ACTION FIELD KODRA 09
Organized by: Cultural Organization of the Municipality of Kalamaria
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HINTERLAND I - II |
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KODRA FRESH |
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GALLERY YOUNG |
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C for CIRCUS |
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SMOKE IN THE ATTIC |
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OBLIVION |
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photos by Georgios Vasilopoulos
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The visual arts festival Action Field Kodra has been organized annually since 2001. Art productions began in the form of workshops of alternative artistic creation, during which artists worked in situ transforming the barracks into an art workshop. After a period of maturing, in days of economic crisis, cultural recession and visual irresolution, Action Field Kodra ’09 is walking towards reconstruction…
The 2009 agenda retains the fundamental successful structure it has had in the last years while laying emphasis on …
It goes back to previous organisational structures, retaining its role as a means of communication, a stand of dialogue – redefining- integrating influences and restating questions and opinions, using inner forces and aiming to establish a network of feedback for the future.
The programme comprises the following Actions:
«KODRA FRESH»
The exhibition forms the primary basis of actions and gives priority to young artists from the entire country after an open invitation made to them. This year is the first time that the young artists through workshop independently listen/feel the space, laden with use in time. They will lay down their artistic Voice into the space they choose. Earlier on, the curators will have been chosen through an open invitation and their accepting it by writing their names on the internet until the 3rd of August. Later on, from the 20th to the 31st of August the artists will be able to exchange opinions and via productive interlocution they will enhance their work. This act constitutes the well established fresh and breezy core of the Kodra exhibition with the works of young artists coming from the School of Arts. It’s the artists’ first time they have left the microcosm of the university to enter the battlefield of exhibition. The specific act refers to the young creators who have just begun their journey.
«HINTERLAND»Art historian Maria Kenanidou undertakes the curatorship of this year’s exhibition-proposal of the Action Field Kodra from which significant curators and artists have emerged. ……this year the curator of the project featuring artists from Thessalonica highlighting the local artistic production.
Hinterland: “dialogue A”
It constitutes the first part of the “HINTERLAND” exhibition regarding the mature artists from Thessaloniki. These artists support the Kodra institution that marked them and on which they left their mark during the upward course of this annual festival in the previous years.
Hinterland: “dialogue B”
It constitutes the second part of the “HINTERLAND” exhibition which involves young artists that are already on the field of production and exhibition. It has occurred after the open invitation on the internet and will be recorded according to the date of sending one’s proposal to the contact e-mail.
Hinterland
Dialogue I, II
«despite the traps of the locals and the legends of nocturnal birds and morning newspaper... »
«we hold our faces in our hands and see colorful lands
Our thoughts are made, are born in our every glance...
»
«We are hunters of the charm the dreams of destination have, which goes and goes but never stands still...»
Andreas Empirikos, Hinterland
Entering the Hinterland...
Labyrinthine tour on the inside… with works as vehicles of transport that lead to introspection without navel-gazing tendency, intercommunication without lack of dialogue, endogonia without introversion, in the days of extroversion of art travelling, of previews, of excrescent lifestyle and an art booming of unknown account with at least 340 biennales and triennales around the world and so many foir…
Work-vehicles as a trigger for tracking-palpation, touching that stimulate the sensory receptors diversely: interactively, in a redemptive way, invasively, semantically, in reference, explanatorily, dialectically, dialogically, subversively, charmingly, enticingly, ironically, sarcastically, fancifully, existentially, metaphysically, emotionally, catalytically, disdainfully, revealingly, repellently, in qualm, repulsively, fascinatingly, indifferently, using visual dialects, codes and languages that each creator chooses every time, so that to transform them skilfully through creative process into narration, emotion or thought.
The artworks, with possible interpretations from a semiotics reading system of content production, through mutual allocation as a requirement for harmonious co-existence, provide the supplies for displacement reversals to stay and fight with the senses, impressions, doubt, concealment, revelation, rupture, escape, exposure to existential queries of the subconscious, mental world and fantasy, human emotions, fears, obsession, neurosis and despair, involvement, plot, acceptance, courage to shoot down the use of symbolism of irony and sarcasm without fear in grotesque, without easiness to conceal, offering supplies for rewriting to validate the truth or lie.
Both at the first part of the exhibition Dialogue I, with the artists of our sity, and at Dialogue II with the artists that accepted the online invitation, the activation of the artistic community was impressive and immediate despite the running period of summer indolence and against institutional inertia.
The conceptual framework occurred from the demanding need for introspection due to the expansion of urbanization but also from Kodra’s own need to lean over the inner of its powers to reconstruct, stir, to condense and be condensed, to repel, to attract, to invalidate, to create from deep within.
Dynamic artists with spirits acuminous and sharp, with brutality, catalytic truth, fine and subtle sense of humour, poetry, irony, hints, self-directed sarcasm, hints, suggestions and insinuations close to the touch of our personal truth construct a suggestion of research into the truth of things. They smirk, criticize, set boundaries, undermine, delete, and register internal conflicts between thymic and real in an effort to approach modern reality ideologically, aesthetically, politically and socially.
All these to create resistance to the observer so that they don’t face soothingly the incurable dreamers of great ideas, the insatiable greed of personal ownership, the rule of mediocrity, retail passivity, imitation, the lack of meritocracy, the iniquity, the voracity of haves and possessors of an introverted, fearful and ruminant corruption scheme.
It is a collective effort towards subculture in the intolerable suffocating absence of meaning, against violence, derogation, cruelty, pathogenesis, the complex hysteria, the ensuing compulsion, inadequacy, demerit, intransigence, improbity, ennui, corrupted socio-cultural establishment, the risk of homogenization, rigidity of boundless eudemonism that accompanies the long decadent course, aiming to shoot down stupidity as an ideology without grandiloquence.
Against face, fulfilling oneself, nebulous, tortuous, illogical, fragmentary, irrational, chaotic, inapprehensible, saturation and delinquency, prosiness, verbosity, void and absence, disorder, the nerveless and neurosis, illusion of lifting the non-political and narcissistic isolation of art in Hermeticism, its spineless urban aesthetic and cultural addictions. With a tendency to introspection which is not conducive to poverty and resignation but endogonia. The reaction of the artist is the direct, frontal, the sharp expression of emotions in order to bark the different layers of the multilevel psyche of the viewer and of the creator himself, to appease the Furies, to address the impasse, to heal the wounds, to touch the truths and fears, his attractions, to escape from his claustrophobic individualism, his passions and habits, to hear the cry, to expose the embellishing display of ego.
Peeling the obvious, the apparent, even the visible, with humility, transparency, directness, they suggest breaking free from restrictions that the contracts hide, to detect associations with people and situations that ultimately define us, to acquire resistance to stop being vulnerable to ourselves. Each one of us should nobble himself so that his truth can purify him as well as his gaze and aesthetic perception. Using art as a crowbar tool, they try to recognize the limits, dare subvert and resist them, create new resistance and freedom forms, open our hermetically closed souls, our modern principles typical of ostensible disorder and abandonment in the temporary.
A dialectic, communicative work-spectator relation is suggested through the Hinterland exhibition, focusing on the viewing process via intercommunication-introspection. The moment of viewing becomes an instant of silent compressed tension-realisation of a small part of our psyche, which we anyway know and control little about. This moment becomes an exploratory adventure of the human psyche geography so as to touch the freedom of the subject or, as far as possible, the Ego's fullest understanding, the self-knowledge that cannot but finally let the man free from internal and external repressive forces.
Whatsoever, we might at last clear up our inner collective image, our cultural singularity and identity so as not to be so prone to take refuge in loans and finally extricate without entrenchment from our local hinterland, being at the same time able to avoid developing introversion and reserve obsessions.
This is how a particular inner locus crystallizes, a locus where shades coexist with connotations and association references, memories, allegories and desymbolisms, notions that reconsider and redefine according to the different perceptions, experiences, associations, memory references and thinking devices of each spectator.
They stimulate reflectively the device of memory and depiction, and they create intertropical tension. They leave imprints, post-impressions, they put the spectator's view in a self-analytic process. Not in the self-satisfied narcissistic introspection sense though, but in a sense that deprives the Ego until it becomes a quintessent experience, deconstructing it to the profound inner core of existence as an empirical existential element of composite necessity and togetherness, of deconstruction in multiple levels as a consequence of painful introspection and a critical consciousness experience, which we all ought to explore.
This very self-knowledge constitutes a thorough and imaginative game of sometimes archetypical term transposition, subversive thought projection, obsession filing and vision categorisation, which the artist driven by his own hinterland presents through his psychographic work in order to meet, touch and talk to the spectator's hinterland, providing us with his own viewpoint of identification, clarification, interpretation, trauma embrace, and decoding the myth in the soul of us all touching thus cryptic aspects of our unconscious.
Through this painful process of examining the silence, we recall our own hinterland, we discover it along with a usually uncomfortable truth which if not denied, may not hit us with our inner self unable to connect with it and others too. In the course of time, this process transmutes into a journey and our personal hinterland into a new Ithaca, the far end of the river in this cruelly disenchanted world of cultural corruption with the privative bourgeois poverty and counterfeiting in which we stand sharers of a dream and not participants in the res communis of plundered dreams. Thus, in Empiricos' words we shall get along feeling as he himself felt:
«My eyelids transparent curtains
when open I stare whatever comes along
when closed I see what I desire»
«You may say I’m a dreamer
But I m not the only one»
Maria Kenanidou
PARALLEL PROJECTS
“GALLERY YOUNG”
in collaboration with five of the galleries in Thessaloniki: Zina Athanasiadou, Kalfayan Lola Nikolaou, TinT and Tsatsis that have made the proposal to present their own young artists.
“Smoke in the attic”
workshops of young Greek artists.
“Roufixte designers production”
a street art project taking place at the centre of Thessaloniki and Kalamaria
Performance
“C for Circus” group
Performance: 4/09
Concept-planning:
“Oblivion” simulation exhibition based on real stages of creation of Gabriel Tzafka’s short film.
“Para thin alos” engravings at Remezzo Gallery. Engraving exhibition in all its aspects, wood engraving, etching, lithographs and digital prints prove the variety and diversity of engraving as a visual act. Curating Xenis Sahinis
INFO:
President of COMK: Ioannis Iosifidis
Artistic Director of COMK: George Kazantzis
Coordinator of Artistic Events of COMK: Georgios asilopoulos
Production: Cultural Organization of the Municipality of Kalamaria
General Coordination of Action Field KODRA 2009:Maria Kenanidou
Assistant: Nikolaos Varitimiadis
For further information:
Maria Kenanidou: [email protected]
Georgios Vasilopoulos 2310-481711, 2310-481006
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