Maria Zervou
07 Oct - 20 Nov 2010
MARIA ZERVOU
“Bon Voyage”
07.10.2010 - 20.11.2010
Bon Voyage, Maria Zervou’s second solo exhibition at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
opens on Thursday 7 October 2010, at 19:30.
“The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world and it obliterates the boundaries between true and false by driving all lived truth below the real presence of fraud ensured by the organization of appearance. One who passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by resorting to magical techniques. The acceptance and consumption of commodities are at the heart of this pseudo-response to a communication without response.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Maria Zervou’s second solo exhibition at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center features videos, drawings and photographs that focus on contemporary symbols of confinement (e.g. the burqa) to probe the enduring dichotomies between the internal and the external, between masking and exposing, the poetic and the political, dream and reality, the phantasmagorical and the mundane, memory and amnesia.
The artist’s recent video Bon Voyage (HD, 12 minutes, 2010) follows a woman in a burqa, unseen behind her impenetrable veil, on what seems to be a hallucinatory journey: magic tricks, acrobatic stunts, dance performances and other spectacles unfold before her eyes while she appears to be almost still, her immobility underscoring the illusive character of her visions and her own monumentality.
In Zervou’s second video, Traveler (HDV, 8 minutes, 2009), a woman carrying a suitcase is seen walking and walking as if on an endless road. Her seemingly straightforward passage across space, against a background of alternating landscapes, lends the image an almost monumental quality. The suitcase in her hands is like the shell of an interior space: the roof and walls of the room she will later reach. The black suitcase, which never opens once throughout the whole journey, is like a mobile monument and relates to the female body as a metaphorical impregnated womb.
Both videos are presented across the gallery’s space in the form of installations, where the artist’s photographs and drawings –a common thematic thread tying them to the videos– are equally important inasmuch as they seem to be bridging the gap between realism and abstraction, the tangible and the intangible, the fragmentary and the complete. These photographs and drawings could be seen as a form of working notes or storyboards for future video works, while preserving at the same time their particular visual autonomy.
“Bon Voyage”
07.10.2010 - 20.11.2010
Bon Voyage, Maria Zervou’s second solo exhibition at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
opens on Thursday 7 October 2010, at 19:30.
“The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world and it obliterates the boundaries between true and false by driving all lived truth below the real presence of fraud ensured by the organization of appearance. One who passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by resorting to magical techniques. The acceptance and consumption of commodities are at the heart of this pseudo-response to a communication without response.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Maria Zervou’s second solo exhibition at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center features videos, drawings and photographs that focus on contemporary symbols of confinement (e.g. the burqa) to probe the enduring dichotomies between the internal and the external, between masking and exposing, the poetic and the political, dream and reality, the phantasmagorical and the mundane, memory and amnesia.
The artist’s recent video Bon Voyage (HD, 12 minutes, 2010) follows a woman in a burqa, unseen behind her impenetrable veil, on what seems to be a hallucinatory journey: magic tricks, acrobatic stunts, dance performances and other spectacles unfold before her eyes while she appears to be almost still, her immobility underscoring the illusive character of her visions and her own monumentality.
In Zervou’s second video, Traveler (HDV, 8 minutes, 2009), a woman carrying a suitcase is seen walking and walking as if on an endless road. Her seemingly straightforward passage across space, against a background of alternating landscapes, lends the image an almost monumental quality. The suitcase in her hands is like the shell of an interior space: the roof and walls of the room she will later reach. The black suitcase, which never opens once throughout the whole journey, is like a mobile monument and relates to the female body as a metaphorical impregnated womb.
Both videos are presented across the gallery’s space in the form of installations, where the artist’s photographs and drawings –a common thematic thread tying them to the videos– are equally important inasmuch as they seem to be bridging the gap between realism and abstraction, the tangible and the intangible, the fragmentary and the complete. These photographs and drawings could be seen as a form of working notes or storyboards for future video works, while preserving at the same time their particular visual autonomy.