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Contemporary concerns
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The Athens Biennial challenged Greece’s association with classical culture. Gunvanthi Balaram
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Taking an ironic look at cultural greatness, Kessanlis’ work brings a trace of self-deprecating humour to the show.
Photos: Vassilis Polychronakis
spectacular: Folkert de Jong’s The Shooting Lesson (2007), courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York and (below) Nikos Kessanlis’ Proposition for a New Greek Sculpture (1963), private collection.
Destroy Athens”. The curators of the first Athens Biennial could not have predicted how ironic the title of their exhibition would prove to be. As the art show opened on September 10 in the Gazi, a defunct gasworks in downtown Athens, the country’s worst-ever forest fires had killed 65, laid to waste hundreds of miles of countryside and were threatening to singe the Greek capital.
At the Biennial press conference, Athens mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis had no qualms about highlighting the phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes metaphor attached to the € 1.3 million event. He buttressed the view expressed in the biennial website that “biennials are an instrument of the economic strategy…and a vehicle for the development of cities”.
Whether the Biennial — crafted by the curatorial team of Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka Yio and Augustine Zenakos to be a cutting-edge show of contemporary art that challenges the association of Greece with classical culture — will serve this purpose is quite another matter.
Angst and oppression
The tone of the exhibition is grim; essentially one of angst, oppression and annihilation. It gives one the feeling of having reached the point of no return, reinforced by the manner in which the show is designed as a one-way route that proceeds along decrepit, industrial sheds linked by grey, concrete-made corridors covered with mesh-nets used for collecting olives. These nets block the sunlight and as such, your tour of the show is almost entirely subterranean. Rarely do you get a full picture of what the Gazi architectural complex looks like from the outside. What you do get to do is to acutely experience many of the interiors that vary in scale and architecture but are uniformly spectacular.
You enter the show through a kind of bomb-shelter door that leads you into a darkened chamber reverberating with the sound of buildings crashing to earth. The muffled roar comes from the seven video loops being shown simultaneously on screens that surround the viewers. These films, titled “Detonation Deutschland”, by Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle, show almost an hour of continuous footage of building demolitions in post-WWII Germany. They set the mood of the exhibition, depicting as they do a world clouded, choked and crumbling under the weight of history.
And, pray, what kind of world emerges when these clouds of dust settle? A monstrous and an ignoble one: a universe in which greed, suspicion and exploitation leave little space for equity, compassion and justice. Among the more startling of the umpteen works subscribing to this view are New York-based sculptor Aidas Bareikis’ mixed media installation, “Easy Times” (2007), Oslo-based Narve Hovdenakk’s video, “Neo-Man” (2005) and Greek artist Eleni Mylonas’ video “Lamb of God”.
Bareikis, who was born in Lithuania and fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and worked in a demolition firm in NY in the mid-1990s before turning to art, gives us an installation of a post-industrial environment of devastation and death that leaves us aghast. It depicts a swirling thicket of skulls and agonised, twisted figures in Halloween masks, covered in burn marks, surrounded by plastic flamingo lawn ornaments, broken toys, insects and a form of gum sticking to the rafters and floor.
Hovedenakk’s video is as in-your-face as they come. His film shows us an un-uniformed policeman subjecting a motorist to sexual harassment by threateningly staring in through the car window, whipping out his penis to wag at the driver — and the viewer. You’ve barely recovered when you arrive at Mylonas’ video — a stark film that portrays the simultaneously macabre and mesmerising image of a dead lamb slowly washed ashore on the beach. The artist, who divides her time between Athens and NY, found the lamb floating on the waters lapping the shore of the Greek island of Aegina the day the U.S. invaded Iraq. This piece of work, more than any other, captures the spirit of the Biennial.
The show is draining. The moments when the pressure relents are few and far between. One is when you encounter Nikos Kessanlis’ “Proposition for a New Greek Sculpture”, an installation fashioned in 1963 by one of Greece’s most reputed painters. The late modernist’s proposition consists of a bucket and a crumpled canvas suspended from the ceiling. Taking as it does an ironic look at cultural greatness, Kessanlis’ work brings a trace of self-deprecating humour to the show.
Another such moment is when you come face-to-face with a small drawing by Picasso in support of the liberation of the communist Manolis Glezos. Entitled “Parthenon”, it shows a little man planting the Greek flag atop the hallowed monument on the Acropolis.
Also in the same hall are the vivid wall paintings of Stelios Faitakis, which employ the style of Byzantine religious painting to tell the story of Socrates’ apology. Called “Socrates drinks the Conium”, this is among the most eye-catching exhibits in the show along with Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s monumental sculptural tableaux, “The Shooting Lesson”, which again depicts the barbaric nature of man. You get a reprieve from the gore also while watching a video project by the British “Otolith Group”, which presents a television series made by French filmmaker Chris Marker in 1989 on Greece’s cultural heritage. The series includes highly interesting interviews shown on different TV screens with intellectuals such as Michel Serres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Serres and Iannis Xenakis.
Ancillary events
The Biennial has organised ancillary events in the form of radio programmes and a couple of small exhibitions — one called Her(his)tory at the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art and another called ReMAP in a series of abandoned structures in the historic Kerameikos district, home not only to a classical period graveyard but also to Plato’s Academy at the foot of the Acropolis. The former is not a feminist show as its title might (mis)lead us to believe, but an exhibition of the video work of 29 young artists, including a few Greek ones. The latter has 16 international dealers showcasing contemporary works in temporary galleries set up in Kerameikos’ decrepit old spaces.
The fact that the Goulandris Museum, renowned for its recherché Neolithic and Bronze Age marble figurines from the Aegean islands, has chosen to showcase contemporary art in its premises is a matter of gratification for the curators of the Biennial and contemporary Greek artists.
“Athens has generally been indifferent to contemporary art,” observed Georgia Tsivopoulos, a budding young Athenian artist, as we sat sipping black coffee, trying to digest the Biennial. “If this Biennial succeeds in taking the contemporary art movement in our country even slightly forward, it will have been a useful and rewarding exercise,” she added.
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