Group Exhibition with Eleni Kamma, showing the new work The Selfie Junkie and The Fool (from Studies into Characters for a parrhesiastic theater parade)
21/02/2018-10/03/2018
Daily Lazy Projects, Athens
Artists: Savvas Christodoulides, Dimitris Foutris, Maria Georgoula, Zoe Gialboudaki, Dimitris Ioannou, Eleni Kamma, Markela Kontaratou, Konstantinos Kotsis, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Karolina Krasouli, Margarita Myrogianni,Theo Michael, Nina Papaconstantinou, Tereza Papamichali, Kostas Roussakis, Georgia Sagri, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, George Stamatakis, Alexandros Tzannis, Myrto Xanthopoulou
Curated by Kostis Velonis
Introduction on the exhibition by Kostis Velonis
Entre l’homme et l’amour,
Il y a la femme.
Entre l’homme et la femme,
Il y a un monde.
Entre l’homme et le monde,
Il y a un mur.
Antoine Tudal, Paris en l’an, 2000
Stopping Point
In erotic literature, we often find descriptions of the impasse of a relationship based on sexual difference.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure a poem by Antoine Tudal, which describes the difficulty of love through the acoustic and verbal similarity of “love” (l’amour) and “wall” (le mur) in French.
However, Jacques Lacan’s apt reference to the poem as a semiology of difference and similarity provides a basis in order to justify the relationship through the two lovers’ blunders and fumbles, their vain and unfulfilled reveries, even through excruciating pain (la douleur exquise) that turns into tragicomedy when there is no mutual response.
The exhibition reveals what pushes away instead of uniting, what stands as an obstacle and makes relationships incompatible through the difference of the subjects. Archaic and biblical references about the eternal battle of sexes, as well as the rhetoric of contemporary psychology on “complementary” relationship, become the ingredients of an indirect acceptance of the separation caused by biological difference.
The emergence of divergence between desire and the obstacle that annuls it conveys the comical or melancholic outcome of an event that echoes not just the division of the relationship, but also the conflict, the struggle and the effort surrounding it. Here, there may be winners and losers, but in reality both sides annihilate each other, since idealizations and erotic frenzies are altered and extinguished in the corrosive flow of time.
In perceiving the wordplay of l’a-mur as an insurmountable “love-wall”, or even as a temporarily surmountable obstacle, the exhibition aims at parodying discontinuity in this libidinal architecture of delimitation and cut.
Daily Lazy Projects
Sina 6 & Vissarionos 9 (entrance), Athens 10680, Greece