IDENTITY IN BETWEEN+ EXHIBITIONS

“Engaging with the art field is another way of perceiving the experience of the everyday life, your own and others'. It is nowadays referred to as social, political and cultural experience; it functions as a magnifying glass for the microcosm, a telescope for the outside world, a bridge connecting the present (and perhaps the future) with the current reality.

A reality that today, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, proves to be deeply complex, fluid and unstable, hovering in areas that we tacitly accept as volatile, in forms of experiences that confirm what Bauman refers to as liquid times. Times, which form “flexible” subjectivities, identities that are perpetually shaped in the present tense, as they struggle to meet this condition of "in-between".

"In between" of what once was, but no longer is valid; of living between the digital and the real world; of having that chameleon ability to maintain plural professional and multiple social identities; of our mediated relationship with nature, a time when ecology is increasingly drawing our attention to a rapidly emerging danger; of the ways our perspective on health, gender, body and ageing is constantly changing.

This constant race for things, ethics, experience, perception, for others, is shaping the sense of relentless running. The Identities in between project is an invitation to reveal the tendencies and the conditions of this unstoppable motion, the distances between but multiple different points of view, the motion that erodes the certainties, based on which, more solid identities were once formed, and the processes of this quick and where our “flexible” selves are cultivated.

The artists, Jenny Argyriou, Marianna Kavallieratou, Virginia Mastrogiannaki, Maria Sideri, ElizaSoroga explore the poetics of this "in-between" condition. Argyriou turns her attention to the mediation of the reality that our connection with technology brings, Kavallieratou in the ways we are transported in plural routes every day, Mastrogiannaki in the endless pursuit of youth, Sideris in our borderline relationship with nature and our coexistence with the other, and Soroga in our multiple professional identities.

All there five artists work with the body. They do conclude in the way social scientists do neither they cogitate like theorists and philosophers. Art, after all, is a privilege topos for posing questions arbitrarily and poetically.

Similarly, however, with how a social scientist stands motionless for a moment to comprehend what is happening, observing around and then reflectively on her/himself, so do these five artists approach the present; with their gaze inwards and outwards at the same time.

The five artists place their bodies at the forefront of artistic action. They filter concepts through their senses and their bodies, their skin and their way of moving. They do not stand outside the artwork they embody it.After all, when you work with the body, you start by recognizing that your body “is the pivot of the world”. You comprehend how perception works. You approach the phenomena and social reality in which identities are shaped, through experience; Through movement, posture, silence, speech, conscious, kinesthetic action; through the corps itself.

In our first meeting, the five performances were only ideas. Sometimes purer, sometimes a bit more abstract. Some of them were already seminal, while others began taking shape triggered by this occasion. They appeared as blurred images or as vivid, fluid descriptions. Successively, they became five individual filmed works. Each one follows in its way, its style, its focus, poses its questions. However, allowing always the mediation from the director’s way of looking. Like allowing a collective eye to connect the pieces.

We first met as a group in a sunny cafe and then each one of the artists worked alone. We had some more meetings. Discussions held in the digital realm and body to body meetings; A vivid, changing condition.

After the performances, or almost in parallel to them, the discourse returned. Five projects, five interview discussions. Ideas, thoughts, narratives, questions, answers, questions again. An attempt to talk about one’s work and thus talk about one’s present time. A way may be to understand it and reconcile with it.

These performances present personal ways of view. However, when we approach them as spectators, they do not impose ways of thinking. They invite us to respond kinesthetically, remaining in a state of transition, in an “in-between” condition. Between what we see and what recalls our previous experiences. Experiences not only related to the topic that each performance reflects but to the way we see contemporary art in a museum, a public space, a gallery. Because, whatever the case may be, we are processing these two experiences equally, when we step on the threshold of a museum when we decide to stand and listen, to move away or to “travel” with a work of art.”

Words by Paraskevi Tektonidou, Musician, Researcher