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Accidental Woman (2007)
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PRESS RELEASE
Elefsina Cultural Center ‘L. KANELLOPOULOS’ is pleased to announce the opening of Falling in Place, Aikaterini Gegisian’s first major solo exhibition in Greece. Ranging from audiovisual cinematic installations to single-screen videos, text-based, photographic and site-specific projects, the exhibition presents a body of work developed over a period of 10 years that until now has been seen sporadically in Greece. Gegisian’s rich practice explores the sculptural qualities of the moving image, sound, text and photography, focusing on the relationships between landscape, memory and narrative and interrogating the documentary role of images.
The exhibition includes the recently completed Notes on a conception of a film (2010), an installation consisting of 190 postcard-size, black & white photographs, collected over a period of 6 years that have been carefully altered with the addition of colour and text. This act of inscribing personalises the images, infusing the photographed spaces with multiple emotional and psychological allusions.
Falling in Place will further include the majority of Gegisian’s video works, starting with an early trilogy of single-screen videos consisting of the day that left (2002) / Tokyo Tonight (2003) / 10:34 ΑΜ (2006). Whether it is a mountain scene, a train passing in front of the camera or even the shelves of a supermarket, this trilogy of films deals with the ways spaces are transformed into emotional sites and reflect other experiences and landscapes. Through a precise framing of the camera and in conjunction with a layered soundtrack, the artist ultimately explores how one image can lead us to a myriad little narratives and how sound can lead us to other images.
In 2006, the artist travelled to Armenia where, in collaboration with Lizzie Calligas, she filmed the double screen video Sevan Boys (2008). The work focuses on a conversation with a group of young boys, documenting at the same time a derelict and abandoned landscape that brings to the surface images of memory and displacement. With the single-screen video Passengers (2007), the artist moves her attention to Nicopolis, a newly built shantytown area in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece and focuses on an immigrant community of Greek-Pontiac descent. The work takes a lyrical and reflexive tone that attempts to reveal the position of the maker and the impossibility of documenting all aspects of a perceived reality.
The exhibition will also mark the premiere of Gegisian’s most recent video project, entitled Diego Garcia (2010), which looks at the deportation of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands (now the site of one of the biggest American military bases in the world) in the Indian Ocean by the British Government. Funded by the Arts Council England, Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art, PARTage Residencies, Mauritius and Picture This Moving Image Agency, Bristol, the project was filmed on location in Mauritius. The work unravels the hidden and constructed side of paradise and comments on shifting geographies and on the ways we inhabit a globalised world. Finally, Falling in Place will include and present for the first time a series of the artist’s storyboards that highlight the ways she works with image, sound and text.
Falling in Place is accompanied by an English catalogue with a text by British art critic Colin Perry. The works presented in the exhibition are courtesy of Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki.
Aikaterini Gegisian is a young Greek artist of Armenian origin who lives and works in Bristol, UK. She studied film at the University of Glasgow and Fine Arts at the University of Brighton and Chelsea College of Art and Design. She has exhibited her work internationally, in places such as: Hold and Freight Gallery, London; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece; State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece; Kunstklub, Berlin; 5th & 6th Gyumri International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Armenia; Galerie Parissud, Paris; Espace Croise Gallery, Lille; Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany; Videoformes Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Far
From Now, work in progress, research still
WORK
IN PROGRESS: Far from Now
The project focuses on Armenia, a country at the edges of Europe, landlocked
and with contested boarders and at the same-time with a long history of
migration. Taking as a starting point this specific context and working
with the genre of moving image documentary, the project will examine parallel
and antagonistic projections of the future through the exploration of
the relations between different migratory movements and transformations
in the urban and build environment.
What I am interested in documenting is the role of space in the way the
future is perceived (in a society that is described by the very impossibility
to plan for the future) and negotiated between migrant populations (moving
to the country either from former Soviet republics or from the wider Armenia
diaspora).
In addressing conflicting temporalities and the historical agency of space,
the moving image work developed will collect images from the derelict,
failed and haunted spaces left abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet
Union that coexist with the new urban developments in the center of the
capital Yerevan and juxtapose them with narratives and experiences of
the future that are imbedded in the synthetic landscapes emerging.
In exploring the relation between material structures and subjective ways
of inhabiting them, the project will reflect on new ways of imagining
the country, on the layered histories inscribed in space and on transformations
in identity.
Far
From Now, work in progress, research still
Aikaterini
Gegisian
‘Hold Everything, Dear’
Private View: Thursday, 6 March 2008, 19:00 – 22:00
Exhibition Dates:: 6 – 29 March 2008
Opening Times: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday: 10.00 - 15.00
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 10.00 – 15.00 & 18.00-21.00
Kalfayan
Galleries, Thessaloniki
43 Prox. Koromila Str.,
Thessaloniki 546 22, Greece
Tel: +30 2310 231187 | Fax: +30 2310 231820
info@kalfayangalleries.com | www.kalfayangalleries.com
Press
Release
On Thursday, 6 March 2008, 12:00 – 15:00, Kalfayan Galleries, 43
Proxenou Koromila Street, Thessaloniki are inaugurating the exhibition
of Aikaterini Gegisian, “Hold Everything, Dear”.
The exhibition features a new body of work centered on journeys, changing
environments and contrasting urban landscapes. The works conjecture the
exploration of documentary methods with the mapping of a personal geography.
The video-installation The Image Unfolded and the series of drawings on
photographs, titled Notes on a Conception of a Film, are based on material
gathered from travels the artist made in the period from 2003 to 2007.
Documenting a variety of locations, the works bring to the forefront the
transient and transforming nature of space (roads, airports, tracks) temporary
and makeshift structures.
These works successfully blend the cinematic language of documentary with
fiction. Based on observation and recording, they construct, on one hand,
a personal geography while on the other, “ground” the viewer
in contemporary realities. Images from different geographical regions
are featured in these personal “encounters”, without reference
to specific chronology or spaces. Gegisian focuses her lens on details
as she recognizes the significance of the moment and the fragile nature
of images. At the same time, the manner in which the images alternate
in the video or the choice of phrases that are recorded in the hand-tinted
photographs reveal Gegisian’s desire to filter out reality by contrasting
opposing themes such as location and dislocation, private and public space,
tourist experience and migration.
The artist calls into question the “veracity” of realistic
recording and challenges the viewer to enter into a game between reality
and the imaginary, as she succeeds in transforming the external stimuli
and information that she records with her camera in “documents”
of a purely personal narrative.
Already
living with regrets, 2007, Drawing on photograph, 14x10cm
We have become stereotypes of ourselves, 2007,
Drawing on photograph, 14x10cm
Do not assume the other is at the same point in time,
2007, Drawing on photograph, 14x10cm
Noone
saw her, 2007, Drawing on photograph, 14x10cm
Drifting to the edge of the world, 2008, Drawing
on photograph, 14x10cm
I can always be found, 2007, Drawing on photograph,
14x10cm
