Wanderers
Camille Cros, Yu Araki, Nanna Lysholt Hansen
Join us on Thursday 24th December 24, from 6-11pm to celebrate the finissage of “Wanderers” and our Christmas Eve party!
Opening hours: Monday 21st, Tuesday 22nd, Wednesday 23rd December 3-8 pm Finissage and Christmas Eve Party, Thursday 24th December, 6-11 pm
Current Snehta residents Camille Cros, Nanna Lysholt Hansen and Yu Araki are driven by a strong sense of investigation and ongoing research that has resulted in work that highlights process as its key aspect. The works’ overarching aspect exists in how each artist brings together elements of historical significance to form new associations with present narratives. Objects and features which highlight Greece’s cultural identity as a classical and modern state are apparent in the artists’ focus on architectural space that bears signs of a wider exchange between styles and intellectual attitudes. Moreover, their focus in sculptural form is an unbiased sign of the human scale and factor in the things that compose our wider awareness and perception. Artists’ enduring attempts for overarching disparate meanings and symbols in the effort to create modern-day mythologies finds once again fertile ground here in Athens.
Camille Cros is focusing on sculptural work that is a result of a finely prescribed process of abstraction. Geometrical ornamentations and patterns that appear in the facades and gates of Athenian buildings are stripped down to pure schemas which then get methodically arranged in digital blueprints before she executes them in material form. Walking in the city is vital for creating a visual archive of the shapes and forms that she encounters. In the studio, she carefully tests out how those shapes create new patterns and rhythms which she then paints and arranges in large wall based compositions by using contemporary materials used at large in interior architecture. Being largely the focus of her work, she observes the iron features of old deco gates of the interwar period buildings that strike us as a reminder that amidst an epoch of social and political instability the arts thrive in an effort to destabilise and shake common opinion. Architecture alone offers itself as a vast field of experimentation where the histories of cities - and therefore the histories of nations - through the recycling of past knowledge try to renovate and reinvigorate the present.
Nanna Lysholt Hansen has developed a variation of the Sphinx as a temporary sculpture framed within derelict and vacant spaces in Kypseli, therefore reminding us of the undisclosed world of myths, legends and magic. During her temporary occupation of empty spaces in Athens she personifies the sphinx and documents an archaeology of those fragments through the use of a DIY pinhole camera. The function of light slipping into darkness is allegorical of the way we value and make sense of our world: it is a glimpse into the world of the Pre-Socratics and the physiocrats, where scientific discovery was utterly linked with the world of religion and magic. It could also be a reminder that the numinous in regard to the divine light is still experienced through enactment and embodiment of ancient rituals. "It is the light of revelation that floods the interior of buildings in Adomnan's writings of St. Columba". In that sense abandoned architectural space contextualises her work and presents the birth of a modern age: mythology as a mode of spiritual survival. As part of the exhibition Hansen uses marble and metal in conjunction with her own body to sculpt her sphinx over time.
author, - maker is a conduit for passing skills and traditions down the generational lines. As during the process of mould making and then casting, Yu compares the process to that of a film production during which the ‘casting of actors’ composes the living part of what is to become the end feature itself. It is therefore in the hand of the successor of knowledge that the process might get slightly altered or changed. In his work “Penelope’s Hand” Yu presents a single channel video depicting a sculpture student in Professor’s Markos Georgilakis’s sculpture class from the School of the fine art of Athens delicately making a mould of her own hand. The work attempts to metaphorically highlight the process of mould making as a microcosm of passing down the tradition in the extent of culture/academia at large.