Structures of political imagination: An arbitrary observation, 2025,
Kessanlis exhibition space of ASFA, Athens
Michelle Corvette (2016) in A critical theory of color concerning the legality and
implications of color in public space refers to the color industry cartel and its
impact on society. Specifically, she observes that the above "elite" uses the idea of biopolitics to ascertain people's inability to decide its significance in their lives, resulting in the
development of a mystical, emotional, economic, and social structure that controls
the semiotics of color in public space. Taking Corvette's research as a starting point and using terms of "anarchy," as Phyllida Barlow referring to the advantage of the third dimension over the two dimensions of painting, this presentation connects my interest in observing public space both through a gestural treatment of its materiality and through the prism of color.
The work The Red and the Real is based on four cases of emblematic buildings
and services in the center of Athens. In the four-part work, different
surfaces and corresponding reds have been selected, leading to individual associations.
The first part is taken from the masonry of the central entrance of the EMST, and the code RAL3013 (the bright red color of the entrance) was found after contacting the museum's management. The second part is a piece of the wall panel from the facade of the Syriza political party's building and was given to me upon request. The third part is a free reference to the sex industry and was chosen after research on the facades of sex shops in Attica. The fourth part is a typical example of reflective tape on the road network.The Niki and Kifissos installation is an open-ended project that resulted from the "reuse" of two previous projects. The metal part that resembles a platform came from the Kifissos exhibition and concerns the observation of construction paradoxes in the urban landscape around the Kifissos River area, such as the choice of blue neon lighting along the avenue of the same name at the height of Aigaleo. In its original version, it was co-created with German
artist Karl Heinz Jeron, who used the analysis of the chemical composition of water from the river to create a soundscape. In the center, the work Niki, a covered scaffold made of external pipe insulation, follows the thread of questioning the term monumentality. In the work Fuji, there is a reconstruction of objects that tests the boundaries between the work of art and what Kant calls a by-product, focusing on a plastic yellow toy and pieces of asphalt embedded in liquid glass.
