ECSTATIC TEXTURES

Garage
Nicosia, Cyprus
Curated by Evagoras Vanezis
16 - 28 October 2017

With Evelyn Anastasiou, Maria Andreou, Kyriakos Theocharous, Orestis Lazouras, Victoria Leonidou, Anastasia Mina, Panayiotis Mina, Sofia Papacosta, Anthi Paphiou, Marina Xenophontos, Anna Maria Charalambous

Ecstatic Textures is a performative formulation that operates within the cultural form of the group exhibition. It attempts to celebrate the great diversity of artistic action, mediate the great multiplicity of gestures of young artists that are not governed by single point of departure or arrival, and to make space for the enunciation of new connections, cultivating a capacity of speaking-with-others that rest upon touches that fashion and perceive the qualities of ecstatic texturing - a texturing that challenges assumptions that touch upon the sensory aspect of the experiential and the experiential as a capacity that lends a new sense to cultural processes.

For a younger generation of artists, which is responding to its own challenges, callings and experiences, creating work is also an issue of affecting the many differential chains of positioning in which they find themselves, negotiating that-which-regions with the "pre-reflective "felt" textures of praxis". The liveliness (or sense of urgency) that this affection carries becomes operative when it crosses the (cultural) demand of demonstrating its efficacy within material and symbolic flows. Such a flow, operating around the great concentration of artistic activity and in contemporaneity with many others, is the presence of artist-run spaces and independent initiatives in the country. Artists develop platforms that negotiate their presence in society and bring attention to conditions, as varied as the artist as a working body and the value of experimentation, affecting a mode generative of spatial and temporal textures, in many ways that effectively blurred and disrupt the discursive coherence between areas normally demarcated as art production, the artwork in its reception. In conjunction with the development of a digital world as a continuous flow of images operating on platforms that allow instant sharing of (art) documentation, giving it the quality of a symbiotic intensity, the shift towards process, participation, and the murmur of discourses that develop in communities that embrace multidisciplinarity and collaboration can be extended and become tangential to the subject matter in tactics chosen by artists. Using this context as a starting point, the social and political dimension that informs this regime of art production and exhibition on the island at this moment, is recognised as a chance to develop a tangential discourse which is focused on the tactics and materiality of artistic practices, which challenge both the conscious and unconscious registers of our being (with).

To perceive this multiplicity of gestures required the opening up of the new synaesthetic paths. Artists inscribe the spaces and times of the works, and the exhibition space, esoteric measurements that articulate the spacing of political and other bodies, the circulation of mnemonics of the self and the probing of (historical) time. These paths are negotiations that colour encounters that do not adhere to giving sense to demarcation lines; instead they make thresholds pulse and push experience, with great speed (accelerating at a rhythm that surprises even the desire that gives it drive) into spaces that host unvoiced (or perhaps unheard) proximities and intimate distances.

The exhibition space becomes an "off-site diagram of a new collective spatial assemblage of enunciation". Every work is a proposition to the senses and a challenge to rethink political, economic and art loops in-between the lines and in a way that creates myriad idiomatic textures, by explicating the "intensive local recording of the global expressivity-movement of the traits of expression."

In the work of Adonis Archontides, one finds a preoccupation with the history of the name Adonis, and the circulation of mnemonics of the self. Through his work, he effects a special type of handling cultural and personal memories, tinting the various histories of the name with current political concerns. "What if the name is repeated not in order to be heard by the namesake, but to be set as a name by the speaker, by the actual bearer of the name?" Archontides' interest lies in the interplay of the (non) transparency of experience and the loop between the failure of intentions and our political predicament, as creative forces that can be utilised. The condition of living with names is put to test, and expressed through the creation of gardens, whose life cycle acts as a metonymy for the cycle of human life, growth in death.

– Excerpt from exhibition text by Evagoras Vanezis.