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Share IRL Phase 2: The Anxiety Primer
S:2F2
Nicosia, Cyprus
Curated by Evagoria Dapola
20 - 25 September 2018
With Adonis Archontides and Nikos Kouroushis
Anxiety ascribes the current state in which we live – a state where experiences, effects and understanding gained from the digital realm move freely into our tangible reality. Boundaries that may once have been neatly defined, are now soft and pliable – they are superficial membranes that positively support the act of osmosis between digital and material. There is a distinctly existential quality to the works that compile the exhibition, a form of art that includes a field of unlimited processes and an onlooker allowing for no constants; and the exhibition’s title does nothing to dispel this notion. The structures as lifeless material objects are manipulated and positioned in ways that evoke humanity —the anxiety, the sadness, the confusion, the despair of people who are trying to live their lives but are just not sure quite how. The exhibition creates a space that is a sanctuary and an arena for contemplation.
Adonis Archontides uses emotional structures more than formal structures, emotions generated by googling yourself, playing video games, creating digital versions of yourself, the awkwardness caused by watching your online avatar die while you are expecting it. The works seem like contemplation on youth, their representation and their supposedly passive narcissism and Adonis plays with the visitor’s attention and humour; this way he creates holes in the systems of representations we take for granted. Adonis combines signs that reflect upon interiority with elements linked to social attitudes and habits. Together, they make up places where the singular is expressed by the common, and where intimateness is uncovered, exposed. They are places to be lonely with others.
Adonis is representative of a different and exciting new age with a fresh and different approach to artistic rendering, so much so that he is not merely reducing the subject matter of his work to a simple statement but he rather circles around it; delivering a series of Adonis(es): Adonis the artist, Adonis the mythical, Adonis the exhibitionist, Adonis the hero/protagonist, Adonis the victim. What this leaves for us is to deal with a life lived on certain margins and a digital alter-ego or mini me death hardly noticed. Meanwhile, the man 'himself' becomes something of a historical, mythical and digital cipher. Yet this is the void that allows us to experience something other than easy to swallow humanism, an interplay on politics of existence, that makes us weigh on the politics of art itself. His art is a type of contemporary art that is about fragmentation and questions - questions that frequently have no answers easy to summarize, but offer fragmented evidence of narrative.
– Excerpt from exhibition guide by Evagoria Dapola
Works included:
- Sulsul! Plerg Majah Bliff? (Hello! Can I do something else please?), 2018
- Bath I, 2018
- Adonis, 2017-ongoing
Related tags: group shows, Adonis, The Sims