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22/3/2013

Eirene Efstathiou

Motinternational, Bruxelles

MOTINTERNATIONAL BRUSSELS is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Eirene Efstathiou.
The media culture in which we live encourages the diffusion of an enormous number of images, principally via the internet. Because these images are drawn from an infinite collection they are often consulted and used without reference to their original context. Their mundane use leads to a loss of reality in relation to the event which originally produced them.

Eirene Efstathiou works on this contextual deficit inspired by images whether from photographs, print media or her own photographs. She adds to these ‘original images’ another media layer by reproducing them pictorially. With this process the artist inquires: what creates the disparity between the events as an experience and as a media representation? The resulting artworks allow for a further rearranging in the reading of the images, revealing the uncertainty of the meaning of the events themselves. In a way they are landscape paintings but social-human-urban landscapes. Efstathiou uses painting and printmaking as mapping tools for an alternative cartography of events.

The artist focuses on the documentary potential of the images. She examines the past through her pictorial technique which involves re-adapting and selecting the original image to create a new context. Images from the press, even if critical always have a direct relationship to power, and often simply repeat the narrative that power tells about itself. How then to work with these sorts of public images? How to ‘blast’ them out of this ‘official’ narrative? How can these images of recent history, in their new context, be used to try to make sense of the present and to ask questions about it, such as, what is in crisis and for whom?

In order to do this, Efstathiou builds an archive of images around a particular theme. She compiles archives of images ‘surrounding’ moments of political crisis and social unrest, but somehow peripheral to these events. The work presented in this exhibition, Memories of the Present, is an excellent example of her approach. The series presents a compilation of painted images of photographs from the Greek post-dictatorship era. The images express ruin, deadlock, conflict, oppression, but also resistance, resilience and hope.

Influenced by the context of the images that she appropriates, she builds a narrative coloured by subjectivity and detached from official history. Use of series permits the artist to break the linear structure of representation, giving the spectator the opportunity to reconstruct a narrative through a non-sequential reading. The images depict divergent memories of shared events; some seem monumental, others are beneath notice. They become in this way a common story, inviting both recognition and identification as well as misrecognition and reinterpretation.

Eirene Efstathiou was born in 1980 in Athens where she lives and works. She received the 6th Deste Prize from Deste Fondation in 2009. Selected exhibitions include: 3 Artists, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece, 2012; A Perpetual Present, Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, USA, 2011; Ieras Odos Revisited, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece, 2010; Customer/Value/Service, Project Room of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece Perpetual Dialogue, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New-York, USA, 2010; PPP, Private Public Painting, Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium, 2010.

Preview 23 March 2pm - 9pm

MOTINTERNATIONAL BRUSSELS
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Open
Wednesday - Saturday 11 - 6
and by appointment.
The gallery is closed on public holidays.

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