Haris Epaminonda
dal 31/3/2009 al 9/5/2009
Segnalato da
31/3/2009
Haris Epaminonda
Malmo Konsthall, Malmo
The artist works mainly with photographs, collage and video. The point of departure for her paper collages is found material from books and magazines from the 50s and 60s. Her videos and films are composed out of disparate found film footage as well as the artist's own filmed sequences. Epaminonda's moving images are in many instances overlapping or juxtaposed with one another in ways that any threads of potential meaning weave in and out of each other and thus evoke a dreamlike distant world.
Haris Epaminonda (Born 1980, Cyprus. Lives and works in Berlin) works
mainly with collage, video and photography. The point of departure for her
paper collages is found material from books and magazines from the 1950s
and 60s. Her videos are composed out of disparate found film footage as
well as the artist’s own filmed sequences.
Epaminonda’s moving images are in many instances overlapping or juxtaposed
with one another so that threads of potential meaning (political utopias,
gender, cultures of collecting) weave in and out of each other and thus
evoke a dreamlike distant world. In the 1950s and 1960s, from which the
found footage often derives, the idea of progress and fascination for the
future seemed filled with both hope and fear, and Epaminonda’s work moves
between a real and a potential or illusory past/future. This creates a
poetic, surreal and uncanny maze as if the found and reworked material is
a loophole in time.
The exhibition, VOL. I, II & III, at Malmö Konsthall will be the first
large solo exhibition by Haris Epaminonda in northern Europe. The
exhibition is divided, as the title indicates, into three parts. The three
parts consist of two separated spaces in Malmö Konsthall and a book
produced for the exhibition.
VOL. I is a book containing approximately 120 Polaroid images, which is
1/3 of the 365 Polaroids Epaminonda has taken since 2008. She has
re-photographed images from books and magazines, details of images,
places, situations and collections, with an instant Polaroid camera. The
many images make the book appear as a photo album done by a well-travelled
traveller, artist, anthropologist or simply a tourist with the ambition of
becoming just that – a traveller, artist or anthropologist. Today Polaroid
films are not produced anymore and the factories were shut down in
February 2008, so the nostalgic instant film era ended after 62 years.
VOL. II & III consist of two installations, attempting to transform the
two Malmö Konsthall spaces into a kind of 'theatre of the world'. The
installations will appear as 'rooms of wonder' consisting of an assembly
of images, plinths, objects – such as ostrich eggs – and sculptures that
aspire to envision a shadow realm, offering an enigmatic puzzle that
insists to remain unnamed and unresolved. Intimate space is confronted
with the surreal.
Both VOL. II & III will play with the institutional notion of the museum
and of display. The spaces will attempt to juxtapose the highly modern and
the ancient as compressed time, compressed memory, compressed dream-like
fiction within sculptures and images.
Haris Epaminonda studied at the Royal College of Art and Kingston
University, London. She represented Cyprus at the 52nd Venice Biennial
(2007) and took partat the 5th Berlin Biennial, Neue Nationalgalerie,
Berlin (2008) as well as the 9th Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, United Arab
Emirates (2009).
Press Preview 1 April 11 a.m.
Opening 1 April 7-9 p.m.
Malmo Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan, 7 - Malmo