Katerina Katsifaraki
Songlines
Editing | Anna Kafetsi
Duration | 14.07.2022 – 18.09.2022
Athens Concert Hall Garden
Opening hours | daily after sunset until 23:00
Free entrance
From 14 July to 18 September annexM presents in the Garden of the Athens Concert Hall the in situ exhibition of Katerina Katsifaraki entitled Songlines, curated by Anna Kafetsi.
Scattered in 19 places in the Garden, new in situ productions and restorations of previous works in the natural exhibition environment are presented partly in daylight and in their entirety after sunset until late at night.
The exhibition will also feature the first screening of Dimitra Kouzi’s new documentary Do-Nothing Farming (2022), which accompanies Katerina Katsifaraki’s installation Svoloi. The video records the participatory process of producing pellets with vegetable and cereal seeds in the workshop organised for this purpose by the natural grower Panagiotis Manikis in Alagonia, Taygetos, in May 2022.
Ephemeral installations and inconspicuous sculptural interventions of natural materials are spread over grass and stone, self-photographs are translated into painted landscape paintings in the vegetation, instant videos as visual “haiku” and projections without sound create a poetic universe that, through wandering and walking between imaginary and real paths, offers an experiential connection with the natural space and an inner and reflective experience of the self.
Anna Kafetsi notes: “The exhibition is designed as a fluid, boundary-less metaphorical cartography, connecting movement, stasis and ritual with an invisible thread. Its surface is traversed by silent countless linear paths, without visible human presence, which are repeated, unique, parallel, or intersecting, without pause.
“Songlines” in the dream cosmology of the Australian Aboriginal people and their pictorial mappings, which the loan title of the exhibition brings to mind, open up in the reading of the works a broad anthropological, intercultural and sociological horizon of intertextuality, and with it endless roads of land and sea routes of displacement and migration through long time, intersecting with the present.
“In the actual space, the transition from the silent Pathways, projected in the center of the Garden, to Stasis, an archetypal nomadic habitat, in between movement and pause, transports us to a series of ritual works. It opens with the circular ecstatic Dance, the only work in the exhibition with sound in front of the fence line, before we pass, through the purifying whiteness of Offering – and incense – into the sacred territory of the pivotal work, Svoloi. In between, works-symbols that submit the “luminous moment”: a surprise, a playfulness, a moonlight to the sky.
“With the exhibition in the Great Garden and the ephemeral inhabitation of the public space, the artist returns to where she belongs, to the countryside and the community. She observes on site and collects her materials and metaphors. She compiles an archive of moving notes and images. She carries seeds, roots and “still lifes” from other places and times. She “transplants”, cross-pollinates, patiently, with manual labor, prepares for creative transformation. With humility and subtle interventions in the landscape. Sometimes as an emotional observation and commentary, and sometimes as a direct artistic gesture, she weaves an eco-poetics of the minimum that recycles the “waste” materials of the earth (dry leaves and bark, cut trunks and branches), cultivates diversity and coexistence with the non-human and other forms of life, incorporates community action and participatory learning of new strategies of regenerative co-creation with nature into the artistic process.
Nature and movement/walking always remain in Katerina Katsifaraki’s works a source of poetic thought and authentic feeling.”
Katerina Katsifaraki (Athens, 1970) studied at the A.S.K.T. Athens and at the D.A.I. in the Netherlands. She has participated in exhibitions, residencies and performances in Greece and abroad.
He designed and realized in situ installations in various spaces: First Last and Perpetual Biennale of Psiloritis (Crete), Benaki Museum/NH.M.A. (Rencontres Internationales Al Maken d’Art Actuel (Tunisia), Libby Sacer Foundation, Museum of Yugoslavia-Museum of 25 May, Studentski Kulturni Centar, Outdoors Touring Balkan Project (Serbia), Villa Weiner (Germany), Nomadic/Topos/Athena, Akademietheater of Utrecht, Museum of Central Bohemia in Rostocki, Czech Republic, El Estudio Ammeba, etc. He has worked as a teacher at the Architecture Department of the Technical University of Crete, at the Athens College and in public schools.
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