On Thursday, October 31, Nina Papakonstantinou’s solo exhibition “I think I made you inside my head” opens at CITRONNE Gallery – Athens.

The title of the exhibition refers to Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, and alludes to the starting point and source of the works presented, in which the artist uses extracts of poetry and prose by women writers. Papakonstantinou follows a particular path: it is not about thematic or artistic variations, but about the manual transformation of texts, in order to “make in her head” and finally to render through the combination – the weaving of different passages – a visual sense of writing, but also a new reading.

Nina Papakonstantinou

The choice of texts is not random. The writers come from different countries, write in different languages, produce in different times. The common element among them is Passion, in its literal and psychological sense. This common primordial Passion, an almost uncontrollable emotion and, at the same time, a suffering, i.e. a wound and trauma, underlies the quotations from Katerina Angelaki-Rook, Anna Akhmatova, Kiki Dimoula, Marguerite Yursenar, Sylvia Plath, Maria Polydouri, Anne Sexton.

The exhibition develops narratively with two series of wall works, a four-panel drawing and a bound work, which draws from Virginia Woolf’s diary notes when she was writing “Mrs. Dalloway”, and closes as a description-narrative, revealing to the viewer a part of her “workshop”, that is, the process of editing her material.

Nina Papakonstantinou introduces an innovative expression in artistic creation. She proposes a literary reading that does not separate writing into visual form and mental content, matter and spirit; instead, she considers the printed text as a whole creation that she transforms, seeking associations, correlations and affinities. It is, as Thodoris Chiotis notes, ‘a profoundly visual approach to language’. The literary reading engages with manual tangible experience to produce a renewed affective reality. Without forgetting or disregarding the original literary origins, Papakonstantinou adds another dimension to the literary poetic work, which is inscribed in her personal experiential diary.

CITRONNE Gallery – Athens
Patriarchou Ioakeim 19, 10675, Athens| 4th floor
Tel: (+30) 210 7235 226
Email: [email protected]

Opening Hours

Τue, Thu, Fri: 11:00 – 20:00
Wed, Sat: 11:00 – 16:00