The a.antonopoulou.art. gallery inaugurates on Thursday 05 September 2024, from 7.00 to 10.00 pm, the new solo exhibition of Stefania Strouza, curated by Marina Fokidi.

“Water abandons itself. Gold takes life over”.

The phrases of the poet Anne Carson echo the tensions between the animate and the inert, between life, myth and matter. It is precisely this fluidity of these relationships that is reflected in the present exhibition through an imaginary place where a mythical entity known as the Golden Fleece has left its traces. It is the winged creature with the golden sheepskin that crosses the Aegean Sea to the East, carrying on its back the fugitives Frixos and Elli. When the Fleece is later sacrificed and its skin becomes a trophy, its remaining body is inscribed in the celestial firmament in the form of the constellation of Aries. The origin of the myth, however, is found in the subsoil and its exploitation, since in the gold-bearing rivers of ancient Colchis, sheepskins were used to collect nuggets of the precious metal. Written in the Anthropocene era, The Golden Fleece is a narrative about the instrumentalization of life and loss, but also a story of survival and a revision of the boundaries between the living or non-living, the being and the non-being: the mythical animal is killed off, but continues to exist as an astral complex.

In the exhibition, the history of the Fleece is related to the ability of life to emerge in multiple ways, crossing even the stages of its absence.Fragile materials and fragmentary forms define a condition of vulnerability and interconnections between various versions of existence. In the central space, the suspended works of paper refer to hybrid bodies that, while seeming to be in decay, are at the same time regenerated and diffused in space, reconfiguring their relationships with each other and with their environment. The vertical arrangement of the works is interrupted by ceramic sculptures with embedded reed roots that form an imaginary horizontal plane suggesting the surface of the Earth.

In today’s world of climate change, uncontrolled fires, mining and species extinction, what survives and in what form? The mythical creature that runs through the exhibition refers to the radical otherness that resists human civilization. The myth of the Fleece becomes matter; the drawing of an imaginary place is the introduction to the exhibition, a map of imaginary coexistences, cosmic fragments, ruins and rebirth into which the audience is invited to enter.

A Short Bio:

Stefania Struza lives and works as an artist in Athens. She has presented her work in exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Solo exhibitions (selection): PrimaryTide, MOMus-Alex Mylonas Museum, Athens, 2024 (upcoming)· I the sea journey, I the occupation of the land, Old Olive Factory, Elefsina, in the context of the Elefsis European Capital of Culture, 2023; 212 Medea (Narratives from a deserted space), AnnexM, Athens Concert Hall, 2021; Currents and Currencies, a.antonopoulou.art, Athens, 2017; Shore, WienerArtFoundation, Vienna, 2016; Toacertaindegreesacrednessisintheeyeofthebeholder / ActV, NeueGalerieInnsbruck, Insbruck, 2015. Group exhibitions (selection): Plásmata II: Ioannina, organized by Onassis Cultural Centre, Ioannina, 2023; TheMediterranean: ARoundSea, ARCO Madrid, Madrid, 2023; The Palaceat 4 a.m, co-organized by NEON and Whitechapel Gallery, Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, 2019.

He has been awarded, among others, the Art Athina Award (2023), the InspirePrize of the MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the ARTWORKS Artists’ Support Programme of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (2018), the Young Artists Award of the National Bank of Greece (2017) and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts Award (2015). Her works are in the collection of the Onassis Foundation, the D. Daskalopoulos Collection and various other important collections in Greece and abroad.

She studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and completed her postgraduate studies in Environmental Art at the Edinburgh College of Art and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly.