EXHIBITIONS

Body Memory

Thessaloniki, Contemporary Art Center

March 29 – May 3, 2014

After the exhibition ‘Places of Memory – Fields of Vision’, that took place at the Contemporary Art Center in 2012, we return to the subject of memory, emphasizing not the city as a mnemonic space, but the human body. The ways in which the body recalls past memories and experiences and turns them in artistic creation is the main focus of the exhibition. Strategies of remembrance might refer to conscious acts, such as recording, selective recollection or revisiting the residual material, or even less deliberate and implicit processes that go beyond the mechanisms of perception, such as texture, trauma and sublimation.
In the context of the exhibition ‘Body Memory’ the art work is conceived as a dynamic context where images, discourses, feelings and experiences are structured, even if the reception of the work follows its own course which might be independent of the author’s original intentions. Collective memory embodied in an art work often revokes controversial issues referring to people and events that still provoke intense debates today.
Body is approached as a fluid condition that stores and recalls past experiences and behaviours automatically. It is through the senses that human body remembers or chooses to forget, since oblivion turns to be as vital as memory itself for the subject. We become what we are and give meaning to our life according to what our body chooses to remember, or forget.

The exhibition Body Memory explores this poetical and creative dimension of embodied memory, a memory which is felt and experienced rather than cognitively approached, in the context of contemporary Greek art. Through various media, including video, performance, photography, drawing, painting, animation and installation, artists approach and reinterpret the individual and collective memory.

Artists: Loukia Alavanou, Panos Balomenos, Rania Bellou, Xenofon Bitsikas, Lydia Dabasina, Zafiro Georgiadou, Maria Loizidou, Leda Papaconstantinou, Eleni Pavlopoulou, Ilias Poulos, Athena Tacha, Babis Venetopoulos, Katerina Zacharopoulou, Mary Zygouri

Curator: Syrago Tsiara