Attempts to Escape

Art Seen is delighted to announce the group exhibition ‘Attempts to Escape’. Participating artists: Spyros Anastasiou (CY), David J. Batchelor (UK), Aikaterini Gegisian (GR), Eva Marathaki (GR), Kyriakos Kallis (CY), Phanos Kyriacou (CY) Vicky Pericleous (CY), Société Réaliste (FR), Georgia Sagri (GR), Maria Theodoraki (GR), Diana Taylor (UK), Mark Wallinger (UK). The exhibition will run until the 10th of May 2019.

The exhibition brings together a polyphony of critical voices and diverse expressions by twelve contemporary artists, working within a variety of practices and methods. The selections of works and their re-configuration in space, propose alternative situations. These situations form re-negotiations towards ways of being(s), or even set forth, devices of withdrawals from current socio-political conditionings and cultural conventions. The works could be therefore, perceived as ‘escape attempts’, of different scales, analogies and languages.

The exhibition expands towards a variation of critical approaches, touching upon themes of cycles of life and processes of living as reflected in the alchemical equation of matter and being (Spyros Anastasiou, Kyriakos Kallis), spatiotemporal quests in response to ‘situations’ (Aikaterini Gegisian, Société Réaliste, Vicky Pericleous), structures and synergies for patterns of thinking and modes of forming/making, (Phanos Kyriacou, Georgia Sagri, David Bachelor), agents of meaning and forms of translations (Diana Taylor, Maria Theodoraki, Eva Marathaki), self as mediator between identities and contexts (Mark Wallinger).

Artist Vicky Pericleous responds to the curatorial quest and further reflects on the exhibitions motifs: “The works share a commonality in their persistent tempo(s) of responses and articulations towards alternative systems of thought that move beyond hegemonic narratives and structures of power and compliance; in respect to the cultural and the bio-political. As such, they could be thought of as extended spatiotemporal acts of resistance. Enacted, not as mere attempts to escape from the gloomy political ambience felt across the world(s). They rather constitute critical escape attempts from enclosed systems of various forms of production; and from prevailing spatiotemporal hierarchies that dominant rhetorics – as echoed through the rherotics of the current globalised crisis - impose or are plausible to do so, across geographies and histories. That affect both the individual and the collective. The proposed curatorial ‘escapisms’ come as a multitude of conceivable and therefore probable alternative possibilities to re-engage with, what Giorgio Agamben refers to as form(s)-of-life.”

Opening: Wednesday, 27 March 2019, 18:30 – 21.30

Opening Hours:
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 15.30 - 19.00 or by appointment.