New Somatography

The group exhibition, New Somatography, curated by Fashion Editor, Christos Kyriakides, showcases eight contemporary visual artists based in Cyprus, London, and Athens. Working in a variety of ways with photography – installation, collage and video – and taking a diverse approach on thoughtfully un-representing forms of bodies, imagined in a photographic space vested with curiosities and desires, this show, at PENINDAPLINENA gallery, is, in part, about entering the body at the same time that it is a display of writing off bodies.

As half the title of this show suggests, bodies, and notions of them, play a central role in creating a dialogue between different manifestations and signs related to the inscription of the body. Throughout academic features, the ‘term’ and ‘action’ of somatography has enjoyed a long life where dissimilar attitudes have claimed it from within its own discipline – ranging from biomedical sciences, anatomical studies, fine arts, action art, anthropology, molecular biology, critical studies, semantics, and, queer studies – as writings on, in and around the body. From within visual arts, the take offered in this New Somatography is in its kind of exposing, voluntary vulnerability.

Eleni Bagaki’s and Soteris Kallis’s treatment of photographic collage overtly and consciously builds on features and formal qualities which often delimit gender-identities-prescribing-desires. Bagaki works with found objects and images, material often taken from pornography magazines, which she then employs to skillfully construct new dialogic sceneries which engage swelling pleasures of gender (in)equalities, and three-dimensional installations. Kallis’s portraits worked as photographic collage, appeal and appear to us through both their large scale of single bodies disjointed, and borders erased. Robi Rodriguez’s tetraptych gaze of observing subjects outside the very frame in which they are seized, restages this rehearsal between figures “fashioned” and photographers. Likewise, in Stelios Kallinikou’s work, the subject’s gaze turns away from the lens, which, conventionally, focuses on the body, reflecting in an almost mirroring attitude, the subtle relationship between subject and subject. Hanna Putz’s portraits half stand between abstracted body sites playing with posing, and a minimalist aesthetic, which moves casually into story threads, while Edith Bergfors’s diverse range of selected figures, faces and features releases the tension dividing distortion from contortion. Alternatively, Daniel Sannwald’s works are heavily armoured in digital handling and masked mirrorings of vacillating bodies that seem well at ease inside a pop smokescreen. Revisiting one of his videos, Alexandros Pissourios divorces several still images, sensual and grainy and evoking passage, blurring, therefore, the borderlines of how we perceive movement and immobile impressions, which stir us gently.

Pushing the mediums of photography and fashion, notions of bodies, conceived and graphic, overlap. The edges between these situations of portraits and forms, and the manifold images of them, create a reconfiguring of bodies, both visible and evoked. Escaping what might seem like a photographic moment of “framing the body”, these artists’ works are keen on disarticulating what is ordinarily taken for granted to be included in defined photographic, and three dimensional, space. - Maria Petrides, Independent Writer

Eleni Bagaki | Edith Bergfors | Stelios Kallinikou | Soteris Kallis | Alexandros Pissourios | Hanna Putz | Robi Rodriguez | Daniel Sannwald

Opening: 2 December 2012, 20:00
Exhibition dates: 2 December 2012 – 18 January 2013

Opening Hours
Monday – Friday: 16:00 – 20:00
Saturday: 12:00 - 16:00