Screening Scheme - Alkis Hadjiandreou

50 plin 1 Gallery announces the inauguration of the Window Project, with the solo exhibition Screening Scheme of Alkis Hadjiandreou curated by Panayiotis Michael and Maria Petrides.

Is a specially designated and autonomous space housed in the windows of the gallery,where young artists are given the oportuniy to experiment.

Screening Scheme

‘There is nothing simpler and more human than to desire’.
‘Desiring’ in Profanations, Giorgio Agamben

In this exhibition, Screening Scheme, artist and architect, Alkis Hadjiandreou, presents part of his recent work in two media: a series of photographs, group-titled See my desire. Break through yours (2010) and the video installation In-versed? (2011).

In See my desire. Break through yours, Alkis Hadjiandreou, experiments with the possibilities flourishing in internet sex sites where users interact to communicate their sexual desires and behaviours. Unlike dominant commercial pornography, which suspiciously monopolizes the privilege of mediating sexual desires, these sites give space to users to show and share their own desires. The users create a persona through their videos, photos and public profiles by choosing their own usernames . In so doing, they interact with others in a way that ‘material’ and ‘virtual’ come closer, creating a new ‘reality’. Here, the ‘real’ is, at once, material and virtual. And the persona of each user is, at once, material and image.

By the use of either stills, videos, or text on Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, one can merely make some form of documentation, organization of space, or (un)intentional commentary on a ‘reality’. By ‘reality’ I mean the space, which is activated by a physical and material presence attached to an identity, constructed and, by extension, deconstructed by our social environment. Interestingly, unlike the above-mentioned connectors, these sex sites precisely because of the boldness of their content, break through the screen, which protects the ‘user’ from the ‘viewer’. The ‘user’ is, however, both performer and viewer, in so far as s/he articulates and initiates her/his desires. These naked desires are deliberately made visible, and the ‘user’ fearlessly performs her/his vulnerabilities. The ‘user’ reaches out to the voyeurist ‘viewer’ to show him/her how unprotected and threatened s/he is by not having broken through the screen. The ‘user’ bravely contests the ‘viewer’ to transgress the shield, which disguises ‘unreal’ desires and the appearance of them.

Alkis Hadjiandreou uses the material provided by the users’ images and videos to create lyrical portraits by photographing personae and not ‘bodies’. Dreamy bodies, in this work, are saturated with awkward fantasies, tender tension and films of interruptions. The actual body, here, is the skin of the site, which offers users the space to be real and imagined; at once, desired performer and controlling object. The body in any given image is doubly manipulated. Bodies are controlled by unleashed desires. At another level, the images of these bodies are employed in different ways. Settings are altered; periods seem to be changing; forms are warped; figures are misrepresented; screens are unsaved. Each still shot is manipulated by superimposition, keeping in the forefront however, the colour and texture of each ‘user’s’ aura in the video. Although zooming close to the Users’ videos, the frame around the image is inevitably captured: the cursor, the symbols of play and download, the streaming window, the screen itself, the titles of the videos. And just as the excess of desires and their images cannot be contained, the videos here cannot keep the ‘instructions’ on how to play, outside the frame. No image is above suspicion. Desire oozes both within and without the frame. Images of expressed desires resist confinement, and this is meant to be seen.

While See my desire. Break through yours, moves from the quick speed of a video clip to another form of time-broken fluidity which superimposition activates, Alkis Hadjiandreou’s video installation, In-versed? moves at quite a different pace. Drawing upon Frank Sinatra’s iconic song, My Way, and two articles from, The Guardian and The New York Times , this 4'44'' video renegotiates the edge spliting autobiography from fiction and ‘self-knowledge’. While autobiography insists on a subject, a proper name, and on memory, birth, eros, and death, it is equally eager to escape from the coercion of this archiving system. Like the relationship, which the artist renegotiates between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in the dynamics of a nude context, In-versed? complicates the distinction between the ‘person’ and her/his ‘part’. May, My Way, be the desire of a way of life written in verse?

Screening Scheme takes on the challenge to present the following hypothesis: if ‘there is nothing simpler and more human than to desire’, then all schemes through which we communicate our desires, inevitably screen what it means to be together.

Maria Petrides - Writter

Opening: Monday 25 July 2011, 20:30

Opening Hours
Tuesday - Friday: 10:00 - 13:00 & 16:00 - 20:00
Saturday: 10:00 - 14:00