The City of Athens, from 26 October to 27 November 2022, presents the new solo exhibition of MyrtoXanthopoulou entitled KATAIGIDA (I have no pen). The exhibition is organized by the City of Athens Culture, Sports and Youth Organisation (OPANDA) at the City of Athens Museum of Folk Art and Tradition “Aggeliki Chatzimichali”, in the framework of Culture is Athens* with the support of Outset Contemporary Art Fund (Greece) and the collaboration of Philosophy Photography Lab. It is a site-specific installation on manuality, matter and reason and how they complement each other in the search for meaning. It is presented in the house museum of an iconic woman who highlighted the value and richness of manual art in Greece.
In her fifth solo work, entitled “KATAIGIDA (I have no pen)”, Myrto Xanthopoulou temporarily camps at the house of Aggeliki Chatzimichali. The exhibition, designed especially for the museum, includes a series of sculptures and videos spread over three consecutive halls. Above the ornate fireplace, a composition of rice papers painted with blue pen dominates the main hall. The phrase “The tap is dripping”, written in large letters on their surface, sends a warning message that does not necessarily need to be decoded. After all, for Xanthopoulou, language is a code. When she writes something, she always means something else.
Similarly, according to her, “KATAIGIDA” can mean many things: “The title has a verticality. A kataigida can be crying, an outburst, a sequence of events, emotions, words, or a natural phenomenon that, while it lasts, everything else seems to have stopped. There is something dramatic about the word, but also an exaggeration, something almost funny (everyone will think of the song by the Greek singer Antipas). It both expresses and undermines the drama.” The artist clarifies that she ΄sees’ all her works as a text: “I generally have a textual understanding of things. In my head, there are always words and phrases, narratives around which I build my works and understand them. And I read them as a text, even when no text is available.
“Xanthopoulou’s unspecified drama is the physical suffering she experiences while making her luggage-constructions, where sloppiness coexists with persistent and laborious manuality. This exhausting appropriation characterizes all sculptures in the exhibition, which include phrases such as “I’m tired,” “I don’t care,” and “We all suck.” Packing papers dipped in glue and oil paint, plaster bases expressing the light/heavy dipole, a small stand with a plastic canopy, fragments of words and quotations, sticks, foam boards, reeds-props, paper with traces of the artist’s hands, words written in nail polish, spray-painted papercutting on paper, a construction of cigarette paper resembling a spaceship that landed on the dining room table – all of these create an exhibition in which materiality and language, physicality and care dominate.
Many of the objects embedded in these sculptures appear in an early form in the videos she shoots with her smart phone and uploads as Instagram Stories. They are a collection of small gestures, shots and speech, all woven together like handiwork. As she says, the videos represent an “experiential dictionary”, an “archive of gestures” that sheds light on different aspects of her practice, physical, performative and sonic. “They open a window to the inner world of the art studio, the home, the pauses where nothing happens, and anything can happen.” In the ten-minute video “100 hits” (2021-22), also exhibited as part of a construction, discourse functions like matter in the sculptures. The artist’s voice endlessly reproduces lines (“Everything is frequencies” / “Every day the same story”) that explain the performative nature of her practice. The videos are deliberately unedited, made without much technical support: ‘It’s like a peculiar arte povera. I work with what I have, with what I find at home, in the studio, on the balcony, on the sidewalk, in my neighbourhood paper shop,” says the artist.
MyrtoXanthopoulou was born in Helsinki in 1981. She lives and works in Athens. She studied Fine Arts at the Painting Workshop C of the Athens School of Fine Arts (2004-2009) and Art History at Deree (2000-2004). “KATAIGIDA” is her fifth solo exhibition held in Athens. In addition, she has participated in many group exhibitions and projects in Greece and abroad, in museums, galleries, festivals and independent art spaces. In 2020 she was awarded the SNF Artworks Fellowship. Her works are characterized by the use of everyday, often trashy materials, the manual element and the use of discourse. They are installations, drawings and constructions that attempt to approach the insignificant, familiar, insubstantial and unserious in a poetic way.
The exhibition is curated by Christoforos Marinos, an art historian and curator of exhibitions and activities of OPANDA.
Warm thanks to Alexandra Athanasiadou (Philosophy Photography Lab) and the collector Dimitris Passas for supporting the exhibition.
*MirtoXanthopoulou’s exhibition is part of Culture is Athens, a three-year project announced by the City of Athens and its institutions, which aims to upgrade, promote and unify the cultural fabric of Athens, and provide practical support to artists and cultural sector workers.
High-resolution photos and texts can be downloaded here
Inauguration of the exhibition: Wednesday, October 26, 18:00-22:00
Duration: October 26 – November 27, 2022
Opening Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 11:00-16:00, Saturday-Sunday 10:00-15:00. The exhibition will be closed on Mondays
Free Admission.
City of Athens Museum of Folk Art and Tradition “Aggeliki Chatzimichali”: 6 Aggeliki Chatzimichali St., Plaka, Information: 210 3243987, 210 3243972 | www.opanda.gr
