Date/Time
16/03/2023 - 26/05/2023
10:00 - 17:00
Location
B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music
An installation by Georges Salameh
Curated by Natasha Christia
Opening
Thursday, March 16, 2023, 18:00-21:00
In Scaffolding Georges Salameh maps out the way in which memory is molded, lined by fragments of oblivion, alongside our individual and collective existential contradictions. Monuments and images recast the perpetual journey of return as momentary projections, and, through it, a form of existence in perpetual exile, a worn-out longing and the death of a precarious chronology of History.
On the 5th floor of the Theocharakis Foundation, with a view to the Acropolis and the Hellenic Parliament building, the Greek-Lebanese artist has installed an ephemeral construction site – a site of reflection upon his ancestors’ journey through life. They endured the devastating consequences of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and went through yet another uprooting, which the artist and his family personally experienced after the outbreak of the long Lebanese Civil War, in 1975; then came, the promise of a new life in Athens.
The installation is twofold in nature – a monument under restoration and an excavation artefact emerging from the depths of the earth. Sweeper (2004), a colour photographic print, mounted on a marble plaque, depicts the facade of the historic Kountouriotika refugee housing complex on Alexandra’s Avenue during the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics. For the duration of the Games, it was covered by a giant poster with a photographic reproduction of the Acropolis in an attempt to keep the desolate condition of the buildings from the public eye. Behind the giant poster, the August meltemi wind uncovers a tottering facade and scaffolding. What emerges is a stratigraphy of concurrent historical realities at the time when the image was taken – a living tissue of refutation as well as a field for potential projection.
This installation is in dialogue with an artwork comprising the colour photograph Gate (2019) and the archival short film White Middle Sea (2010). Gate depicts the Asia Minor Refugee Memorial in Samos, constructed of Ionic columns with inscriptions of the names of cities in Asia Minor. The structure is conceived as a monumental gateway to the future, awaiting a new beginning, or a potential disillusionment – an invocation to all refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. Based on Super 8 footage shot by the artist’s father, White Middle Sea documents Salameh’s earliest journey by boat from Beirut to Athens via Larnaca in 1976, shortly after the outbreak of the civil war. At first glance, the footage evokes the artist’s childhood, when in fact it had just been, irrevocably taken from him. “I no longer have a real memory of that period. My childhood has become for me a sort of landscape”, writes the artist, only to add, “After all, aren’t we a landscape of all we have seen?”. The monumental fragments of collective memory in these two artworks are here complemented by a personal account, which, rather than reinforcing an anti-memorial space, attempts to
investigate, re-signify and eventually reconcile itself with the way in which memory and – its odd but indispensable bedfellow – oblivion –, are engendered.
Scaffolding invites the audience to a series of empathy exercises concerning mnemonic operations of trauma sedimentation and emersion that are also accomplished through a rich program of parallel events, including workshops, screenings and performances – to name a few. By appropriating and reframing memory and oblivion ingrained in his family genealogy, – the artist becomes an archaeologist/custodian, and, ultimately, a mediator. He unearths and shares experiential fragments and emotions involving uprooting and its aftermath, in which we are in a position to discover a faint reflection of ourselves and venture into a manifold redefinition of our place in the world.
Artist: Georges Salameh
Curator: Natasha Christia
Artistic Director: Marina Miliou-Theocharakis
Exhibition Production Assistant: Nefeli Siafaka
Educational Programs: Eirini Alexandrakis, Anna Plessa
Communication: Eva Karagiannakis
Duration: March 16–May 26, 2023
Opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 – 17:00
Thursday: 17:00 – 21:00
Free entrance
Book you spot here
PARALLEL EVENTS:
Saturday, March 18:
16:30-19:00: Encounters with Oral Narration
More info here
Sunday, March 19:
12:00-14:00: Workshop: Books, Photo Archives and Fictional Realities
More info here
19:00-21:00: Screenings: Maesmak, Hippodamia
More info here
Saturday, May 06:
16:30-19:00: Encounters with Memory
More info here
Sunday, May 07:
18:00-20:30: Performance: “Let us stop and weep”
More info here
Thursday, March 30, April 20, May 04 and 26:
19:00: Encounters with the artist
More info here
BIOS
Georges Salameh is an artist and filmmaker. His artwork and practice deal with an idiosyncratic experience of sedimentation, both in a physical and a metaphysical sense, through a creative comparison of reality, languages and narrations. His raw materials are files, recordings, images, which arise through peripatetics, gestures, reconstructions, and a sense of listening. He has lived in Lebanon, Cyprus, France, Sicily and Egypt. For the last six years, he has been residing and working in Athens. In his first contact with cinema and photography, two decades ago, he tried to embrace Athens, the city that shaped him, not for what it should be or for what he wanted it to be, but for what it is and eluded him. The result was a series of short films and photographic series recollected under the title Cahiers de la paix 1998- 2006. Since 1998, he has been exhibiting photographic installations and videos, documentaries and experimental films in Greece and abroad. Since 2009, he is the co-founder of the production and publishing platform MeMSéA. His artworks form part of private and public collections.
Natasha Christia is an unaffiliated curator, writer and educator based in Barcelona. Ηer research focuses on the way photography, archive, film and the photobook interact with the 21st century artistic avant-garde, contributing to a revision and renewal of the dominant narrative forms and ideological myths of contemporary visual culture. She has curated various exhibitions, among them, AMORE: An Unfinished Trilogy by Valentina Abenavoli (Void/Athens Photo Festival, 2017), Dragana Jurišić: My Own Unknown (Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2017), Reversiones (Centro de la Imagen, Mexico DF, 2017), Lukas Birk: Travelogue Sammlung (Galerie Lustenau, Austria 2018), You Are What You Eat (Krakow Photomonth 2019), and ACTS I-VII by Oculi, (PHOTO 2022 Ιnternational Festival of Photography-Benalla Gallery, Australia). She regularly contributes essays on photography criticism for international publications and for artists.
The artist and the curator would like to express their gratitude to the production contributors of Scaffolding:
Nikolis Marmara Ltd (Yorgos Roumeliotis)
Kaloupoemporiki Techniki Karava S.A. (Eirini Karava)
Plexi Market
Macart Graphic (Michalis Varouxis)
Chris Doulgeris
Stefania Orfanidou
Ioanna Nissiriou
Alexandra Saliba
Stefan Lorenzutti
Αnd to the direction and the production team of Theocharakis Foundation
