PCAI Collections artists VASKOS and Antrea Tzourovits participate in NEON’s new exhibition space of togetherness at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece | School of Athens – Irene Papas from 9 September to 20 October 2024. The exhibition raises some of the most pressing issues facing Europe and the world today. Safety, wars, climate change, socio-political conditions but also global demographic and economic status push towards a movement of people, cultures and ideas and shape our world as a space of flows through the interaction and diversity of cultures. Curated by Elina Kountouri, Director NEON, space of togetherness is an exhibition of stories from the intersection of race, politics, and the rights of individuals and communities.
The exhibition explores the assumptions and prejudices of contemporary society woven into our daily lives, around racism, social mobility, and the rights of different communities and migrants. It suggests how, through greater awareness of class, race, and gender, we can learn to co-exist and find a sense of belonging.
In the context of the exhibition, PCAI Collection artists VASKOS participate with the work You Are My Mirror, a series of staged photographic diptychs that derive from the joy of artistic coexistence and sharing creativity – a celebratory and cherishing feeling of the everyday experience. The sense of care and responsibility for one another, and by extension the demand for equity and fairness, inspire this project. VASKOS try looking upon the ‘artistic duo’ as a contemporary artistic practice, a conscious choice that offers an alternative model of artistic symbiosis and complicity, testing the limits of the traditional identity and the common singularity/oneness of the subject. They create hybrid environments somewhere between reality and fiction. You Are My Mirror series has references in history of art and in queer and DIY aesthetics; it is a game of identities and roles that plays with mirror images and reflections and is often infused with homoeroticism.
PCAI Collection artist Antrea Tzourovits starts from his personal story to address a collective history shaped by war, loss, and trauma. His childhood memories from former Yugoslavia, before moving to Greece during the 1999 conflict, are central to his work and always emerge in an enigmatic or humorous way. As a child, he experienced the celebrations of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s win of the 1998 FIBA Basketball World Championship, which was soon overshadowed by the NATO bombings in 1999 during the Kosovo War. The new commission for the exhibition investigates these traumatic memories. Τhe title You know you can see your nose all the time, but your brain decides to ignore it somehow alludes playfully to the painful facts that cannot be undone and the traumatic memories that last, defying our brain’s attempts to erase them. The work comprises a sound installation with recordings from the OAKA Stadium in Athens – where the 1998 FIBA Basketball World Championship took place – and a wall installation composed of reclaimed basketball court flooring. It is a site-specific work that takes us to a different environment, to a game that we cannot see, that is not there, that cannot happen. Exploring the intricacies and paradoxes of human experience, Antrea Tzourovits creates a platform to contemplate history and the persistence and elusiveness of memory and how it shapes reality.
Image credits: Antrea Tzourovits, You know you can see your nose all the time, but your brain decides to ignore it somehow, 2024. Installation View space of togetherness. Photo: © Natalia Tsoukala, courtesy of NEON.
Read more about the exhibition HERE.
Activity aligned with Goals 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17
