Paky Vlassopoulou: A day after a day after a day after a day
Solo Exhibition by Paky Vlassopoulou
Curated by Florent Frizet
14.01.2023-11.02.2022
Opening: Saturday 14 January 2023, 18:00-22:00
Opening hours: Wednesday-Saturday 17:00-20:00
In 2023 OMS will focus on the temporal turn in art which approaches questions of global contemporaneity and chronopolitics. OMS is very pleased to begin the year with the solo exhibition A day after a day after a day after a day, by Paky Vlassopoulou, curated by Florent Frizet. Paky Vlassopoulou presents a new body of work taking as a starting point her research on Leros island, located in the east of the Aegean Sea and only an hour off the coast of Turkey, and its histories of multi-layered confinement. Leros has a long history of incarceration rooted in its exemplary landscape defined by water and unique architectural heritage.
In the area of Lepida, military barracks built during the Italian occupation (1912-1943), have been reused ever since as indoctrination institutions in post-Greek Civil War era (1948-1964), prison cells for political dissidents during the military junta (1967-1974), mental healthcare facilities (1958-today), and refugee camps, known as hotspots (2016-today). Last year, right above the existing infrastructures, on top of the hill, a new controlled refugee camp, with barbed wire fencing, surveillance cameras, x-ray scanners and magnetic doors and gates, was built. Thinking of the common living conditions of all these very different cases of unwanted bodies, Vlassopoulou is drawn to the plate as an object widely recognized as a symbol of sustenance and as a domestic object linked to material culture. She creates multiple porcelain plates to carry words, lines, scratches. Each plate acts like a journal entry documenting numbers of confinement. In the exhibition space, the plates build up a storyline through drawings, notes and quotations.
A day after a day after a day after a day serves as a cognitive and sensorial experience on placement and displacement.
Paky Vlassopoulou lives and works in Athens, Greece. Her work is informed by the dialectics of traditional sculpture making in relation to spatial issues, object hood, functionality and bodily experiences. She is concerned with thematics that deal with knowledge production, history, ruins, while in recent years her works revolve around the concepts of proximity, care and hospitality. Selected fellowships and residencies include: International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) New York City, USA; Artworks– Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship Program; The Association Phenomenon and the Kerenidis Pepe Collection, Anafi Island, Greece; WHW Akademija, Zagreb, Croatia; AIR Residency Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium; Sterna Residency, Nisyros, Greece.
Selected exhibitions include: Missing Homes, Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, The Netherlands; Bread, TAVROS, Athens, Greece; The Equilibrists, a project by the New Museum, New York and the DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; Reverb: New Art from Greece, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA;
A Thousand Doors, commissioned by NEON Foundation and The Whitechapel Gallery, Athens, Greece.
She will be participating in the upcoming Thessaloniki Biennial 2023, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras.
In 2012, together with artists Chrysanthi Koumianaki and Kosmas Nikolaou, she co-founded 3 137, an artist-run space operating in Athens, Greece.