dora

SOLO SHOWS

2006 The Lost State Of Grace, Gazon Rouge, Athens

GROUP SHOWS (selection)

2008 Ten years after- my friends, curated by Antonis Vathis,

Sarantopoulos mills Space, Athens

Soi tzeneris – without a family, TinT gallery, Thessalonica, Greece

2007 In present tense. Young Greek Artists, National Museum of Contemporary Art,

Athens (Catalogue)

Part Time Punks, DESTE foundation, Athens (Catalogue)

What Remains is Future, Contemporary Greec Art Scene, curated by

Nadja Argyropoulou

2006 Femmes d’Europe, San Tropez

An outing: the Beltsios collection: contemporary art in Greece in the 21st century,

curated by Sotirios Bahtertzis, Matsopoulos Mill, Trikala, Greece (Catalogue)

Fuck Your Dreams This Is Heaven, curated by

Xenia Kalpaksoglou & Christoforos Marinos

2005 ProTaseis (Version IV: 935m), curated by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and

Augustine Zenakos (Catalogue)

Prospective Sites, Billboard project, Vienna, Austria

We stock/Amos esmi pecado/The closer you will get to a face to face, group show,

Athens, Greece

25 PEACes, Vienna

Atheneum Intercontinental New Acquisitions, Athens

Opening Act, gallery gazonrouge, Athens Greece

4th Deste Foundation Prize, Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece (Catalogue)

Art athina ‘05, gallery gazon rouge, Athens Greece (Catalogue)

2004 So much…so great…, Larissa Contemporary Art Center, Greece

(Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, curator)

Manderley Astoria Hotel in Thessaloniki, Greece (Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, curator)

2003 Cosmos: the 11th biennale for young artists from Europe and the Mediterranean” ,

solus locus , group exhibition, gallery gazonrouge, Athens, Greece

2002 Emerging Greek Artists, GAZI, Athens Greece two group shows in Art in General

& the Williamsburg Historical Center in New York and a collaboration with

Jennifer L Clark for a sight specific installation in Galapagos art space in Brooklyn

PRIZES/SCHOLARSHIPS/RESIDENCIES

2004 Cirius, Royal School of Architecture, Copenhagen

Triangle AIR, Dumbo, New York

2003 Commendation, Yiannis Spyropoulos foundation

2002 Scholarship, Fulbright foundation

STUDIES

1999 Athens School of Fine Arts

2002 Pratt Institute, Brooklynz

Published in GAP (Greek Art Projects), issue 2, March- April 2005 pp 18-22

How would you like other people to approach/see your work? In what terms would you like your work to be seen by the art critic and in what terms by the audience/spectator?

Firstly, what I do has mostly to do with the process of creating it, or better, with the experience of the processes of creating it and the time it takes me to create it as well as the journey I make creating it is very important. So I guess that I would like the spectator to approach it in similar terms, which means, to travel in it, spend time, look at it, and to slowly try to discover it. And I think that I would like both the art critic and the spectator to approach it in the same way.

Do you believe that it is easy for the spectator to enter this process of interpretation that you suggest, which means to identify with the way you work?

I believe that it is possible, because this is the way that the objects are made so that the way they are made to be very obvious.

Of course taste is always very important and this is also something that interests me a great deal. Once the spectator is interested and likes what he/she sees I think that he/she will enter this process. What I try to do is to make visible all the levels of the process that lead to this result in all the things I create. So, when you look at it, you can follow the reverse root and see the work unfold. In other words, follow the same journey in reverse. Suffice to interest you enough so that you can devote the necessary time.

What you create, with the way that you create them, work as a transport for something else?

No. They are exactly what they are. I do not know, maybe you could say that they could work as a transport of a course or as transference of a course. Even better, of a rhythm, not even a course –in which way I co-ordinate my body and my head in a working rhythm. But it is definitely literally, it is not a metaphor for something else, nor a transfer for somewhere else, maybe just for something different.

In the objects you created in the past – which personally at least very much remind me of children’s constructions- you included elements of buildings and human figures, which you slowly excluded, in order to end up creating just objects.

Yes. And this, because I am not interested in telling a specific story. With my first work, when I did these big compositions on walls, I thought that what I wanted to do is tell a story. And to tell a story in a very descriptive way, meaning that you could literally read it as an illustrated children’s book. A work for example was a fairytale that had to do with people under the sea surface. I think I had read a tale by Oscar Wild (The Fisherman and his Soul) and that image was stack in my mind. Maybe something between a fairytale by Oscar Wild and Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt. It was this fairytale about people under the sea. The main colours were blue and if you went close you would see mermaids and various stories. The other work was a huge collage that looked like a city, and it had buildings and the buildings had windows and the windows had human faces. And what I wanted to do was tell stories. I like stories. It is almost impossible for me to read anything else, and theory is a lot easier to understand if it is given in the form of a story. So I tried myself to tell stories. However, what I realized slowly is that what interests me the most is the way stories are made, not what the story tells. Even in these big works, the way I made them was in reality even more important. At the beginning, I had a face that I cut here and took it a little bit further.

But then I realized that I was not interested in the little face, I was concerned about the process of moving it from here to there.

Thus, I slowly began to remove the narrative elements and the process became the narrative. I talked about how you tell the story, about how you create a story not about what the story is about.

True, in your last work the narrative element does not exist …

Not at all. But it continues to be a construction of a story, as if you have the pattern in a sense and according to this to be able to tell anything. Like this drawing with the equilateral squares which I repeat all the time in the last four years. In fact it is like having the backbone of a story and let the story develop around it like an amoeba or like a parasite. It is a motif that never really changes; at the same time it never is the same. All the things I make are the same motifs in many different versions.

Do you see the ‘hands on’ approach as a statement in art today?

I mostly see it as a need, I do not see it as a statement. Creating something with your hands gives you an entirely different pleasure. I personally need it, I could not do it in a different way. Maybe it is a bit annoying: the need to prove tangibly that I can produce work.

I mean, doesn’t it have other type of extensions? Feminist for instance.

This is another issue that bothers me. I do not like my work to be interpreted trough psychoanalytical terms. I do not agree with this. The artist is one thing and his/her work another. I believe that one has the right to keep these things separated. Because in reality if you begin interpreting a work through psychoanalytical terms, what you do is interpreting the artist –as a person- through psychoanalytical terms. And this is a bit ‘vampiric’ and also I do not understand why this is of any interest to the recipient. None of us has really such an irresistible personality. On the other hand my work is one way or another an ergo therapy and it is obvious. What I wish to say is that I composite myself by working. The reason I work so much with my hands is that by doing so what I succeed in doing is to get everything in order in my head. And this is why I removed elements such as narrative, this is why I remove any type of political comment, this is why I do not wish to refer to any kind of feminist or psychoanalytical interpretations, this is why I try to remove any elements that have to do with form. I try to remove all these. In fact, I limit myself and I try to work with as little elements as possible because this way I have to be as concentrated as possible, imaginative, direct and not clacking. And in the end, what comes out is a thing which is I think compact enough. I use the work a kind of alphabet as if I am trying to teach myself anew how to talk and how to arrange my thinking and at the same time bring out something which can be intelligible to the public. In this way, I return to your first question as to the way I would like the audience to interpret what I do. The main thing is that I would like people to be able to read what I do. And because I would like them to read it, I have tried to train myself through working, of how to talk in a way which is codified and recognisable. I have tried to create this very simple alphabet and work with the combination that this alphabet can create. It is one combination at a time, with a start, middle and end.

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What do you like to look at the mostly?

I like beautiful people, mainly. I like to stare at beautiful people. Their assurance, their story. I like melodrama, I like drama and I like shop windows.