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Nadia Kalara | ADELOS / ΑΔΗΛΟΣ
ARTIST TALK: March 24, 2011 | 8 pm Adelos, the invisible, floating island, is cut off from the grounds of history and wanders in an archipelago of temporalities. If you follow the old Egnatia Route, the ancient passage that for ages connected Asia to Europe, you may arrive at Adelos, the place where Nadia Kalara’s gaze was trapped. Like a retrospective traveller in contemporary Greece, aiming at discovering the unseen fold of places, Kalara attempts to reveal what insists there as a phantom. Through her artistic practice, she reconstructs the spaces she encounters, expressing the historical anxiety that dwells in them. The exhibited artworks are eight large-format digitally edited photographs and a sculptural object on the floor. Entering the pieces of this exhibition, one follows the fabrication of a spatial entirety, constituted by fragmentary and un-composed pieces of marble, some amorphous, some shaped. In this marble cosmos ancient forms reappear persistently, albeit as copies or residues of an original. Here, structures are erected as remnants: whatever is produced is being added, not in order to complete a building, but in order to make it more ruinous. It is a temporal construction-site where one is watching the constant genesis and repetition of a ruin. Kalara’s digital composing strategy compiles numerous photographic takes into a hypothetical unity that preserves the memory of its fragmentation. The initial photographs—automatic inscriptions of a gaze onto a material— are transformed by the commands of simulation and replacement of the image-editing program, resulting in digito-graphies that return a lost magic to our sight. The resulting images oscillate between the optical and the virtual, conveying a sense of strangeness while being beautiful. For Kalara, the photographic medium is the post-medium par excellence. Photography is not an objective recording tool for her. Its versatility and dynamics are used not in order to objectively record reality but rather to reshape and reconstruct it. Besides this special focus on photography, one might also come across other media in her work, such as drawing, sculptural objects, sound, video and text. The perception of the artwork is enriched by the ways these media are related as well as by their difference. In many of her installations, the viewer is called to reconstruct the meaning of a space. By moving, the viewer discovers visual punctualities and tensions in the space, while, for example, she is at the same time invited to study a plan, a model or a text. This perceptual complexity of simultaneously viewing, reading and physically navigating creates a feeling of active participation and constitutes, eventually, a comment on the condition of representation. More specifically, Kalara is interested in the multiplicity of view points, the credibility of narratives, their deconstructive and compositional potency, the multiple scales of vision and time, the proximity and distance from the viewed object, their conceptual impact. Thus, the interim space between artwork and viewer is activated along with the awareness of the mechanisms that construct the distance between them. Touring – mainly to the Greek suburban landscape- is also an important artistic practice for Kalara. This experience is formed by the attempt of its representation. The landscape is constructed the very moment it is traversed. The resulting art works are an attempt to understand this double simultaneous construction and they are considered to be temporary stops or pauses in this movement. The touring is carried out through the main arteries of the country or through old, mote secondary routes. There is a special focus on the old national road of Athens-Patras for autobiographical reasons. Nadia Kalara leaves and works in Athens, Greece. She studied Fine Arts at the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and University of East London (MA). Since 2009 she is a doctorate candidate at the University of Thessaly. Her research focuses at the aesthetics of heterochrony in the work of Robert Smithson as an invention of models of artistic practice based on temporal strategies. Since 2003 she has been teaching visual arts at the University of Thessaly, department of Architecture. She also taught visual arts at the University of Patras, department of Architecture. She participated and taught in international workshops of art and architecture (UIA, Istanbul, Center of Mediterranean Architecture, Crete, University of Thessaly, Greece) Solo and group shows include the Museum of Freud’s, St Petersburg (2010), Art Athina, (2009), the 2nd Athens Biennial, (2009), 7th Architecture Biennial, Sao Paolo, (2007) and several group and solo shows in Greece and Great Britain. Media Sponsor: Culturenow.gr |
