Design your house and furniture in a way that could serve the revolution

Exhibition Duration: December 20th, 2010 – January 14th, 2012 
Exhibition Hours: Mon - Fri, 2.30-8.30 pm; Sat 2-6 pm
Opening Reception & performance: Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | 20.00
Performance: Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 | 20.00
Art Talk και Performance: Saturday, January 14th, 2012
Artists: Wafa Hourani, Daniel Le, Eric Vallette, Marcus Coates, Kavecs, Mounir Fatmi, Giorgos Papadatos, Daphne Alexia, Socratis Socratous, Joulia Strauss, Artemis Potamianou, Youla Hatzigeorgiou, Yannis Ghikas, Thanos Triandos, Costas Emmanouilidis, Charis Kondosphiris, Savvas Christodoulides, Dimitris Tataris, Andreas Liberatos, Angelos Papadimitriou.

A project by Nikos Charalambidis

‘Professor, you recently published some research and a new book on sleep deprivation
and how it can damage people’s health if they are getting less than six hours sleep
a night. Is Santa Claus at risk by staying up all night on Christmas Eve?'

Beton7 presents the exhibition 'Design your house and furniture in a way that could serve the revolution'. Nikos Charalambidis proposes a Procrustean bed-sleigh, a device of punishment and torture for the foreign Santa Claus and the inexorable "gifts" he brings to our country this year. The bed-sleigh, "a proposition based on medical advice for rest", is something the artist has explored before.

In the exhibition NOHELIA, the C.I.A. project (Turner Contemporary, 2006) the languid character of Santa Claus' bed was recanted by the very elements which made it up: a demonstrator's discarded megaphone, the sled of Beuys and the references to the Russian Avant-garde, a (scaled-down) Taliban cage but also the red star of revolution in place of Bethlehem's star over a small manger.

Another sled, first displayed in the exhibition Christmas Spirits (Omonia, 1999), is actually used as a skylight over the artist's bedroom, allowing daylight to penetrate the room from the crack of dawn. The design of the sled/skylight allows for its ultimate use, after the artist's death, as a greenhouse on top of his grave, which will enable the cultivation of a small vegetable garden in the dimensions of his body, in a symbolic continuation of life.

The constructions of Charalambidis, and the way they lend themselves to multiple uses and interpretations, reflect the radical way in which he devised his own house and the way in which he perceives the design and operation of the unique School of Fine Arts he has established at the abandoned airport of Nicosia on the Green Line—essentially an extension of his home which evolves the notion of HOME into that of HOMELAND.

Sleep, idleness and languor have no place in the geometry of Charalambidis, where the concept of design is actually a mechanism of training and alertness for himself, for his fellow-artists who are invited to contribute and, of course, for the viewers as well. As with all projects of the artist, the exhibition at Beton7 includes a series of events, interactive platforms, happenings, performances, classes and lectures.