The W:OW Project: We Are One World
Video Art Miden: Down to Earth [a selection of Greek video art] [duration: 28min]
Curator: Gioula Papadopoulou
Curatorial statement “Down to Earth” is a selection of Greek video art, featuring 7 contemporary artists: Anna Vasof, Alexandros Kaklamanos, Panos Mazarakis, Yiannis Kranidiotis, Alex Karantanas, Katerina Athanasopoulou and Vasilis Karvounis. The title is borrowed from Anna Vasof’s video “Down to Earth”, which opens the program. The video creates several personal stories, using ordinary objects fixed on different pairs of shoes, in unusual and practically useless mechanisms, which serve as strong metaphors for our way of living. Alexandros Kaklamanos also creates a metaphor using a stage setting of everyday life in his city, an urban trade-mark site in Thessaloniki: the well-known statue of Alexander the Great as a rider is vanished in his video, and has been substituted by a living horse, perhaps as a reminder to step out of myth or history and, for once, praise the livings –every living creature on Earth. The next 3 works, by artists Panos Mazarakis, Yiannis Kranidiotis and Alex Karantanas, focus on digital features to criticize vanity, classical and modern aesthetics and the limits between the natural and the virtual world in a dystopian way, setting questions about our actual & virtual entity. Katerina Athanasopoulou and Vasilsis Karvounis also use digital tools, to talk about life and death: Katerina Athanasopoulou in a lyrical music video, where a patient turns into a deep-sea diver sinking in their own body, and Vasilis Karvounis in a humorous, surrealistic, post-modern animation synthesis, inspired by S. Freud and S.Beckett. All videos “talk” about “life on earth” as we experience it daily -each one of us in their own personal way- balancing between existence & nothingness, beauty & vainness, rhythm & chaos, movement & stillness, life & death.