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PRESS RELEASE
Video Art Miden travels to Cairo Video Festival! Video Art Miden presents a selection of Greek video art at the 8th Cairo Video Festival, Egypt. The works from Miden will be part of the loop videos exhibition, which will take place 628 of February 2017, in 29 Hoda Sharawi, which is located in the heart of the city in downtown Cairo. The program, curated by Gioula Papadopoulou, is entitled "Forgiving time" and introduces 3 videos by contemporary Greek artists, in which ordinary, everyday objects are used symbolically to explore concepts such as memory, existence, displacement, alienation, inner battles and personal perceptions of time, loss, life and death. Participant artists: Aggeliki Bozou, Thodoris Trampas, Sofia Simaki. For more info & updates please visit the official website of Cairo Video Festival: www.cvf.medrar.org Forgiving time [20 min] [Curated by Gioula Papadopoulou] 1. Aggeliki Bozou, Superm’s diary-Chapter 03: You and I, Greece 2015, 4.35
“You and I” is the fourth and last work of the video series “Superm’s diary”. It is a series of short videos created with the intention of recording daily notes. The unit “You and I” is an allegoric reference to the “stranger” that exists around and within us. The video begins with a comment on Man Ray’s artwork, Hands by Picasso (1935). The lens of the camera records on top view two hands. The one is painting the other using black ink. After this action, the two hands will never again have the same color when they are facing the same side. This leads to a change of landscape and transfers us into a virtual battlefield, where decorative porcelain figures are destroyed by a hammer. Those porcelain figures represent the time of prosperity, welfare, enjoyment and romance for many European cultures. When the last porcelain head falls, the audience
erupts in applause. The symbols continue to rotate: a book with a face changing eyes, a deer trying to convince us that is alive and finally the sign of death comes to redeem. Bio: Born in 1982 in Athens, Greece. Graduated from Athens School of Fine Arts in 2011. Since 2014, she is a postgraduate at the MA of Visual Arts in Athens School of Fine Arts. During 2012-14 she studied acting at the theater company ‘Askisi’. In 2011 she received the first prize of the Spiropoulos Museum Award. Since 2005 she has been professionally engaged in theatre set and costume design. In her personal work she is interested in video and performance art. She is a founding member of the experimental music band The Crabs of Horror and since May 2015 she is collaborating with the Athens Biennale 2015-17 'Omonia'. Her work has been presented in several group exhibitions and festivals in Athens and also in New York, Berlin etc.
2. Thodoris Trampas, Amorphous Mass, Greece, 2015, 12.53
Balancing between conscious and unconscious, the absence of “those who never came” and the utopian hope that “they will come”, the video “Amorphous Mass” is a performative expression of existential issues that search to satisfy the primary need; the need “to be”. Thodoris Trampas combines performance art and installation in space. He searches the limits inside and outside the body; while it moves, it generates some pace, which affects its relation to the space, it makes natural sounds, which sometimes interrupt and sometimes connect the constant flow. He also uses items and materials of modern life, together with organic materials, such as soil and water. He changes the properties of the materials to give certain meanings to them, which are related mostly to the concerns of the human condition and, in general, of the today’s society. Through experiential reality, he aims to highlight a human condition as an endless effort to balance within an “area”, which is constantly changing in space and time. Bio: Thodoris Trampas is a visual artist who has been working with performance art and installation in space. He was born in Devonport, Australia in 1991 and comes from Serres, Greece. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He has been selected from the ΜΑΙ (Marina Abramović Institute) and NEON (Culture and Development Agency) for Long Duration Performance 2016 in Greece, Benaki Museum. He lives and works in Athens and has participated in various group exhibitions in Greece and abroad.
3. Sofia Simaki, It will be a while yet, Greece 2015, 2.23
The video “It will be a while yet” is based on a studio action in which images of birds and flowers were burned. The sounds of mobiles and mac shutting down accompany the video sequence. The silencing of feelings and our inability to communicate them is the main theme of the original action and the video. Bio: Sofia Simaki is a painter and sculptor. Since 2011 she has been cooperating with several theatre groups as an artist/set designer. She is a founding member of the art lab IRIDA and since 2015 she has opened her studio organising a series of artist’s dialogues under the title “Ghostwriter”.
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Video Art Miden Miden* is an independent organization for the exploration and promotion of video art. Founded by an independent group of Greek artists in 2005, it has been one of the earliest specialized video-art festivals in Greece and has built an international festival identity, presenting an annual video art festival for a decade. Since 2015, Miden continues its work changing its form to a more flexible and broadened event programming, setting as basic aims to stimulate the creation of original video art, to help spread it and develop relevant research. Through collaborations and exchanges with major international festivals and organizations, it has been recognized as one of the most successful and interesting video art platforms internationally and as an important cultural exchange point for Greek and international video art. It also provides an alternative meeting point for emerging and established artists and a communication hub between artists, organizations, festivals and art spaces around the world. Miden screening programs have traveled in many cities of Greece and all over the world, and they are hosted by significant festivals, museums and institutions globally. (*Miden means “zero” in Greek) Art direction: Gioula Papadopoulou & Margarita Stavraki Info: www.festivalmiden.gr www.facebook.com/festivalmiden e-mail: festivalmiden[at]gmail.com