Cra(u)sh. Or How You Made Me Kiss The Pavement.

- hardship is a scarce commodity. 

Michel Serres

Can we capture our lives overturned by a crash?

In the line of unfortunate events, a crash can be described from a fleeting stumble to a total collision, questioning the notion of being.

The exhibition ‘’Cra(u)sh. Or how you made me kiss the pavement’’ examines the other side of the accident. Streets, routes, vehicles, encounters, crashes, are revisited through the new materialist agenda and pop culture. Twelve young artists study drifts and wounds, isolate and re-construct the entanglement of matter and flesh, the absolute fusion of machine, landscape and man, within the premise of organic and inorganic world.

With reference to J.G.Ballard’s literary work Crash from the ‘70s and the notion of the fetishistic desire erected by a crash, the body, as anatomy and sign, encounters emotions and the inorganic world. The wound, as the engraved trace upon the skin, becomes a mouth or a vagina, revealing love for the inorganic. The exhibition’s space simulates the scene of the crash.

The exhibition is hosted in Grace, an independent artist run space near the Athens Railway Station. Over the years, the building has operated for several occasions, such as a venue for religious cults to a short-stay hotel. Honoring the building’s historical continuum, the curatorial searches for a more sensory interaction with the artworks; acknowledging the artworks as material witness of the Athenian urban narrative. The exhibition space becomes the field where the visitor gets accustomed to the uncanny, as part of the crash scene. Grace opens the doors seconds before the fatal collision, in the vertigo of the velocity.

Through different mediums and practices, the artists unfold different sides of crash and crush. The artworks include image bending of an automotive legacy, interpretations of erotics symbols, exhausting trials of hard/soft materiality, perfomative reductions of conflict, techno-bio- philic studies of the hybrid boy and docu-fictive formulations of archival material.

Recalling the words of G.Battailles “...Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels-that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him...”, daring for a voluntary fatal collision with the self has never been so tempting. In a mode of ascesis, the exhibition rises one question:

Who’s next to Cra(u)sh?

Artists:

Phaidon Gialis, Konstantinos Giotis, Christos Delidimos, Evi Kalogiropoulou, Byron Kalomamas, Orestis Karalis, Konstantinos Lianos, Eva Papamargariti, Marios Stamatis, Valinia Svoronou, Marina Velisioti, Iria Vrettou.

Curator: 

Vassiliki-Maria Plavou.

Grace:

Filadelfias 2& Liosion, Athina 104 40 T 695 557 4808

Exhibition Opening: 

14 February 2020, 20:00 Exhibition Duration: 14 February - 08 March