Timeless Tales
2009 | Ekfrasi Gallery | Athens, Greece
T o u c h i n g u p o n t h e u n t o u c h a b l e : the writing of "Timeless Tales"
Effie Halivopoulou's new installation "Timeless Tales" (2009) signals both a shift and a return within the artist's practice. On the one hand, this work differs from her previous installations on account of its flatness: its strategic withdrawal from three-dimensional space back onto the level surface of the wall. While E.H.'s older installations such as "Silent Synapses" (1999) and "Interactors II" (1999) retain certain characteristics associated with two-dimensional work (painting and drawing), they clearly depart from the realm of imagery in order to physically embody the cellular structures and corporeal processes that they seek to represent. For instance, "Interactors II" (1999) metaphorically transforms the electric cables of its light sources into neural axons.
These older works recreate their microscopic subject matter on a much larger scale, one of anthropomorphic proportions, so that the viewer might not only perceive these processes and structures usually invisible to the naked eye, but also encounter them in a phenomenological manner as an-other body. By contrast to these older works, "Timeless Tales" is significantly disembodied. It consists of a series of vinyl pieces and mounted drawings installed along the gallery walls. This work abandons the older installations' impetus towards literal incarnation - the actual reproduction of microscopic processes on a human scale - in favor of two-dimensional representation, a conceptual shift that allows for E.H. to revisit a much older corpus of work.
Indeed, "Timeless Tales" marks E.H.'s return to her earlier research into the ancient Greek language: the lyrical poems, the Linear A and Linear B alphabets. Within her new installation, these fragmented texts appear alongside strings of amino acids and chromosome imprints. As such, "Timeless Tales" synthesizes E.H.'s two main areas of research: the ancient Greek language and new breakthroughs in genetic engineering, which she has explored throughout her practice for the past eighteen years. But this recent synthesis necessarily begs the question: how can such radically different bodies of research, one linguistic and the other scientific, intersect within the artist's material practice?
The answer to this fundamental question lies in the installation's notable divergences from other works that engage with similar material. By contrast to numerous artists who currently deal with genetic research as part of their practice, E.H. consciously avoids the new scientific findings' spectacular potential and abject charge. This sets her works apart from more controversial pieces such as Eduardo Kac's "GFP Bunny" (2000), a living rabbit genetically modified to become fluorescent green. By contrast to the bio-artists, E.H. chooses to focus instead on the fixed patterns and codes that regulate corporeal influxes. These codes, which she describes as the body's alphabets, determine our genetic makeup. Artists such as Kac tend to use these corporeal alphabets for referential purposes, rearranging them transgenically in order to signify a new mode of being. They alter the codes' inscriptions in order to transform a living body as one might reorganize letters into a new word to signify a different message.
E.H. works with these corporeal alphabets in a significantly different way, using these codes poetically rather than in a referential manner. This enables her to draw a parallel with the ancient lyrical poems, Linear A and Linear B fragments, which stand as some of the oldest recorded forms of writing in the world. It is significant to note that scholars working on the lyrical poems refer to these ancient writings as "αθεράπευτα χωρία" meaning "texts that cannot be cured". These incomplete fragments remain indecipherable, resisting referential transcription.
As such, E.H. stencils the lyrical poems directly onto her works amidst graphic schemas of transgenic drosophilae cells, collaged photos of brain scans, floating arms and eyes surfacing through fluid washes. Within "Timeless Tales", these ancient Greek text fragments appear integrally alongside corporeal codes, lending the latter a unique poetic value amidst the representations of bodily influx. Through this juxtaposition, the amino acid chains become visual inscriptions printed across Ε.Η.'s large paper works, which in turn appear as the lost pages of a mysterious ageless book. These bodily codes come to be read as onomatopoeias, dissonant and emotional interjections that seem to translate the figurative portrait's silent scream into sound: "A TA TTGCT!" as if a pure primal expression devoid of any possible referent other than itself.
But the texts that appear at face value across the body of the installation constitute only one of three distinct registers of writings that sustain Ε.Η.'s "Timeless Tales". Beyond these immediately accessible visual inscriptions - the lyrical poems, the amino acid chains, the chromosome traces, etc. - there are two other sets of texts that construct this complex body of work. The first consists of the individual paintings' evocative titles, notably "The first time I am possible", "Timestorm" and "Palimpseston". These poetic headings are the fruit of an on-going collaboration with writer Soti Triantafyllou. As titles, they stand a-part from the work: once removed yet part and parcel of the whole. By virtue of their position outside the visible framework of the installation, these texts are permitted to acquire a slightly more referential dimension than the ones that appear literally in the work, but nevertheless retain a unique poetic quality.
The third register of text that constructs E.H.'s "Timeless Tales" consists of a singular dictionary that accompanies the installation. This compendium defines the terms that both inform and characterize E.H.'s work. It includes notions such as ‘Memeplex', ‘Gene Pool' and ‘Collective trauma', which the artist outlines as a means of mapping out her moral position in relation to her sensitive source material.
These three distinct registers of writings can be viewed as concentric circles of signification, becoming increasingly referential, though ever less poetic, the further away they move from the work's visual body and enter the space of reception, of interpretation. All three are crucial to understanding the expanded project of "Timeless Tales". Indeed, the concerns and positions articulated within the dictionary, for instance, are closely related to the artist's decision-making process within her visual works, notably her choice to include only literal and universal texts within her pieces and to collage actual photographs of brain scans directly onto the surface of the paper rather than depict them. These elements are given as such, appearing integrally within the context of E.H.'s two-dimensional representations. In a parallel way to the dictionary, these aesthetic decisions begin to formulate a code that suggests what can be transformed and what ought not to be tampered with, what can be liberally interpreted and modified versus what must remain fix.
In this way, the installation and its accompanying material can be said to use different poetic registers in order to map out the extent to which a body can and should be copied, blown-up, reproduced, transformed. In a wider sense, "Timeless Tales" addresses the limits of what can be said or encoded within the language of visual representation. It frames certain elements to signify that which might resist interpretation, what remains firmly entrenched within the realm of direct sensorial perception, and so continues, in a more poetic way, her earlier installations' project to explore the value of phenomenological encounters with the work of art.
____________________________________
Stephanie Bertrand
Thessaloniki, March 2009
Stephanie Bertrand is an independent curator from Canada, based in Thessaloniki.
Effie Halivopoulou's new installation "Timeless Tales" (2009) signals both a shift and a return within the artist's practice. On the one hand, this work differs from her previous installations on account of its flatness: its strategic withdrawal from three-dimensional space back onto the level surface of the wall. While E.H.'s older installations such as "Silent Synapses" (1999) and "Interactors II" (1999) retain certain characteristics associated with two-dimensional work (painting and drawing), they clearly depart from the realm of imagery in order to physically embody the cellular structures and corporeal processes that they seek to represent. For instance, "Interactors II" (1999) metaphorically transforms the electric cables of its light sources into neural axons.
These older works recreate their microscopic subject matter on a much larger scale, one of anthropomorphic proportions, so that the viewer might not only perceive these processes and structures usually invisible to the naked eye, but also encounter them in a phenomenological manner as an-other body. By contrast to these older works, "Timeless Tales" is significantly disembodied. It consists of a series of vinyl pieces and mounted drawings installed along the gallery walls. This work abandons the older installations' impetus towards literal incarnation - the actual reproduction of microscopic processes on a human scale - in favor of two-dimensional representation, a conceptual shift that allows for E.H. to revisit a much older corpus of work.
Indeed, "Timeless Tales" marks E.H.'s return to her earlier research into the ancient Greek language: the lyrical poems, the Linear A and Linear B alphabets. Within her new installation, these fragmented texts appear alongside strings of amino acids and chromosome imprints. As such, "Timeless Tales" synthesizes E.H.'s two main areas of research: the ancient Greek language and new breakthroughs in genetic engineering, which she has explored throughout her practice for the past eighteen years. But this recent synthesis necessarily begs the question: how can such radically different bodies of research, one linguistic and the other scientific, intersect within the artist's material practice?
The answer to this fundamental question lies in the installation's notable divergences from other works that engage with similar material. By contrast to numerous artists who currently deal with genetic research as part of their practice, E.H. consciously avoids the new scientific findings' spectacular potential and abject charge. This sets her works apart from more controversial pieces such as Eduardo Kac's "GFP Bunny" (2000), a living rabbit genetically modified to become fluorescent green. By contrast to the bio-artists, E.H. chooses to focus instead on the fixed patterns and codes that regulate corporeal influxes. These codes, which she describes as the body's alphabets, determine our genetic makeup. Artists such as Kac tend to use these corporeal alphabets for referential purposes, rearranging them transgenically in order to signify a new mode of being. They alter the codes' inscriptions in order to transform a living body as one might reorganize letters into a new word to signify a different message.
E.H. works with these corporeal alphabets in a significantly different way, using these codes poetically rather than in a referential manner. This enables her to draw a parallel with the ancient lyrical poems, Linear A and Linear B fragments, which stand as some of the oldest recorded forms of writing in the world. It is significant to note that scholars working on the lyrical poems refer to these ancient writings as "αθεράπευτα χωρία" meaning "texts that cannot be cured". These incomplete fragments remain indecipherable, resisting referential transcription.
As such, E.H. stencils the lyrical poems directly onto her works amidst graphic schemas of transgenic drosophilae cells, collaged photos of brain scans, floating arms and eyes surfacing through fluid washes. Within "Timeless Tales", these ancient Greek text fragments appear integrally alongside corporeal codes, lending the latter a unique poetic value amidst the representations of bodily influx. Through this juxtaposition, the amino acid chains become visual inscriptions printed across Ε.Η.'s large paper works, which in turn appear as the lost pages of a mysterious ageless book. These bodily codes come to be read as onomatopoeias, dissonant and emotional interjections that seem to translate the figurative portrait's silent scream into sound: "A TA TTGCT!" as if a pure primal expression devoid of any possible referent other than itself.
But the texts that appear at face value across the body of the installation constitute only one of three distinct registers of writings that sustain Ε.Η.'s "Timeless Tales". Beyond these immediately accessible visual inscriptions - the lyrical poems, the amino acid chains, the chromosome traces, etc. - there are two other sets of texts that construct this complex body of work. The first consists of the individual paintings' evocative titles, notably "The first time I am possible", "Timestorm" and "Palimpseston". These poetic headings are the fruit of an on-going collaboration with writer Soti Triantafyllou. As titles, they stand a-part from the work: once removed yet part and parcel of the whole. By virtue of their position outside the visible framework of the installation, these texts are permitted to acquire a slightly more referential dimension than the ones that appear literally in the work, but nevertheless retain a unique poetic quality.
The third register of text that constructs E.H.'s "Timeless Tales" consists of a singular dictionary that accompanies the installation. This compendium defines the terms that both inform and characterize E.H.'s work. It includes notions such as ‘Memeplex', ‘Gene Pool' and ‘Collective trauma', which the artist outlines as a means of mapping out her moral position in relation to her sensitive source material.
These three distinct registers of writings can be viewed as concentric circles of signification, becoming increasingly referential, though ever less poetic, the further away they move from the work's visual body and enter the space of reception, of interpretation. All three are crucial to understanding the expanded project of "Timeless Tales". Indeed, the concerns and positions articulated within the dictionary, for instance, are closely related to the artist's decision-making process within her visual works, notably her choice to include only literal and universal texts within her pieces and to collage actual photographs of brain scans directly onto the surface of the paper rather than depict them. These elements are given as such, appearing integrally within the context of E.H.'s two-dimensional representations. In a parallel way to the dictionary, these aesthetic decisions begin to formulate a code that suggests what can be transformed and what ought not to be tampered with, what can be liberally interpreted and modified versus what must remain fix.
In this way, the installation and its accompanying material can be said to use different poetic registers in order to map out the extent to which a body can and should be copied, blown-up, reproduced, transformed. In a wider sense, "Timeless Tales" addresses the limits of what can be said or encoded within the language of visual representation. It frames certain elements to signify that which might resist interpretation, what remains firmly entrenched within the realm of direct sensorial perception, and so continues, in a more poetic way, her earlier installations' project to explore the value of phenomenological encounters with the work of art.
____________________________________
Stephanie Bertrand
Thessaloniki, March 2009
Stephanie Bertrand is an independent curator from Canada, based in Thessaloniki.