Τhe cycle of life and nature, myth, and imaginary stories, feed the Yiparakis’s personal code of communication, which is complex in construction and concept. Combining post-industrial materials (such as construction wire, iron, rubber, boilers, fiberglass) with elements from nature (such as water, soil, fire, essential oils, sound), he creates installations and constructions which stimulate most of the visitor’s senses (vision, touch, hearing, smell). The installations, constructed in proportion to the surrounding space, hover between the real and the unreal, triggering associations of images from the individual and collective unconscious. The artist converts organic forms into sculptural pieces and, conversely, gives to recognisable objects of everyday use sculptural attributes from the natural world-for instance, a wire dress transforms itself into a tree.

"I want to reveal with the poorest means, to reveal with nothing", wrote the painter Tassos Christakis, who in 1990 will deal with the design transformation of the white of his paper into a light that shines dazzlingly, emerging through a charcoal-made dark environment. At the same time, he undertakes the sculptural rendering of the same idea, in a series of wall wood-plates with burnt surfaces, where the realistic presence of the blackened wood is transformed thanks to a technical processing through which emerges the conceptual dimension of the work.

Here the charcoal, from a design means is transformed into a textured material on which the light creates a multiplicity of reflections. This grated charcoal, an element of ultimate incineration, is used to frame and highlight a fire that continues to burn inside. Austerity of the means of expression and laconic formulation from which a semantic ambiguity arises, as the flame that burns the deepest layers of the wood can be seen as an element of destruction of the life-giving nature, but also as a symbol of life still within earth in a state of potentiality, capable of regenerating an entire burned forest. It is life that sustains form, and this power of rebirth represents the bright hope for a world which today is threatened by ecological - and not only - catastrophe.

K.T.

The photographer traveled to southern Iran in areas where there are large plantations of sugar canes and recorded the process of the hard manual labor of the workers who collect the canes. The earthy color palette, the strength and fatigue of the male bodies and the fast movement of sharp scythes create images of a strange dance performance that is revealed to us through the discreet intervention of the photographer, who realizes what a fine thing it is and how profoundly humanist in spirit to record a tough and dangerous routine which no one had ever thought to observe.

The large-scale work entitled The stone, one of Sotiris Soronga's favorite subjects, is at the same time an impressive instilling of some of the basic qualities of his art: design skillfulness, ascetic austerity in the use of his painting tools and focus on the depiction of light, those are the means by which the artist is masterfully molding every small piece of the mineral world. Sensitive to all the spirituality that the duality between decay and incorruption can hide, the artist is actually dealing with a deeper ontological relationship, that of the essential being of things with the ephemeral nature of becoming. And the simple rendering of the volume-shape ends up to an intense contemplation, a suggestive reference to basic existential problems that plague modern man.

Like this hovering stone, a lunar landscape without a trace of life, in limbo on an undefined white background, in a disturbing silence that sounds like a looming threat of an impending doom or a harbinger of universal desolation if man continues to disrespect and recklessly pollute his mother earth.

 K.T.

Allan Sekula expanded the artistic use of photography, combining practices drawn from conceptual art with those of documentary photography, in photographic installations which bring together photographic prints, slide projections, recorded conversations, written testimonies and other text. Through the political approach in practice, he explores the ways in which the capitalist economy, the industry, and the shipping business impact on the lives of ordinary people, workers, and communities. Middle Passage is the third out of a total of nine chapters of the larger photographic work Fish Story. The work has a dual form: on the one hand, it can be seen as nine-fold photographic installation consisting of photographic prints, slide projections, and text; on the other hand, it can be read as a seven-chapter book demonstrating the exact same structure with the addition of a supplementary essay, written by the artist himself. This essay discusses the subject of the installation, namely the role of ports and the shipping business in capital accumulation and the exploitation of seamen and dock workers. Middle Passage stands as an autonomous work within Fish Story, for which Allan Sekula watches and records the everyday life of seamen working on board a cargo ship carrying containers across the Atlantic Ocean. Through his photographic lens, he uses the opportunity to underscore the material, labor and environmental implications hidden beneath what in contemporary global economy is perceived as a vague flow of capital.

S.S.

Tranos’ sculptural installation interrogates the concept of a nuclear winter, that is, the climatic conditions expected to prevail on the planet in the event of widespread nuclear war. The bright pink mutant forms, made of different types of clay, fired and glazed at 1,050° C, allude to the colour of the hospital ward where victims of radiation poisoning were treated after the nuclear disaster at the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima. Despite the fairytale image it presents at first glance, the work comments on our complacency at a time when the climatic change that will result from the use of nuclear materials is more a clear and present danger than a means of intimidation.

T.P.

The video installation A Piece of Land by Giorgos Gerontides is moving inside the realm of Land Art, Performance art and Video art. In the three videos the artist takes over the role of the farmer and “plows” a piece of land in a field inside the ex-military camp of Kodra, using a dustbin, then waters it and after a few days he “makes” (or offers us) a strip of green land in autumn. The general intervention of people upon nature and earth, the artistic gesture and the concept of luck all intertwine in this work with the purpose of connecting art with labor work, but at the same time the artist presents himself ironically with the cloak, as a kind of superhero.

A.L.