New Monuments

Co-curated with Olympia Tzortzi at Callirrhoë. With works by Iván Argote, Anastasia Douka, Iman Issa, Regina José Galindo, Latent Community, Rallou Panagiotou, Prinz Gholam, Hans Schabus, Socratis Socratous, Kostis Velonis and Lois Weinberger.

New Monuments, as an ongoing research, is taking shape through a dynamic dialogue that originated from a common acknowledgment: There is a significant gap in representation in the public sphere. It is inconceivable to experience this lack of representation in the public space where you act and contribute daily. Whether we are the benefactor or the subject of othering, the modern narrative of history does not include a vital part of the stories that need to be remembered, reissued and acknowledged. Since our knowledge is always situated, in our case we can observe the tension between old and new forms of inscription of collective memory, between figurative sculptures – the form per excellence for the inscription of memory in the western world – and performative works, where the bodies are constantly escaping monumentalization. Can the same tools be utilized to “build” new narrations or should we totally reject the given methods in order to move forward? Τo whom do these tools belong to, anyway? Can we imagine a symbiosis between old and new monuments?

Performance Spit by Despina Charitonidi and Panos Profitis
on Saturday, 4 December 2021, 12–9 pm 

In the context of the exhibition New Monuments, the artistic duo of Despina Charitonidi and Panos Profitis present Spit, a long durational performance. It is a monument in progress, which begins with a simple and repeated gesture: chewing and spitting the passatempo, a common gesture to help time pass. In Italian, the word « passatempo » comes from the words « passare » and « tempo » denoting « something to pass my time ». Therefore, Spit negotiates the automated gesture that records time and simultaneously is recorded in time as a tangible practice of inscribing memory, which in this context disrupts the stagnancy of monuments. Laying emphasis on the present, the here and now, the performance deals with the ‘demand for eternity’, the human need to preserve memory through the centuries but also the assumption or suggestion that monuments do not have to be static constructions, they move as we move, they feel as we feel, they breathe as we breathe.