Anaxagora 3-5
Athens Greece
SOMETHING STUPID
MANOLIS MPAMPOUSIS EXHIBITION
Romantso presents the exhibition of Manolis Mpampousis “something stupid”, on Monday, March 27. The curator of the exhibition is Apostolis Artinos. The last 40 years Manolis Mpampousis works mainly with the Photographic Images. He has traveled a path and he holds a language which explores issues around memory, institutions, confinement, environment, accumulation and loss. His artwork represent a specific material and tool of a social, political and cultural validation. On his new work, using new tools, objects, ephemeral constructions and in fragile balance, texts, photos and video projections, he urges us to see in a different way-full of humor-the real world, the assembly of the different monuments and of the memory, the name and the names, the titles and the wolves, the parody and the impermanent, the despair, the reality, the utopia as deadlocks and hope.
He proposes a cohesive installation, which is uttered in project modules, where the main subject is the non-oblivion, the truth of the institutions. He indicates as monuments, what is not said. He proposes the accession in the modern life and in the historical consciousness of the one that we all know, but it is not mentioned. He brings together the city’s attractions in a grand scheme of six meters, the “Mnimeiopoli” and in an extensive colorful model, with assembled objects, illuminated by a video projection of the “guide to the city sights.” The king is naked.
At the same time he is forming a number of monuments of different scale around the showroom- the monument island of exile, the monument of selfies, the monument of the 100 years of the October Revolution in 1917 with video projection and finally, a large installation with hundreds of photos. In an era dominated by exploitation, hypocrisy and cynical exchanges, where the crisis of an entire country is projected internationally as a landmark, as a promotion tool of all sorts of grave robbers, Mpampousis lists his photos of the carnival in Rio, the photo of the Greek parliament with empty seats, in a dialogue with other mementos of the Democracy.
The curator of the exhibition, Apostolis Artinos says:
“The exhibition of Manolis Mpampousis critically contemplate the environment of the crisis and it is composed around two investigational fields. On one side, the autistic fixation of power and of governmental, academic and artistic institutions, as shown in a series of drawings from museums and academic sites in his imaginary city and on the other hand an accumulation of objects – points, where despite their pluralism, they witness the impasse plurality and multiplicity of their secular sphere. An artistic gesture which diverts the base of things in a version of a materiality that Giorgio Agamben will name “parody object.” A para-poetic function which has the subject in the noblest, but at the same time and in the most trivial form. A divisive function, which is also installed in the linguistic core of the photographic, artistic, poetic project of Mpampousis, revealing the language as a weakness, as a training ground of non-practitioner, of the one that is constantly diverted and remains elusive in all of its disclosed moments. Whatever escapes from the object, it is what rescues it. On this constitutive folding of the form, in its dramatizing side, Mpampousis creates and shows his disappointment about the ‘’ scheme of things”.
Duration: Monday, March 27, 2017 – Thursday, April 13, 2017
Curator : Apostolis Artinos
Media Sponsor: KROMA Magazine
