Opening: 8 February 2024
Exhibition Duration: 8-25 February 2024
Location: Athens Municipality Arts Center, Parko Eleftherias, Athens, Greece
Curator: Dr Eva Kekou
Participating Artists: Aggelos Antonopoulos, Panos Charalambous, Thalia Chioti, George Drivas, Chloe Akrithaki, Peggy Kliafa, Christina Mitrentse, Panos Papadopoulos, Diamantis Sotiropoulos, Tolis Tatolas, Augustus Veinoglou
Peggy Kliafa participates with the artwork:
Armory – Color, Homage to Josef Albers
2023, plastic colored pills blisters and aluminum pills blisters on aluminum surface, silicone, 110 x 110 x 5 cm
Press Release-Dr Eva Kekou’s text:
The exhibition deals with the condition of infinite possibilities in an initially mathematical framework, within which there are infinite new possibilities. It is a fact that the changes issued from the developments of recent years (the COVID-19 pandemic, military conflicts, natural disasters and climate change) have changed and sometimes intensified political, economic and social relations, giving them a new dimension. The theme of the exhibition is any new condition, event, or incident that invades or may potentially invade our lives. An ongoing situation/circumstance is unknown whether it will have an overall positive or negative sign/connotation. Given the nature of the transition that our time and society is going through and the inability to define itself, the exhibition aims to question but also to investigate the nature of these changes and how they are perceived.
Peggy Kliafa’s text on her artwork in relation to the exhibition’s theme:
It is a work that combines the concepts of the medicine and its packaging with the concepts of the infinite combinations of colors and their interaction in human perception through the research and testing of the legendary Josef Albers.
Albers experimented with the square shape as a guide but also with other parallelograms on the infinite combinations of colors and the way they are perceived by humans. He created numerous works to this effect. Based on one of them, but without following it completely, I applied an experimentation of my own.
For years, the pharmaceutical industry has been using colors either in the pills themselves or in their packaging (both in their blisters and boxes) for practical and marketing reasons. Science has been particularly concerned with the effect of medicines’ colors and the market is taking advantage of this knowledge.
A health problem is an event that suddenly invades our life and its outcome is always uncertain. Fragile human health and its preservation with the help of medicines fall under the subject of infinite possibilities and infinite potential developments. Each organism reacts differently to diseases or injuries, as well as to the use of each medicine which ranges from complete recovery to death. The dual dimension of medicines – Remedy and Poison- and the uncertainty of each organism’s reaction create a multitude of possibilities.
If we leave the individual health problem and focus on society at a local and international level, we witness the reversals that resulted from the recent example of the pandemic. The microcosm – the Covid 19 virus – invaded the big real world and disrupted it to an extreme degree. The enormous health problem that it created had an impressively large impact on all aspects of life, society and the economy worldwide. Only the discovery of vaccines and some other medicines allowed a return to a new normality.