CATALOGUE TEXT BY Dr. SOZITA GOUDOUNA-HEALING THE GRID
The grid is the silent dictator of modernity. It structures our cities, our screens, and even our medicine cabinets. From the relentless right angles of Manhattan’s skyline to the clinical precision of pharmaceutical packaging, the grid imposes an illusion of order upon the chaos of life. Yet, beneath its rational veneer lies a paradox—it both sustains and suffocates, heals, and controls.
The Grid as a Modernist Paradox
In her solo exhibition, Healing the Grid, Peggy Kliafa’s work confronts this duality, drawing upon the ancient ziggurat as a counter-symbol to the flat, oppressive logic of the modern grid.
The artist interrogates the intersections of modernist urban structures, biomedical aesthetics, and visual art, probing how the rigid geometries of urban planning resonate with the invisible architectures of human biology. Drawing from the legacy of the grid—a symbol of rational order in modernist architecture and art—Kliafa reconfigures its cold precision into a living, pulsating network that mirrors cellular formations, vascular systems, and the sterile yet intimate spaces of medical imaging.
This exhibition does not merely present an aesthetic contrast between two forms (the rigid grid and the ascending ziggurat) but stages a philosophical and historical confrontation. The ziggurat, a sacred structure from Mesopotamia represents a different way of understanding space, health, and society—one that was holistic, stratified, and spiritually engaged. Meanwhile, the modernist grid, with its cold efficiency, reflects our contemporary condition: a world where systemic health crises—pollution, urban alienation, mental health epidemics—are met not with structural change but with pills, quick fixes that mask rather than mend.
Kliafa’s work, deeply engaged with the intersections of art and medicine, interrogates this condition. Her art pieces and installations dissolve the rigid grid into aesthetic, and pulsating forms, suggesting that true healing requires not more control, but a reconfiguration—an ascent, like the ziggurat’s tiers, toward a more integrated, spiritual, and aesthetic way of being.
While modernist abstraction often sought purity and flatness (Mondrian’s rigid compositions), Kliafa’s art pieces are dense, layered, alive. Her grids are not static but dynamic, resembling biological membranes, neural networks, or even aerial views of urban sprawl. This fluidity suggests that healing cannot be imposed from above (like a gridded prescription) but must emerge from within, through a renegotiation of boundaries.
Healing the Grid is not a nostalgic return to antiquity but a provocation: what if we stopped trying to “fix” the grid and instead transcended it? The ziggurat offers an alternative logic—one of spirituality, accumulation, integration, and ascent.
The ziggurat was more than an architectural form—it was a cosmological diagram. In ancient Mesopotamia, these stepped temples were seen as bridges between earth and heaven, places where the human and the divine could commune. Unlike the grid, which enforces a uniform, horizontal logic, the ziggurat ascends, layer by layer, toward transcendence. The ziggurat was not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader, ancient understanding of space as sacred, stratified, and alive.
By contrast, the modernist grid—epitomized by the Cartesian coordinate system and Le Corbusier’s urban plans—flattens existence into measurable, controllable units. It is no coincidence that the same gridded logic underpins both our cities and our medicine: both reduce complex, living systems into standardized, interchangeable parts.
Kliafa’s Oeuvre: Dissolving the Grid, Reclaiming the Body
Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, resurrected the ancient Greek concept of the pharmakon —a word that means both “remedy” and “poison.” This duality is at the heart of modern medicine, where pills function as both salvation and suppression.
Our era is defined by a pharmaceutical dependency that mirrors the grid’s logic: instead of addressing the root causes of illness—environmental degradation, alienating labor conditions, social fragmentation—we are given chemical correctives. Antidepressants for despair induced by late capitalism, statins for hearts burdened by processed diets, anxiolytics for minds strained by hyper-connectivity. The grid, in this sense, is not just an architectural principle but a metabolic one—a system that manages symptoms while ignoring the disease.
Kliafa’s work, as explored in the Healing the Grid exhibition, visualizes this tension. Her pieces are palimpsests of geometric rigidity and organic disintegration, where the strict lines of the grid dissolve into cellular, almost viral, patterns. The pills that appear in her compositions are not lifeless objects but ambiguous entities—simultaneously curative and corrosive.
Kliafa’s current work suggests that the crises of our time—pharmaceutical dependency, mental health epidemics, environmental collapse, —cannot be solved within the grid’s rigid framework. We might require a new paradigm, one that, like the ziggurat, acknowledges complexity, embraces stratification, and ascends toward something greater and communal. In the end, this exhibition is not just about art or architecture—it is about the endurance and survival of human and non-human species. Has the grid failed us? Is it time to climb?
Healing the Grid does not propose a return to some unbroken ideal but rather a reconfiguration—an acknowledgment that the fractures in our systems are where new possibilities emerge. Kliafa’s art, with its rhythmic disruptions of the grid, suggests that healing is not about erasing scars but integrating them into a new order, much like the ziggurat’s layered ascent. In a society increasingly dependent on the gridded logic of pills, screens, and urban planning, her work offers a vital counterpoint: a vision of healing that embraces complexity, ambiguity, and transcendence.
The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between the imposed order of the city grid and the organic yet algorithmic logic of the body. Kliafa’s art pieces and installations evoke the clinical gaze of microscopy and radiology, transposing the aesthetics of biomedicine and microscopic pathologies onto the rigid frameworks of urban blueprints. Here, the modernist grid—once a symbol of industrial progress—becomes a scaffold for biological vulnerability, a mesh where the body and the metropolis intersect.
Kliafa layers the hard edges of architectural schematics with fluid, almost viral, organic forms, suggesting that the body itself is a contested urban site. Her use of sterile palettes— clinical objects, pills—invokes the aesthetics of medical laboratories, while her disruptions of geometric perfection with biomorphic intrusions question the stability of both urban and corporeal structures.
The exhibition also engages with medical visualization, framing the grid not just as a formal device but as a metaphor for the systems that seek to measure, categorize, and control life. By juxtaposing the sterile logic of urban planning with the chaotic beauty of biological systems, Kliafa exposes the tensions between rationality and entropy, between the engineered and the evolved.
Off The Grid
In parallel, the artist exposes the tensions behind the notion of the “off the grid” that resonates as a metaphor for resistance and emancipation from the pervasive structures she explores. “Off the Grid” signifies a shift away from the calculated, monitored, and compartmentalized spaces of modernity towards alternative modes of being that prioritize privacy, spontaneity, and organic connection. For Kliafa, “off the grid” embodies a potential rupture—an intentional retreat from the omnipresent control of systemic architectures—opening space for personal and collective healing beyond the constraints of linear, homogenizing frameworks. It invites us to consider how communities and individuals might cultivate new forms of connection that transcend the mapped, surveilled territories of urban and biological grids, embracing instead the unpredictable, chaotic flux of life that defies categorization and standardization.
Moreover, “off the grid” challenges the notion of autonomy within the dominant systems of control, urging a reimagining of agency grounded in relationality and layered complexity. By stepping off the grid, one can reclaim quiet spaces of resilience—hidden, unmonitored zones where healing can occur without the insidious overlay of systemic oversight. This detachment does not mean disconnection but a conscious departure from the imposed order, allowing space for spontaneous processes of regeneration, community-building, and spiritual ascent. It is an act of resistance that aligns with the ziggurat’s layered ascent—an acknowledgment that true healing often involves moving beyond the limits of all-encompassing systems to find refuge in the uncharted, layered territories of the self and collective consciousness.
Thus, Healing the Grid is not merely an aesthetic inquiry but a critical reflection on how modernity’s architectural and artistic ideals are inscribed onto the flesh—both the body politic and the physical body. In Kliafa’s vision, the grid is no longer just a structure; it is a living, breathing entity, a map of both the city and the self.
Dr. Sozita Goudouna