photo by Dimitris Foutris
"View of Us"
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
4/05 - 22/07/2023
curated by Dimitris Foutris
Continuing a long-term processing of our relationship with the natural world and the landscape genre, Foteini Palpana invites us to wander within a fractured environment of masses and surfaces that unfold in space and carry the characteristics of geological formations and human bodies alike.
The present exhibition is a development of her work shown at the first Ios Art Residency, in the island of Ios, in August of 2022. In this work, entitled Islands grow – Islands fluctuate, Palpana deals with the perpetual shaping and constant transformation of the landscape, where the possibility of access, viewing the beauty of the environment and contact with this common good, is intercepted and delimited by the human factor.
Through her latest work, she turns to claiming the ground/environment as the natural space of our [common] senses. Her work expands on the floor as well as vertically in a sculptural installation which combines coarse construction materials, drawings sewn up in fabric and video. Rocky configurations shaped out of intense painterly gestures together with slender hollow forms and abstract shapes, introduce a narrative about issues as fundamental and familiar as our bodies or our geological surroundings.
The moving image element of the video View of Me, has a special role in this exhibition. Created back in 2017, this work is yet another initiating point for the whole installation, referring to the mechanics and the bodily rhythms that are involved in the making of the sculptural object.
Going back to the body and the ground as form and matter, while maintaining the reminiscence of landscape contemplation, Palpana provides us access to a place of primordial connections, where geological, human and manufactured bodies surround, compress, strain, crush, in other words coexist in a symbiotic relationship of exchanging attributes and properties.
"View of Me", 2017, video, colour, no sound, 8.32 min., video still
