Very happy to be part of 'Apotropaia', a group show curated by
@andreas_mallouris
and
@nealrock76 at
@far_cynefin in Athens ✨️
Opening on the 28th of June
In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam explores failure as an epistemic, counterhegemonic force whose capacity and form give visibility and meaning to histories, bodies, and ways of living that have long been rendered invisible. Ostensibly negative qualities such as emptiness, limitation, ineffectiveness, sterility and unproductiveness, when twinned with flourishing, joy and boundlessness, give definition to creative practices with roots in queer and decolonial countercultural histories.In Athens today, herms no longer mark an urban landscape whose architectural makeup and communities bear the ravages of longstanding socio-economic deprivation. The apotropaic qualities of herms - ancient Athenian city markers - today can be found in the many ways that creative communities reform individual and collective imaginaries. Artist-run gallery spaces are abundant in a city that provides little monetary incentive for artists to equate success with financial remuneration. One form of turning away or refusal – the failure to operate as other cities have articulated capital (London, New York) - provides an opportunity for different forms of flourishing. Whilst the artists in this exhibition are neither a cohesive whole, nor grouped together thematically (another ‘failure’), many have forged the permission to say yes to material and intellectual ways of being that originated in othering, invisibility, the hyper-visual or exoticised. What we encounter are various reformations of the human, not as a coherent form or subject, but rather as mutable, ruptured, potential, imagined or contaminated – the culmination of many moments of joy, failures and refusals along the way.
Participating artists: Susan Aparicio, David Askew, Foxy Azucar, Eleni BagakiMarianna Constanti, Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou, Andreas Mallouris, Neal Rock, Nana Sachini
Image courtesy of Nana Sachini
