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ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
“ THE END ”
Nikos Alexiou’s installation in the Greek Pavilion is a four-piece modular work that consists of an interchangeable projection onto a large screen, paper cut-outs, prints and a table with elaborated paper rests; all as separate elements that will carry the traces of this work's makings and marked with the memory of previous works. It is inspired by the cosmology of the floor mosaic of Iviron monastery at Mt Athos. Through the precision and intricacy of this work, Alexiou attempts to examine the aura of emotions that surround the mysteries of the mosaic. Alexiou made frequent visits to Mount Athos and has been hosted at Iviron Monastery at various times from 1995 to date, where he got to know the spirituality, the quickening of the soul and the strange interpersonal experiences of coexisting in monastic communal life. During this time, after much “copying” and redesigning of the mosaic he attempted to understand the mysteries it contains as he sought its semantic structure as well as its vortex. One could describe this ‘mobile immobility’ of this floor as a composite ideogram, a symbolically packed system, the kind of condensing of the Whole that we call “data storage” today. Nikos Alexiou's digital and material appropriation of the monastery mosaic sketches a visual path that suggests a broader change in the way that many have tried to describe and employ these practices in recent years.<
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Artext © 2007 |