Haris Epaminonda
HARIS EPAMINONDA – VOL. I, II & III
MALMÖ KONSTHALL 2/4 – 10/5 2009
Press Preview 1 April 11 a.m.
Opening 1 April 7-9 p.m
Haris Epaminonda (Born 1980, Cyprus. Lives and works in Berlin) works mainly with collage, video and photography. The point of departure for her paper collages is found material from books and magazines from the 1950s and 60s. Her videos are composed out of disparate found filmfootage as well as the artist’s own filmed sequences.
Epaminonda’s moving images are in many instances overlapping or juxtaposed with one another so that threads of potential meaning (political utopias, gender, cultures of collecting) weave in and out of each other and thus evoke a dreamlike distant world. In the 1950s and 1960s, from which the found footage often derives, the idea of progress and fascination for the future seemed filled with both hope and fear, and Epaminonda’s work moves between a real and a potential or illusory past/future. This creates a poetic, surreal and uncanny maze as if the found and reworked material is a loophole in time.
The exhibition, VOL. I, II & III, at Malmö Konsthall will be the first large solo exhibition by Haris Epaminonda in northern Europe. The exhibition is divided, as the title indicates, into three parts. The three parts consist of two separated spaces in Malmö Konsthall and a book produced for the exhibition.
VOL. I is a book containing approximately 120 Polaroid images, which is 1/3 of the 365 Polaroids Epaminonda has taken since 2008. She has re-photographed images from books and magazines, details of images, places, situations and collections, with an instant Polaroid camera. The many images make the book appear as a photo album done by a well-travelled traveller, artist, anthropologist or simply a tourist with the ambition of becoming just that – a traveller, artist or anthropologist. Today Polaroid films are not produced anymore and the factories were shut down in February 2008, so the nostalgic instant film era ended after 62 years.
VOL. II & III consist of two installations, attempting to transform the two Malmö Konsthall spaces into a kind of ‘theatre of the world’. The installations will appear as ‘rooms of wonder’ consisting of an assembly of images, plinths, objects – such as ostrich eggs – and sculptures that aspire to envision a shadow realm, offering an enigmatic puzzle that insists to remain unnamed and unresolved. Intimate space is confronted with the surreal.
Both VOL. II & III will play with the institutional notion of the museum and of display. The spaces will attempt to juxtapose the highly modern and the ancient as compressed time, compressed memory, compressed dream-like fiction within sculptures and images.
Haris Epaminonda studied at the Royal College of Art and Kingston University, London. She represented Cyprus at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007) and took part at the 5th Berlin Biennial, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2008) as well as the 9th Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2009).
In collaboration with Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Services
Malmö Konsthall
www.konsthall.malmo.se