GTBT Start Introduction Itinary Outro
The video-installation by Greek artist Kostas Tzimoulis consisted of two visual sequences at opposite ends of the room, and a few small white sculptures on the floor close to the projections that, lighted by small lamps inside, showed hands pointing towards the sky. This work was one of silent drama. In one sequence a dark figure wearing a white mask and sitting on a rock in the ice, used his hands to mould a ball of ice and make it melt. The artist saw this meditative gesture as an alternative way to measure time. The other sequence had a suspended figure who appeared in an uncanny homely setting in an open cupboard. At the end the figure is taken down, without knowing how this deliverance comes about; is this through something that in the Greek tragedies is called the 'deux ex machina'? is it through the hands shown in the installation? In the artist's plans that prefigured the work, there was a desire to focus on the subject of exile. And indeed, though the work does not deal obviously with the idea 'exile', the two figures do express feelings of solitude and entrapment, approaching exile... When asked if this had to do with his personal story, the artist said that indeed in his surroundings there is close relative who has been imprisoned under Greek dictatorship.
Special about this work was its abstraction which opened it up to many readings. Was the artist in fact talking about his own experience but in quite a veiled way?
