Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation

The Exhibition

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Athanasia Kyriakakos

Dreams-World: Work in progress

Video installation with selected videos, 2001-2005.

Three years ago the artist walked into an upscale Greek restaurant in the heart of Chicago, looking for a summer job. “No we don’t need a waitress” they responded. “However give us your name and number and we will call if we need you.” So she did. The short round man read her name out loud. Athanasia Kyriakakos. “Where are you from?” “My father’s from Mani, my mother from Kalavrita.” “What was The Fatman to you?” “He was my Grandfather. I never met him. He died when my father was nineteen.” Athanasia was hired on the spot. This man had been her father’s brother’s best friend and over the course of the next two months she slowly learned about The Fatman in a country far away from his own. Born in Baltimore in 1968 to two Greek immigrants, Sia lived in the United States until the age of six. At that point her parents decided that she was to be raised Greek. So they moved to Greece and life changed forever. At the age of sixteen she returned to the States. Carrying with her the knowledge that she was part of a past that tied her to the people and the land in a way that went beyond words, that she could feel deep under her skin. After receiving a sculpture degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art she became a certified teacher in Connecticut where she worked full time as an artist and educator. In 1998 she was awarded a full scholarship to the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She developed a body of work there that was about the interactive process behind the final product. Her sculptures became active performative spaces where community and dialogue could begin. Sixteen years later after she left Greece a Fulbright gave her the opportunity to return to investigate and to recontextualize the daily rituals that had shaped her as a child. Athanasia Kyriakakos presently lives and works in Athens, Greece, often traveling on the same roads The Fatman did. He was a truck-driver.

The Dream-Worlds project started out in Plovdiv in 2001, at the third edition of Communication Front, with an installation and the first interviews with people about their dreams. Within two years it had matured to a 120 square meters multimedia installation presented at the 50th Venice Biennale in collaboration with Dimitris Rotsios under the name of intron. Another two years later Dream Worlds, a work in progress, returns back to Plovdiv as a video installation presenting a selection of interviews made over the course of four years.