Exhibition
Maria Kriara: The Pawnshop
31 Mar 2017 – 27 May 2017
During Documenta Athens CAN gallery will present a solo show of greek female artist Maria Kriara (b.1982).
About
Kriara's work aims to unfold as a kind of phenomenological tour through images and selected phrases of ephemera of the past. They all manifest whether or how the narrative capacity of fragments (both as images and text) can provide insight into a broader current historical context.
The show finds its starting point in the introduction of the pawnshop as an increasingly emerging heterotopia in present-time Greece.
The exhibition invites both the artist and the viewers to reflect upon everyday language and recent greek history in order to revise memory, grand narratives, myths and collective nostalgia.
The title of the show suggests an anti-heroic epos in which the artist is not per se the one who “creates” rather the one who undertakes the task of a metaphorical pawnbroker; the one who helps alter, “erase” or strip things off their dominant, historical or sentimental connotations.
Kriara as an artist selects her subjects with an interdisciplinary curiosity for images and for any kind of visual representation or documentation (texts and illustrations) deriving from the the history of art and multiple other printed or online sources e.g. encyclopedias, science essays, manuals, anatomy atlases, graphic novels, historical records and archives like the NASA photographic archive or the archive of LIFE magazine, etc.
At the same time her drawings create an "ark" of representations, a sort of Warburgian Atlas, similar to the Encyclopedie or Voyager's Golden Record.
