Petros Moris » Future Bestiary «

About

The exhibition brings together an assembly of sculptural entities in suspended material rendering. Reconstructed in marble sourced from quarries around Greece, their figures originate from photogrammetric scans that the artist performed on funerary artifacts of the Kerameikos archaeological site, depicting the daemonic beings and apotropaic animals that inhabited the ancient cemetery as the underworldly protectors of life and death. These tectonic bodies are joined by linguistic signs and digital imagery that encode wishful speculations and emerging anxieties about natural ecosystems, algorithmic sovereignty and sociopolitical change. Likewise, they coexist with alchemically processed forms: 3D-printed specters that trace the conception of the future back to their ritualistic formulations and eventual colonization by scientific institutions and technologies of quantitative simulation and predictive analysis.
The symbolic and physical subterranean space recalled in Moris’ work is a realm of bidirectional time and ceaseless emergence. Like the mythological underworld, it is not only perceived as the territory of fateful entropy and sedimentary demise, but equally the origin of earthly wealth—the extractive domain of the material resources that forged the notion of anthropogenic progress and perpetually shape nonhuman coexistences.
Both consciousness of the past and foresight of what is to come can be extracted from the underground. This is the haunted gift of the chthonic entities that form a bestiary of power and vulnerability, burdened with terrestrial trauma and graced with the potential of fierce transformation.

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Petros Moris is an artist based in Athens. He has studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Goldsmiths University of London. He has presented his work in solo shows at Fast Forward Festival - Onassis Stegi, ROOM E-10 27, the Embassy of Cyprus in Athens, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, DUVE Berlin and Project Native Informant. Recent group shows include the Singapore Biennale 2019, Singapore National Gallery 2019; the 7th Thessaloniki Biennale - Stasis, Alaca Imaret, Thessaloniki 2019; Digital Gothic, Centre d'art contemporain - la synagogue de Delme, Delme 2019; The Same River Twice, Benaki Museum, Athens 2019; Tomorrows, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes 2019; 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York 2018 and Geometries, Onassis Cultural Foundation at the Agricultural University, Athens, 2018. He has been part of the art collective KERNEL and the curatorial projects Office SIM and Radical Reading and has been nominated for the DESTE Prize 2015 and awarded the Spyropoulos Prize 2012, the ARTWORKS 2018 Fellowship and the Onassis Foundation Scholarship.