From its beginning the National Museum of Contemporary Art set, inter alia, a double goal. This was, on the one hand, to bring the Greek audience into contact with the international contemporary art. And, on the other hand, to present significant experimental and critical forms, which would allow us to showcase the international potential of the artistic production in Greece, connecting it with the dominant today discourse, for a multifaceted, open and decentred international art by creators from diverse geographical regions of the world. We continue to serve this initial goal with a broad programme of solo and group exhibitions that promote equal collaborations between artists and a creative dialogue between the local and international artistic scene.
Within the framework of this policy, we are organizing a solo exhibition of Kostis Velonis, one of the most significant Greek artists of the younger generation. With humanities and cultural studies in London and fine arts studies in Paris, Velonis is one of the artists who, coming from peripheral countries, remain in their native place, creating within the framework of international pursuits and attracting the interest and the recognition of an audience that transcends local borders.
Velonis’ sculpture, in the broad sense, and particularly the series shown in the present exhibition, is usually described as political. But, more than a return to political art, we discern the question about how art today can be political. The artist’s visit to and appropriation of heroic periods of the modern movement, such as the Russian one of the early 20th century, where the artistic and political avant-garde meet and intersect, do not promise a safe reunion. Through the rich intertextuality of his works, and especially through the aesthetic and conceptual transformations of the historical material in the translation process, we observe a hovering between nostalgia and transcendence of the collective vision. The rift between the collective and the individual that is revealed by the works in the exhibition may be a melancholic and at the same time open answer to the initial question, in an era of scepticism and lack of certainties, in the realm both of politics and aesthetics.
Curated by Daphne Vitali
CATALOGUE
Editor: Daphne Vitali
Text: Miltos Frangopoulos, Chus Martinez, Daphne Vitali, Florian Waldvogel
ΙSBN: 978-960-8349-50-6
Number of pages: 96
Language: Greek / English
Dimensions: 22 x 16.5 cm
Publication year: 2010
Available for sale: 12 €
EXTRACT:
[…] Velonis, pivoting himself on the language of Modernism and the theoretical pursuits of the avant-garde, deals with both the significant objectives of the previous century and the impossibility of their realization. The title of his recent work, Memorial to Collective Utopia, condenses Velonis’ artistic pursuits, and also alludes to the Russian avant-garde, the Bauhaus, the May ’68 movements, and other particular collective Utopian moments in history and art, with which he deals in his work. In the artist’s own words, “Modernity in its collective Utopias is represented by international ideological failures”. The failures, the weaknesses, the fall of ideologies, and the Utopian actions of the past form the core of Velonis’ pursuits, since the artist seeks what we have lost in a new kind of ideal Utopia. His entire oeuvre is characterized by his persistence in sentiments such as desire, love, passion, failure, loneliness, loss, defiance, uncertainty and melancholy. Historical failure gains a timeless and global dimension in Velonis’ work, whereas its historical reexamination gives rise to new connections and meanings.
[…] The present exhibition, entitled Loneliness on Common Ground: How Can Society Do What Each Person Dreams, features a series of large-scale constructions and several smaller sculptures that the artist produced over the past two years. The exhibition investigates and showcases Velonis’ work, focusing on works with a political character which refer to the Russian avant-garde, Ancient Greek Democracy, and the artist’s working-class consciousness. The artist attempts to examine the ideologies behind the political structures and to make us think about notions such as the Utopian ideal, democracy and revolution. His interest, however, focuses on the way in which these notions, as well as the ideas accompanying revolutions and forms of resistance to the prevailing systems of domination, could be seen today. Velonis does not attempt to examine the Russian avant-garde and the Constructivist movement in their historicity, but rather, in a critical and investigative vein, seeks to examine several timeless social and political issues and to engage a dialogue between the ideas of direct democracy and social ideals. […]
Daphne Vitali