From the series In Waiting, 2012-2018
Archival inkjet prints
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2022
The photographic series In Waiting highlights aspects of contemporary Greek reality, focusing on the points where state functions and collective mechanisms intersect with individual identities and the national imaginary. Vourloumis documents Greece during the economic and political crisis of the 2010s, turning her gaze towards public spaces and institutions. The confrontation between the country’s self-image and an indeterminate Western model fuels a dream of modernisation that continues to “haunt” us. At the same time, the series reveals the dysfunctional aspect of the state apparatus, as well as its makeshift and inadequate attempts to remedy that reality. The title In Waiting evokes both an abstract anticipation of the end of the crisis and the experience of waiting in line at a public service office, where the citizen hopes that the state— or some ideal associated with it—will ultimately fulfil their expectations.
Within public services—where the state becomes visible to its citizens—one wonders whether a relationship of mutual trust and the consolidation of a democratic ethos is established, or whether, on the contrary, what emerges is an opaque, labyrinthine ritual of restrictions, exclusions, and inequalities. The imprint of the economic crisis emotionally charges the present as a transitional moment. Public spaces breathe like living organisms and symbolise the anxiety of a society in waiting. According to the artist herself, “These spaces reflect contemporary Greek culture and character. The locations I chose are familiar microcosms for Athenians that have now become the public stage for a forced renegotiation of Greek identity. […] I am specifically attracted to the particular aesthetic and surreal atmosphere I encounter in these spaces. [They] also reveal an almost antiquated and bare aesthetic quality […] Spaces, which once seemed banal or unimportant, now reveal nuances of contemporary reality and become linked to social and political implications.”
Eirini Vourloumis was born in Athens in 1979, where she lives and works.
