NikosArvanitis.info

A day´s fog: a text by Theoni Fotopoulou

«Man inhabits only the dark side of the earth»
Gilles Deleuze

In his exhibition entitled "A days fog", Nikos Arvanitis rephrases the question of existing violence free from conceptual determinations and predications. Violence is not expressed through the bipolar schema of violence or non violence but rather as an abstract impression of a media image. As a springboard for the series of works under the title ?A days fog?, Arvanitis uses photos depicting confrontational moments during demonstrations. Through a process of deformation and abstraction, the artist creates foggy landscapes of another texture, decomposed by their social and political fabric focusing on the mapping of a timeless and immaterial condition as a result of an epiphenomenal violence. Then Arvanitis moves from the process of deformation to the process of de- digitization where the media picture is reversed and released from technical codes, such as camera angle or photoshop. Those codes until that moment rendered the image vivid, realistic and consequently captured by the mass media system. Here violence is not portrayed as act, as effect, as resistance or as repression, since it does not even constitute a spectacle, but primarily a sense. This sense of violence emerges under a picturesque context in the installation ?All Comfort?, in which a simulacrum of a house or a kids playhouse-shelter made of wood and floral textiles is set up opposite fireworks. In this work, it is the notion of time that is annihilated and not the form, it is the perpetual presence of violence that leads to a level of familiarity with the violence itself. The function of violence appears in an embodied spectacle by the State. In this State, violence although it is present - camouflaged into a nebula of comfort- and it is conceived as absent, as it is never displayed and when it does, it gets re-camouflaged via the media realm. The process of abstraction in the work ?Promising Megaphone? passes to its audio dimension. Through simultaneous reproduction of political speeches delivered during the period after the return of democracy in Greece, the artist generates a foggy audio documentary, reversing its original use. Such a reversal, features also in the work ?Portrait with Alpha?, in which someone is presented holding a wilted laurel wreath at the back side. This act of reversal of the symbol on the one hand and of the politics field on the other, creates examples of multiplied significance and breaches to the conventional perception of them. In this exhibition Nikos Arvanitis utilizes different tools in order to produce the sense of violence, a violence that is covered either by foggy landscapes and audio nebulae or by the comfort of the familiar. At the same time, flowers, fireworks and symbols are relocated and reversed creating a new field where violence can be revealed and inhabited without being experienced. Contrary to the state apparatus, the artist constructs through an abstract machine simulacra of violence, which are not demonstrated as representation of a reality, but as indications of a new reality.

Nikos Arvanitis: A day's fog, exhibitions catalogue, artcore gallery, Bari, Italy, April 2013 (.pdf 2,3MB)