PRESENTATION: Artemis Potamianou-Your History, It’s Not My Story

Dynamic, restless, multi-talented; the list of adjectives that can characterize the artist Artemis Potamianou is long… she is a multimedia visual artist, curator and founder & director of Platforms Project Independent Art Fair. She attained a BFA Degree from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1997 and an MFA from the Staffordshire University, Great Britain in 1999.

Photo: Artemis Potamianou Archive

Artemis Potamianou’s solo exhibition “Your history, it’s not my story” is part of a trilogy that continues as an open dialogue through time, posing value issues on womanhood and everything that afflicts her. It focuses on the condition of choosing freedom or unfreedom and how this is identified in the female consciousness and the roles it is called upon to play. Starting from the metal grid of Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa – G.I. Katsigras Museum’s atrium, which morphologically refers to her cages, the artist creates a site-specific installation.  The complex installation of cages, which inspired by real buildings, are two-dimensional symbols of prison, protection, or both, depending on the viewer’s perspective, contain the social conditions that a woman is called upon to choose and experience, entrapment or protective, since in the history of art, we meet her several times with the symbolism of the bird. In 1930, the sociologist Max Weber, coined the term ‘iron cage’ to refer to the increased rationalisation inherent in the development of Western capitalism societies “Puritanism has played a part in creating the ‘iron cage’ in which modern man has to exist – an increasingly bureaucratic order from which the ‘spontaneous enjoyment of life’ is ruthlessly expunged”. George Ritzer believes that modern society has taken this a step further, discussing Weber’s ‘iron cage’ he believes that “A society characterized by rationality is one which emphasizes efficiency, predictability, calculability, substitution of nonhuman for human technology, and control over uncertainty…. As a result, our concern here is with what might be termed the “McDonaldization of Society”. “Which side are you on?” is an immersive exhibition, not only in terms of artistic look, but in terms of meaning and the power and sensitivity that deals with these issues”. The second part of the exhibition stems from “Le “The Unknown Masterpiece” by Honoré de Balzac  and Oscar Wild’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”, here Artemis Potamianou creates a Museum with her own terms and rules, reversing the roles of genders the artist creates a very interesting and fruitful dialogue, Composed at the same time of familiar and unfamiliar images, the artworks created by the artist on the walls of the Gallery, consist of a unit of repeated motif composed of well-known works of art, showing the roles of men’s viewing of the female world.  Well-known portraits of women created by important male artists, are transformed by Potamianou with collage intervention from parts of well-known works depicting portraits of men while maintaining their female identity. The exhibition concludes with the video installation ”ART SEEN – ART SCENE”, which through the ”distorting mirror” of history, the distortions of art, which were assimilated and prevailed as social models, are projected. A video-collage of excerpts from Hollywood films that present the lives of visual artists, in contrast to scenes from documentaries that they talk about important themes such as learning art, talent or glory, projecting themselves and their practice through canonization. The video presents the stereotypes surrounding art and how they entrench artistic fiction in the collective unconscious.

Photo Left: Artemis Potamianou, Which side are you on? Time, 2018, Mixed media, 135 x 45 x 66 cm, © Artemis Potamianou, Courtesy the artist and ENIA Gallery. Photo Right: Artemis Potamianou, Which side are you on? Soul, 2018, Mixed media, 140 x 68 x 43 cm, © Artemis Potamianou, Courtesy the artist and ENIA Gallery

Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa – G.I. Katsigras Museum, G. Papandreo:-u 2, Larissa, Greece, Duration: 6/4-15/5/:24, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-14:00 & 18:00-21:00, www.katsigrasmuseum.gr/