ART SNAPSHOTS:Reality check
As dr. Kostas Prapoglou, the curator of the exhibition “Reality check”, says “The psychiatric hospital of Dafni is situated on the axis of the Ancient Sacred Way connecting Athens with the town of Eleusis (where the processional ceremony of the Eleusian Mysteries used to take place in antiquity) and opposite the sanctuary of Dafnios Apollo, above which the byzantine monastery of Dafni was later erected in the 6th century Ad. In an area of high spiritual and mental rebirth since the ancient times the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica in Dafni was built in 1925 as the first State Psychiatric Hospital and has been continuously functioning ever since. The exhibition “Reality check” take place in one of the larger -now abandoned- buildings of the hospital ground. It focus transcends beyond the objective hypostasis of a psychiatric facility. It gazes further away from ideas of institutional confinement, it overrides mental illness as a medical condition and it surveys the structural constraints and qualities of the mind in relation with space and time. Spacelessness (having and understanding no borders or limits) is a term that is future investigated in this exhibition. We also explore how consciousness language and speech stand against gravity an how oftentimes visual landscapes turn into mindscapes and vice versa. Notions of the inside and outside are also being takes into account. Where is insanity realy located? Where do we normally find the real madhouse?”
Photo: Ada Petranaki, Open Line, 2021, © Ada Petranaki,Photo: © & Courtesy Dimitris Lempesis
Info: Curator: dr. Kostas Prapoglou, Dafni Psychiatric Hospital, Leof. Athinon 374, Chaidari, Athens, Greece, Duration: 9/9-9/10/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 15:00-20:00
