DURATION
11.06-20.07.24
11.09-28.09.24
extended
Nikolas Ventourakis | Antonis Theodoridis | Peter Watkins
curated by
Karolina Wisniewska
PRELUDE:
Athens, June 11, 2024 7am.
The city wakes up with a warm smile. It is Alfa Romeo’s 33rd birthday – he is slowly losing his mind. Light filters through the essence of grapefruits, sweetcorn-scented wind flushes down the not-yet-hot pavement. Sounds of engines are drinking the air polluted with posters and tiredness. A seed that was planted is now the size of a human fist. A young boy with crooked teeth is crossing the street with his heart full of tears. The sound of heat sizzles on my skin and I
feel hungry. The evening will be warm and fine. After an hour, it will drift like a bed of seaweed above the heartbeat of our sea. Exactly hundred years ago today, someone wrote me a text I received when sitting on the bench in Philopappou Hill, saying, “surrender forever to the city you love”.
MISC is pleased to announce heartbeat, a group exhibition with Nikolas Ventourakis, Antonis Theodoiris and Peter Watkins, curated by Karolina Wisniewska.
heartbeat uses Lawrence Durrell’s 50/60s tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet, as a starting point to explore how the absence of a general structure and reflections on the city manifest — its decaying streets, inhabitants and the personal memory of it captured in contemporary photography. In heartbeat, Athens, much like Alexandria in Durrell's work, becomes an imagined city with narratives intertwined with masculinity, its politics, and a sense of ambivalence and disorientation.
The first sound heard upon entering MISC is a soft roar of an engine from Nikolas Ventourakis’s film 33. The film is a deep meditation on a car in its decline, taking us on a journey through the broken parts, uncovering traces of past acts of love, angst, and carelessness. Much like an archaeological dig, we discover the innate language of the vehicle, interpreting its fears and hopes through the shapes of its scars. The film's fetishistic portrayal of gears basking in the sun and its contemplation of the car’s metal skin evoke the eroticism of Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, as well as The Alexandria Quartet’s narrator’s obsessive, poetic idealisation of Justine.
Ventourakis’s exploration of decay unfolds in three parts throughout the exhibition, beginning with two large-scale photographs of Athens, and concluding with images of a body afflicted by a purple disease. Journeying from abstraction to literacy, Ventourakis’s works tell a story about the vulnerability of breaking down. Set in a timeless context, they challenge the status of both collective and personal memory.
Antonis Theodoridis’s new large work Kids emerges from the artist's observations of youth attending football games at the stadium. The two carefully selected images depict anonymous groups of male bodies, each filled with clenched fists, dressed in attire reminiscent of military uniforms. His portrayal of macho man-children monumentalises a scene that is familiar, one where you can almost hear the echoes of gender roles and coded behaviours established by society.
Both the innocence and the nervousness that cling to Theodoridis’s kids is rooted in their need to blend in. Yet they seem lost in the crowd, unsure of the future. There is a certain tenderness to his portrayal of the boys that helps us see this, perhaps in softness of the colours, or in the focus on a rarely seen body part like their calves; milky and slender. At a time when concepts such as fragile masculinity shape the discourse, this manipulation challenges our ideas of hypermasculine clichés.
Scripting his memories of the city, Peter Watkins presents works from his Informal Fallacies series, investigating the potentiality of altering the analogue image with AI. Watkins uses augmentation to expand the viewer’s sense of spatial potential, leaving us with a sense of entering a hypothetical reality of a city rather than providing clear answers.
The black and white photographs capture fragmented, disrupted, or disintegrated scenes that could be dubbed contemporary ruins —a middle finger, a grid that might be mistaken for a wire fence, fluffy dust—all the detritus one might find on the streets. Yet there is an inherent elegance and balance that elevates these urban remnants beyond mere debris. According to Freud, the uncanny is related to what is frightening and arouses dread and horror and leads back to what is known of the old and long familiar. The same atmosphere is in Watkins’ photographs, where non-human processes create a glitch, and future and past of the objects are not to be differentiated. The reality is scratched.
Inspired by the hyperreal qualities of the resulting image, Peter built bespoke aluminium frames, pushing the idea of boundaries of an image and material hybridity even further. And, just as the reality in Watkins’s images is ambiguous, we are left questioning the material itself. What are the origins of the scratches, and how authentic are the frames?
Nikolas Ventourakis
Nikolas Ventourakis is a visual artist living and working between Athens and London. His practice situates in the threshold between art and document, in the attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image.
Ventourakis completed an MA in Fine Art (Photography) with Merit at Central Saint Martins School of Arts (2013) and is the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013). He was selected for Future Map (2013), Catlin Guide (2014) and Fresh Faced Wild Eyed (2014) in the Photographers Gallery as one of the top graduating artists in the UK. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at CalArts with a FULBRIGHT Artist Fellowship and is a fellow in New Museum’s IDEAS CITY. He was shortlisted for the MAC International and the Bar-Tur Award. Recently he has exhibited in FORMAT Festival, Derby; the NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, the Mediterranean Biennale of Young Artists 18, the parallel program of the Istanbul Biennale , Hors Pistes 14 at Centre Pompidou, and The Same River Twice, at the Benaki Museum. Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala, and is co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Athens. He is a 2020 Stavros Niarchos Artworks Fellow and a 2021 and 2023 Onassis AIR resident artist.
Antonis Theodoridis
Antonis Theodoridis’s (b. 1984 in Drama, Greece) practice employs diverse photographic strategies and installation, examining the tensions between fluidity and stasis, personal and historical memory, the imperfect and the pristine.
He is a Fulbright Foundation scholar, a Niarchos Foundation fellow, and holds a Photography MFA degree from the University of Hartford, Connecticut. His practice is a mixture of traditional analog photography along with digital processes, installation, collage, and printing.
His process is driven by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium evolves, along with the ways we look at contemporary culture, gender, and politics through pictures.
Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins (b. Oxford, 1984) is an artist and educator based in Prague. He explores archiving and memory, examining how personal histories are preserved or lost through memorialization. Primarily working with photography, he also incorporates sculptural and installation elements, thinking spatially and materially about our experience with photography. Watkins earned his BA from the University of Westminster in 2008 and his MA from the Royal College of Art in 2014. His work is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and Fotomuseum Winterthur. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently an Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.
Watkins’s solo exhibitions include Galerie NoD, Prague (2022), Webber Gallery, London (2017), Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2016), and The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam (2016). His work has been featured in The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, and 1000 Words Photography Magazine. He won the Guernsey International Photography Award in 2018 and the Skinnerboox Book Award in 2019. He was shortlisted for Foam Museum’s Paul Huff Award on three occasions, the BJP International Photography Award in 2015, and the Magnum Graduate Award in 2015.