?Artist: Danai Anesiadou:
?Title: D POSSESSIONS
Curator: Ioli Tzanetaki
?Venue: E????, Athen
Photos: we document art?, Paris Tavitian?, Lynn Vanden Bossche
Danai Anesiadou’s exhibition at E??? entitled D POSSESSIONS invites visitors into an allegorical scenography consisting of sculptures, collages, and her own furniture, among others, referencing the rise of political, social and spiritual crises. In an attempt to permanently get rid of all her personal belongings, she cast them into epoxy. She added metal shavings and quartz crystals to the mix and turned them into orgonites – energy transmutation devices that some consider to attract Orgone, which extracts negative energy and transmutes it into positive energy.
The orgonite-sculptures carry multiple forms and shapes created from moulds of props from film sets. Like a modern-day exorcist, Anesiadou attempts to purge and transform not only her material possessions but also the energies they carry.
Seeking to understand and critically reflect on the present, Anesiadou looks to trace connections between things that on the surface seem utterly unrelated – from conspiracy theories, Hollywood and the Pentagon’s Entertainment Industrial Complex, reality TV and the fashion industry and references to ancient Greek sculpture, surrealism and B-movies. What impact may these have on the state of our world and our minds today? Trying to resist binary thinking, she questions what is truth and what is fiction claiming a right to interrogate everything.
The different elements that make up this kaleidoscopic exhibition create an immersive and alluring environment which, at the same time, suggests a sense of the uncanny, the surreal and the uneasy. Playing with rumour, fantasy and the mystical, Anesiadou’s work acts as an acute socio-political commentary on the multiple and multi-layered crises we face, the invisible, repressed or darker sides of reality, and the extreme polarisation we witness on a daily basis today.
The exhibition is a co-production with WIELS, Brussels.