Exhibition BreadMatters IV - Young Artists
BreadMatters IV - Crossing Boundaries Intersecting the GrainBreadMatters is an inclusive interdisciplinary art programme that addresses contemporary issues associated to bread, and establishes connections with audiences through participation, collaboration, interaction, dialogue and exchange. BM IV investigated historic actions in relation to the present, it questioned perceptions of time and of space, and it explored temporary associations to place and to existence.
Held in Cyprus during November 2014, BreadMatters IV - Crossing Boundaries Intersecting the Grain explored, through exhibition and debate, the relationship between the "contemporary correct", the "ritualistic", and the "popular. It addressed the intense social, political and technological aspects of society, and it questioned many of society's values, assumptions, confines and particular impositions, it challenged cultural concerns whilst addressing fundamental socio-political issues. Located in Nicosia, ARTos Cultural and Research Foundation was founded by the artists, Achilleas Kentonis and Maria Papacharalambous. ARTos is a contemporary centre dedicated to Arts and Science. Its premises are a mix from traditional architecture of the 1900's. These buildings once hosted the bakeries of Nicosia’s Agii Omologites. The Foundation has several distinct spaces that were employed creatively for this curated exhibition.
BreadMatters IV at ARTos in Nicosia involved 17 international artists who produced work, in many instances as collaborative and participative undertakings, involving various artists and many others who were asked to engage with the sub-themes of the main project. Thus the overall exhibition had a cohesive conceptual and visual focus. There was a sense of immersion and each work carried resonances and dialogical connections to the next. BreadMatters IV Young Artists Exhibition (see below) held at Technopolis20 in Paphos brought together 16 young Cypriot artists through a workshop programme and an exhibition that embraced the main concept using practice to explore issues of social and political concerns around bread.
Inês R. Amado, Project Director of BreadMatters, structured and devised the overall concept and work programme. The organization of the events in Cyprus was a collaboration between Inês R. Amado, Achilleas Kentonis, Stella Karageorgi, Katerina & Dorita Voskaridou, Markella Neocleous and Marina Symeonidou.
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Technopolis20 in Paphos hosted our BreadMatters IV - Young Artists. This part of the programme was organised by Cypriot artist Stella Karageorgi and brought together 16 young Cypriot artists through a workshop programme and an exhibition that embraced the main concept using practice to explore issues of social and political concerns around bread. The work of BM IV - Cypriot Young Artists is presented below.
General view of the Exhibition
Young Artist Statements
“Fields” by Stavroula Gregoriou, Installation Our supposedly modernisation is mainly consisted by the loss of our tradition and culture, the easy way is always our priority. Living under an established technological impact there is a constant challenge to avoid the abandonment of our roots and traditional values.. People now have been transformed into robotic machines compulsively capitulated in what they impose. We forget our traditional values, our rich culture and mainly Mother Nature: our starting point. Living under the deified temporary comfort we are unconsciously under the slavery of this hear-rending age of instant material gratification and pleasure. The age of compulsion, value deterioration and emptiness. ------------------- “Chalamantoura” by Papamichael Andreas Constantinou Rafaella Chalamantoura, sites of a place still in time asking for a restart. Through the cartography of abandoned villages, which used to be active and socially energetic, this piece is negotiating the dipole among migration and need for survival. Set on the primary needs of human kind , food and accommodation , they borrow elements stemming from the fields of history, anthropology and sociology bridging the past with the present in relation to wheat. The seed as raw material and action activate the primordial bonding of humans to nature. The selection of these particular villages comes as a result of a research in Paphos district, in villages which were abandoned due to sociopolitical and geological conditions. ---------------------- “Cosmology” by Andriana Nikolaidou Mixed Media, dimensions variable “Bread is the beginning of the universe”-Diagoras Does flour possess cosmic qualities? Is it the essence of the galaxy? Are the stars of the Milky Way as many as the grains of flour on Earth? The visual exploration of a handful of flour mirrors the texture of galactic dust challenging the fundamental relationship between space/time and life. In a work that blurs the boundaries between virtual and scientific reception, the work explores the importance of flour as the eternal ingredient of the cycle of life. ------------------------------- “The baby-dough” by Demetra Socratous The deconstruction of the ‘traditional’ table and the swinging Baby-dough, which meet on an imaginary level, form a dialectic relation between the past and the future of bread, bringing forward the woman's reconnection to bread and a redefinition of bread’s value in the family life. The woman is exalted to the Mother who ‘gives birth’ affectionately and respectfully, through her hands, to the Baby-dough, which is now 'sleeping' in the trough and ‘grows’ (leavens) under her constant care and praying song. Their interactive relationship is accomplished when the Baby-dough transforms to Bread and feeds her. In the Cypriot tradition, a piece of leaven from a previous kneading process is incorporated into the new dough. Thus, any Baby-dough, which will eventually evolved to Bread, incorporates at the same time the potential of all the past and future kneaded and baked breads by the Woman-Mother - just like newborn which carried the genetic material of generations.
