18/03/23 – 03/06/23 – DANCE YOUR WAY AROUND US
Solo exhibition, Rodeo Gallery, Piraeus.
WEDDING CROWNS, Video Installation, 1989-2023 |16mm film transferred to digital video, 2 channels, colour, stereo sound, duration 16’ 31’’ (Kinesia Paradoxa process, 3.3 frames per second) by Menelaos Karamaghiolis
“A wedding ceremony – like the ones only Roma families know how to plan – took place in the late 80s, next to Athens, and is made of previously censored footage, partly shown here for the first time.
Time here is key, as the dissection the footage has undergone (the artist has created a specific system based on an algorithm that breaks down the cinematic frame by frame according to its content and the duration of each shot, bearing the name Kinesia Paradoxa), creates a different point of view and perception. This process turns fleeting moments hidden in cinematic frames, minor details, into hypnotizing monuments, transforms humans into immortals, sculpts their clothes into tunics, and themselves into moving sculptures while they reach for ecstasy through dancing.
Like the heroes portrayed, who have a very different and personal understanding and handling of time, one that grants them eternal.
The swirling glimmering bodies linger to the singing of the pan-Roma-GR superstar Makis Christodoulopoulos, whose lyrics are the only language that appears in the film, then returning to the dark murmur that has overtaken the space, to this perpetual ritual.
Rituals and stories of power and its structures are omnipresent in Menelaos’ oeuvre, as well as the presence of the divine in the miraculous of the every day.
For the artist, who has been mingling with Roma people since his childhood, this ethnic group is the only one he associates as identifying with anything close to what he perceives as Greek: a nation made of mixed races, nomadic while their language and peculiar relationship with religion are their only traits of unifying identity.”
Sylvia Kouvali
Rodeo Piraeus, March 2023
