18th September - 18th December, Thessaloniki

 

MAIN PROGRAMME: A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

PARALLEL PROGRAMME

GUEST EVENTS

Exhibition

A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE Alatza Imaret

[…] Alatza Imaret (also known as Ishak pasa mosque): it is located close to Kassandrou street, at the crossroads of Ag. Nikolaou, Galilaiou and Sophokleous streets in the east, and only at a small distance from Agios Demetrios. The mosque took its name from the colorful (Alatza) stones of its minaret, and the fact that it included a hospice (imaret). It was also called “Ishak pasa mosque” after the pasa who established it. Alatza Imaret is a beautiful building, with clear proportions and harmonious symmetries.

Tsaktsiras L., Papanthimou K., Mantzios G., Kalogirou N., Thessaloniki, the city and its monuments, Malliaris – Paideia, Thessaloniki, 2003

Alatza Imaret, the Colorful Hospice

If you are born and brought up in Thessaloniki, you tend to find yourself (as with other cities in Greece) becoming sentimentally involved in a kind of paranoid perplexity. Particularly here in Thessaloniki, where few people can trace back their relation to the locality more than three or four generations, the situation is very difficult.  This is because it was decided that modern history in Greece should be based on Hellenic or Byzantine antiquity. You hear stories from your grandparents that differ dramatically from the ones you get taught at school. What happened in all the time between antiquity and today? After all, it's often been pointed out that our recent tales, food, habits, attitudes, sense of logic, and so on relate more closely to the wider geographical region rather than to the glorious past of the Ancient Greeks.

Returning to Thessaloniki once more, this time for the Biennale, I deliberately chose Alatza Imaret for my curatorial strand of the main program. It is a place of symbolical antithesis for me formed by my childhood consciousness -located somewhere between an eastern soul and western rationalism.

Alatza Imaret, the once celebrated 15th century colorful mosque and hospice with the most impressive minaret in the town, now looks from the outside to be semi-abandoned. It doesn't open regularly as a monument -just when it's being used for an exhibition. Yet, admiration constructs its own path. This became obvious the times I waited for the guard to open the door during the installation process. In less than an hour, during summertime, tourists would arrive from all over the world, making the effort to come to this residential and hidden part of the town to visit Alatza Imaret. This was not an accident: they knew all about it. Unfortunately, they might find its door closed, and some graffiti on the outside walls. Nevertheless, they were (mostly) happy they made it to its porch and were willing to share stories about it. As well as my grandparents, it was an American man who gave me precise details about its architecture and history.

Fate constructs its own path too. Alatza Imaret, the colorful mosque and hospice, might have been declared a monument by the Greek Government in January 1926, but a year earlier it offered hospitality to twenty families of refugees that came from Asia Minor during the exchange of population (a violent act by both Greeks and Turks and maybe more) who stayed/squatted there. Much later, after the Second Word War and during a period of poverty in Greece that spanned 1952-1960, the Ministry of Health offered free food to students from the environs of Alatza Imaret. Today, the neighborhood is mostly inhabited by ex Soviet Union refugees. Old women bring down chairs and sit by its porch for hours, while children play around them. All this is done with respect. The doors might be locked, but the place feels inhabited and vivid as it perhaps used to.

“Every practice brings a territory into existence… one that superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it: it produces its own secession,” argues the Invisible Committee in the book The Coming Insurrection. Current history might be about false communities and calculated absences; however, art as a kind of magic operation always offers an exodus from the rigid reality to a more “invented” one. Often it not only captures an actual time and place, but also predicts and even influences the future.

The use of color as a symbolic starting point for this small show underwrites the strand.  Color is used metaphorically as a vehicle against the empty propaganda of our times. Through the input of brilliant individuals and their artworks, we may be able to confront this void. The colourful minaret is put back in place by Yorgos Sapountzis. The stories of Mulla Nasruddin (a Sufi visionary who lived during the 13th century in the Middle East), on which my generation in Thessaloniki was brought up as most of our grandparents came from Istanbul or the shores of Turkey, are being discussed once again by Slavs and Tatars. Domestic, “small-scale” production and fragile souvenirs created by Pae White can be found alongside cosmic commentary sketches by Panos Koutrouboussis that invite resistance to a restricted world. And the “Self” (the human self) is both condemned and revised through a set of films by Penelope Georgiou and Ryan Trecartin.

We didn't plan to revitalize the space by closely linking to its history, but rather to add to its vivid destiny through formally tracing the “radical illusion” of the world as we know it.

Marina Fokidis

Artists:

• Constantinos Xenakis
  Constantin Xenakis (Cairo, 1931) lives and works in Paris and Athens. He studied interior design at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes (Paris, 1956-1957) and painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Paris, 1957-1961). Xenakis developed a singular visual language borrowing from the symbols and codes of everyday life such as traffic...
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• Olaf Nicolai
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  Born (1962) in Haale/Saale, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. He studied German Literature and Philology in Leipzig (Germany), Budapest (Hungary) and Vienna (Austria). In 1992 he completed his PhD on "The Vienna Group" (‘Die Wiener Gruppe"). Olaf Nicolai’s work is conceptual in nature and often characterized by (socio) political...
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• Pae White
  Born (1963) in Pasadena, California. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Minnesota, and at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Recent solo exhibitions (selection): The Art Institute of Chicago, Bluhm Family Terrace, (Chicago, 2011) ; Material Mutters , The Power Plant (Toronto,...
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• Panos Koutroubousis
  Born 1937 in Levadia and is an Athenian since the age of four. His first “public” show(!) was at age 14, when he drew a series of naughty drawings on notebook pages at school and was distributing them to his chums in class. That got him a 3-day expulsion. Later he studied film directing in Rome and worked in Greek and foreign productions....
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• Penelope Georgiou
  Born (1949) in Thessaloniki. Since 1970 she lives in Vienna, where she studied for two years at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. In 1977 she directed Urfaust , playing herself the role of Margarita. The next year, she directed in Vienna her own theatrical work Kunst ohne ...
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• Ryan Trecartin
  Born (1981) in Webster, Texas. He is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004 and has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami. In 2009, Trecartin was the recipient of the inaugural Jack Wolgin International...
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• Slavs and Tatars
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  Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an often forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs,...
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• Solon Lekkas
  Born in 1946 in Pigi, Greece. He is a builder, a stonemason, but also a sweet-voiced singer, amateur musician and dancer. He lives today in Taxiarhes, close to the city of Mytilene. He is always involved in singing and dancing, mostly as an amateur, but also professionally.   You can’t learn those things; they are...
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• Yorgos Sapountzis
  Born (1976) in Athens. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1998-2002), and at the Berlin University of the Arts (2002-04, studio of Rebecca Horn). He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. “Yorgos Sapountzis”, as Jakob Schillinger and Nina Tabassomi mentioned, “is interested in sculptures, specifically public sculptures. In his...
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