Commemorating 190 years of operation, the National Printing House of Athens is currently playing host to a contemporary art show opening its doors to artists and the general public. The House accompanies Greece and its history pretty much since the establishment of the modern Greek state. Situated on Kapodistriou Street in central Athens, its headquarters have been the epicentre of state printing activity ever since.
Named after the official Government Gazette (transliterated from Greek as FEK), one of the state’s most important publications, the exhibition embraces the work of thirty Greek contemporary artists. The show’s curator Louise Karapidaki invited all artists to respond not only to the historical background of the National Printing House but also to the practice of printing with its numerous techniques and methods, and explore the importance of circulation of knowledge and interpretations of aspects of democracy.
Working on a wide range of media and disciplines each of the artists occupy different sections of the building, from corridors and small side rooms to printing areas and storage spaces. Visitors are free to navigate themselves in this labyrinthine network and discover artistic interventions alongside the functional purpose of each space.
Among the participating artists, international artist and former professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts Rena Papaspyrou, encapsulates with her body of work ‘Autophotocopies’ (1980-1981) the mundane and the quotidian of life through the occurrence of found objects such as paper, wood, straw and tatters. The accidental rearrangement of Papaspyrou’s material on the photocopier pronounces the deconstruction and deactivation of their original physical appearance. The resulting black and white photocopy concurrently recalibrates the departed three-dimensional hypostasis and fabricates via the element of randomness the emergence of a new narrative. The photocopied face and hands holding creased pieces of paper demonstrate not only the visual equality between the two so different mediums of skin and paper as a result of a straightforward printing process but also the gradual metamorphosis of corporeality and the surfacing of a newborn topography filtered with the convoluted properties of light and shadow.
Eleni Lyra has taken over a narrow office corridor to bring indoors parts of the historical building walls of the Athens Polytechnic School, located at a nearby building where students were sacrificed during the anti junta revolt of 1973. Utilizing digital printing, photography, photocopies, leaflets and banners to assemble her installation, ‘28 Octovriou & Stournari’ (2015), the artist recreates the meeting point of two prominent streets of the Greek capital, a symbol of liberty and democracy. By transforming the plain wall of the Printing House into an outdoors public wall where graffiti and banner advertising constantly modify the facade of the building, Lyra not only emphasises the vivacity and diversity of urban life but also manifests the right of speech, expression and freedom even at the expense of the architectural idiosyncrasy of a historical building. The layers of compiled information unravel a distinctive diary of socio-political behaviourism registered and imprinted on the micro-landscape of her chosen locus.
Dimitris Skouroyannis’s two mixed media works (‘Antigone’ 2015 and ‘Self portrait’ 2015) comprise multiple digital reproductions of renaissance female self portraits in the aesthetics of miniature painting, each individually unfolding under the spotlight of a tiny suspended lamp. Focusing on aspects of identity and societal uniqueness the two works on display are simultaneously permeated by a striking romantic idealisation. Evocative of notions of individuality and originality, Skouroyannis’s works are a clear parallelism between the self portrait of an individual and that of the official Government Gazette as an allusive reflection of the state itself.
While it is impossible to mention all participating artists, it is nevertheless worth highlighting their visual vocabulary that develops as an enduring conversation with the historical and functional character of the Printing House. All works on view enhance its priceless task and mission in the past and present, and, at the same time the groundbreaking decision to open its doors to the public gives everyone the rare opportunity to be acquainted with an institution that has been playing a pivotal role in the turbulent history of the modern Greek state.
