The 7th Athens Biennale ECLIPSE, co-curated by Omsk Social Club and Larry Ossei-Mensah under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio, features artists based in North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, many of whom are exhibiting in Greece for the first time.
Eclipse highlights the obscured perspective of reality caused by the constant state of flux we are experiencing in our society now, it engages the social, political and spiritual changes of today’s global construct and in Athens itself, as a rising metropolis located at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa both physically and historically. Here’s our selection of works from the Biennale.
Zebedee Armstrong
Armstrong picked cotton at the local Mack McCormick farm and at the Thomson Box Factory for most his life. After being “visited by an angel” who warned him about the imminent end of the world in 1972, he went on to construct almost 1500 box calendars, trying to determine the exact date of the approaching doomsday.
Judy Chicago
Chicago tackles issues about feminism, birth and creation, the absence of birth imagery in art history, the construct of masculinity, genocide, the horrors of human suffering and most recently has addressed environmental destruction through various projects. She has works in the collections of major museums and galleries around the world.
Yorgos Prinos
Prinos’s work explores issues of power and violence at the intersection of human psychology and politics. His photos often feature the human figure in urban space, while devising suggestive and elliptical narratives using found footage from media or the internet.
Sanford Biggers
Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speak to current social, political and economic happenings, while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of American history.
Ebony G. Patterson
Patterson’s multilayered practice-in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video-uses beauty are a tool to address global social and political injustices. Her beautiful and immersive gardens grow out of an entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence, with notions of memorial, blood and tears, as she seduces the viewer into acknowledging the darker truth lurking beneath.
Cajsa Von Zeipel
Cajsa Von Zeipel delves into identity, gender and queerness while interrogating ideals of classism through sculpture. Culling from sci-fi and fantasy aesthetics, she constructs her figures in brightly coloured silicone and adorns them with dollar store accoutrement turned glistening treasure. In resolute assertion of femme visibility and sex positive provocation, these beings celebrate a world of their own creation.
Olalekan Jeyifous
Jeyifous is a multimedia artist who leverages his background in architecture as a way to re-imagine social spaces around issues relating to community, and the built environment. Influenced by his Nigerian roots and immigration to the US as a child, Jeyifous uses his practices as a vehicle to investigate issues related sustainability, preservation, and the imagination of urban spaces that serve Black communities around the globe.
Klára Hosnedlová
Hosnedlová’s work explores historical sentiments as they crystallise in modern and contemporary design and architecture. Her sculptures, environments and site-specific installations recognise nostalgia as an essential feature of global culture, are indebted to Eastern European histories and the past collective mythologies.
Petros Moris
Through sculpture, video and writing, Moris work focuses on the entanglements between material memory, natural ecosystems, technological infrastructures and sociocultural transformation.
Ndayé Kouagou
Ndayé Kouagou is an artist and performer, whose practice always starts from texts of which he is the author. Voluntarily or involuntarily confused, he tries his best to bring about reflections on the three topics of legitimacy, freedom and love. The result is… what it is. He describes his work as “quite interesting, but not that interesting or maybe not interesting at all”.
Info is provided by the Biennale.
AB7: ECLIPSE is ongoing until the 28th of November.