DESTE AWARDS 2007

First of all. Love the award designed by artist Maria Papadimitriou. Secondly...?
There was an obvious unbalance among the works shortlisted for the DESTE awards at the DESTE Foundation this year.
Unfortunately the quality of works was not as high as expected. And by expected i mean compared to the previous one, 2 years ago. I have to be honest and say that i have seen live only the previous awards and unfortunately all the others through photos and press clips.

However, the 2005 awards were so much better than this year's. The works were all equal in the sence of presence in the exhibition space and in the strength of their voice. No matter whether one liked them or not, they each had something to say. they had an autonomy from one another, they were memorable .

So..this years awards had 6 nominees. The space felt a bit empty in my opinion.
The works of Eleni Kamma and Loukia Alavanou were mature, complete, balanced works with a personality. Works that left a mark and an imprint to the visitor's memory.

Kamma succeeded in describing a story, an evolution of the idea of the artist. Primarily, it was a big step for her to move to an installation apart from her usual drawings. She first surprised us with her one-woman show @ Gazon Rouge with a video (which needed attention there was a whole story going on there) and now here she presented an architectural maquette in relation to the video. There was a path that was very clear, and one could very well see how she went from point A to B and so on. However, i am not sure the space selected for the works was the most appropriate and i believe that the maquette should be elevated from the floor.

Alavanou's video was very suprising. The last work of hers i saw was the one at "what remains is future" in Patra curated by Nadia Argyropoulou. It was in accordance to her previous work with a very intense element of feminist -lets not be afraid to use the word- feel to it, a comment on woman, on age, on memory, on popular culture. This work was more austere and distanced without too much emotion, although she keeps using cartoon characters in her work. The sound plays again a very important part in her work and here it is a tool used to accentuate time, continuity and repetition. She has created a gran-guignol, humorous, elevating work that played with the notion of time and continuity and its double-sided presentation was very succesful. I am not very familiar with the technical sides of video but it seemed very well made to me.

The other works...well a bit boring. To steal F. Bonami's phrase "im bored, bored, bored". Although he was referring to contemporary performance, i am sorry to have to refer to the contemporary installations by Sokratis Fatouros (i dont know his work very well but what exactly does he want to convey through this particular work??) and Nikos Arvanitis (as a friend said and i agree completely this is so much like Takis -with a tad of 2007 technology i add).

The photographs of Yiannis Grigoriadis -ok they have a cunning political smirk on their face, if you will, however, i have seen this before. I remember seeing his solo show at Els Hanappe in 2005 in Athens and it was exactly the same thing. Working with a theme of political reference such as the Yugo car, that personally makes me think of Berlin, East and West Germany before the fall of its wall, Russia's recent economical boom, Yugoslavia and the Kosovo war, and all these things, is very strong i agree, but one has to develop it in a time frame of 2 years. My humble opinion.

Savvas Christodoulides however managed to pull it off i think, the element of this chair, -very much like the one my granny has in her dining room- very imperial, but so fragile since it was not painted in the usual dark colour, and also so useless, meaning it lost its purpose as a chair because it was tilted and nailed to woods vertical to the floor. I liked that work but i felt i needed something more out of it.