JANUS II

“In the give-and-take conversation, a lovely girl gives a little more fun than she takes.”

Thomas, K., Secrets of Loveliness, 1964

The second issue of Janus femzine is the most up-to-date practical guide to bad behavior and etiquette for contemporary femininities. Yes, you! JANUS womwn are hot, exactly in the way the male audience has not and will never imagine them. They are determined to steal all the fun for themselves and eventually become incredibly unpleasant. They will ruin your party, stealing the spotlight with their very presence. They will not miss the chance to create drama and make everyone in the room uncomfortable. As the huge disappointment they are for their families, they never apologize for their brassy laugh, while they insist on smiling only when they feel like it. Their style of dress shall scandalize passers-by and corrupt young minds, while they turn into every hostess’s nightmare.

For the second edition of JANUS, Irini Karayannopoulou works with her collection of photographic material derived from porn and nudist magazines of the 1960s. Isolating the images and intervening with her characteristically striking painting gesture, she diverts their original narrative through a form of painting collage referring abstractly to punk aesthetics. Female bodies escape the male gaze and return to pleasure, they wander in natural landscapes, communing with plants, animals and flamboyant objects. Curator Christina Petkopoulou, having observed Karayannopoulou’s practice inside the artist’s studio, edits the accompanying texts creating a collage herself, which consists of excerpts from “Secrets of Loveliness” (1964), a best-seller guide book for young women, and lyrics from songs that were on the billboard charts of the same year. JANUS returns to femininities as an unapologetic and accessible, carnivalesque, visual illusion.