Image Kidnapper
text by Efi Falida
1. Crossings to emancipation
Is
there such a thing as a “volcano woman” (Hotberg)? Might be. An iceberg
one? Maybe. Or maybe not, cause our times are imperatively rectifying
male prejudices and stereotypical views of eroticism and the female
erotic body.
In
her own special way, decisive but not violent, humorous and cheeky,
Irini Karayannopoulou settles her accounts with the mechanisms that
treat women as objects. In two moves: the first involves tearing out ad
pages from vintage women’s magazines; the second, the deletion of logos
and faces. Then, like an ingenious kidnapper asking for ransom by
sending letters made up of phrases from various newspaper clippings, she
composes her comments addressed to the collective body that questions
womanhood and uses them to caption her faceless body images.
Her work
is ethereal and brutal. Her videos and images resemble allegories or
myths – or, in fact, dreams. A dense layering, awash with visual
metaphors and symbols that function with the autonomy the artist grants
them as tokens of her peculiar rebellion against gender and identity
stereotypes.
The experiments in image appropriation result in radiant
and psychedelic details so intense to the eye – the back of a neck, the
collapse of facial features, the colour of water – that they seem to be
transmitted directly from or through a conscious dive into the
unconscious. Only to recur to the viewer at odd moments, like a puzzle
the mind is trying to solve.
Irini Karayannopoulou’s creative
concerns are very specific: the female confronts the male in exchanges
characterized by both violence and desire. The use of
deterritorialization to induce psychological states. A narrative
preference for iconic heroines juxtaposed with terror, desire and
grandeur.
With her solo exhibition Hotberg, Irini Karayannopoulou
continues what in her previous works has been presented as her personal
strange pleasure, that is, to eliminate the hypocrisy that often exists
in the imaginary world of women’s magazines. And to paint her own face
on fashion images with rough brushstrokes or to create a different
environment with a few lines, altering the atmosphere. This is her way
of “disturbing”, by upsetting the flawless female print universe with
her shifts. In every image she looks for something that will “touch”
her. She starts with tactile stimuli, i.e. with some textures that will
catch her attention. It can be a body line, a garment, a look, a
gesture, a slogan. It can be the way a face is made up, the way
someone’s hair is arranged. Without any strategic preparation, she
intervenes aggressively, without testing, taking direct risks and
interfering with the image. In her practice she endorses and pursues
impetuous immediacy.
With this exhibition, Irini Karayannopoulou
reflects on female sensuality from a metaphysical perspective, while
negotiating female emancipation in her own, unapologetic way. The artist
paints directly on the pages of vintage magazines. She paints on
photographs she discovers in old erotic postcards. She then enlarges
these images and paints them again until she runs out of material. In
the Hotberg series, some appear as prints, some become moving images,
and others accumulate in collages, as endless possibilities for the
artist’s own experimentation.
So we can even see Hotberg as a
political commentary on the uses and appropriation of female images by
women; as a possibility of desire and transformation, since images play a
fundamental role in the construction and transformation of subjects.
2.A celebration of images
Hotberg
is a celebration. Irini Karayannopoulou’s protagonists inevitably
acquire new passports as they undergo new transformations. All kinds of
possibilities are unfolding, being tested, as the process expands.
Forgotten, anonymous sex dolls of decades past are alchemically
transformed into powerful, sensual figures who take on the new roles
assigned to them by the artist. Hotberg acts as a subtle portal to
emancipation. Passing through Hotberg leads to another dimension where
anything is possible. In such emancipation through images nothing is
impossible.
In her collages, the artist explores the hagiography of
professional strippers and gamblers. She obsessively collects
advertising slogans from Las Vegas casino listings and juxtaposes the
promises of wealth and prosperity established through marketing from the
pages of the obsolete publications she has collected.
The same
exhibition features her intervention in a series of tiny rare postcards
printed in France in the 1950s depicting topless ladies posing
lasciviously. In her findings, one of them is holding a glass of
champagne; another is holding a mirror, or a bouquet of flowers. The
artist “steals” their identities and re-paints their faces, replacing
their eyes with a mask. As she gives them back their anonymity, she
enters another dimension, slips and shifts into another moment in time.
Her
dark oil paintings of faceless torrents of hair intermingle with masked
creatures courting each other as they interface in an almost
supernatural way. As a valuable part of her practice, these paintings
serve as mementos from the realm of the unconscious, where the artist
often immerses herself. Hotberg is a poetic transformation of women’s
imagery, turning the viewer’s visual unconscious into an image.
3.Sensory capsule: Hypnothèque
Hypnothèque*
is a sensual video capsule where women are suspended in a state between
piety and unconsciousness, desire and death. They close their eyes and
engage in the dance steps that lead them to transformation. Where there
is tenderness, something is left unattended. Tenderness invites into a
state of suspended animation, a moment of agony. This is where the care
or the real pain comes next. A multitude of strange but sensual
incidents occur in full morphological fluidity. As painting transforms
these images from still to moving, faces blur, eyes close, identities
dissolve. Hypnothèque is an act of visual, sonic, rhythmic meditation;
an act of transition to immaterial and perpetual transformation. Writing
about “Impressionism”, the Franco-Uruguayan poet Jules Laforgue writes
something that seems valuable to such an approach: “The visual arts
derive from the eye and only from the eye”. The eye that desires,
thinks, feels and acts.
*
Hypnothèque is a “handmade animation”, the result of collaboration
between the artist and French editor Sandrine Cheyrol. The soundtrack
was composed by psychiatrist and sound artist Christos Kalafatis.
translated by Angeliki Kouroutzi
