Life on Venus
Solo Exhibition
19.03.2022 – 02.04.2022
Polana Institute
Warsaw, Poland
As a native Italian deity, Venus had no myths of her own and therefore had to borrow those of Aphrodite, the greek goddess of love. Through her she became identified with other foreign goddesses who specialized in fertility issues and the quest for erotic satisfaction. In antiquity, planet Venus was the star of both Aphrodite and Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of war and sexuality. It seems that the different goddesses of love shared their myths but also a planet.
At first glance, our nearest neighbor seems to be an unlikely candidate for life. With a 475c surface temperature and an atmosphere filled with sulfuric acid, the environment of Venus is thought to be a toxic one. Yet, around 60 km above the ground, the Venusian atmosphere seems to be more hospitable. Lately there is evidence of unusual chemical substances, the presence of which is impossible to explain with conventional chemistry. Are these signals evidence of life? The Venus Life Finder Mission intends to answer this and other questions with a series of flights that will study Venus in situ starting May 2023.
Back on planet Earth and more precisely in Athens, Irini Karayannopoulou draws inspiration from collective sexual fantasies, lusty dreams and the basic human need not to feel alone, both in and outside our planetary system. The forbidden worlds of faraway stars, only accessible through our imagination and via sci fi cinematography, are quite similar to the universe of sexual wishes; although all things hot and spicy are allowed in theory, in real life most of them are impossible to reach.
The artist paints directly on found images of erotic content. She discovers low key sexy photographs and uses them as her canvas, applying paint over entwined bodies which, consequently, become parts of her painting compositions. At the same time, the pictured bodies remain naked and in search of sexual bliss. However, the unauthorised act of covering parts of their skin with paint, amplifies their forbidden, illicit aura. Finally, these adult encounters become the background for a new work that contains both the sexual act and what has become of it in the hands of the artist.
IK photographs every step of the painting process and creates a stop motion painting animation (signed by Twin Automat). The film reveals and conceals erotic bodies who were captured on paper, frozen in time. In Life On Venus, they are in motion, reactivated, the real protagonists of these automatic painting episodes. In her own, quasi psychedelic mode, IK abducts and revisits printed erotica while she negotiates her position as a female artist -and as a woman- in a male dominated world of desire for sale.
Irini audaciously continues the erotic scenes that she discovers in erotic magazines, in quest of an alternative ‘’happy ending’’. She thus invades and dominates a world that is normally perceived as raw and tasteless. As she humorously deconstructs the preconceptions of sexual representation as we know it, she presents us with a new corporeality, one that is actually governed by Venus -or Aphrodite, or Ishtar. Irini introduces us to a new kind of voyeurism that praises sexual liberation from a feminin perspective. In her non-standard portrayal of impulse and pleasure, sensuality reigns and sex becomes a first-class mystery again.
Suddenly, under these new circumstances, desire can become real sweat and planets may seem less distant.
