"Who Doesn’t Like a Good Old Story?"

Aikaterini Gegisian

Kalfayan Galleries 11 Haritos Street, Athens

Opening: 21 February 2012 / 20.00 – 22.00

Duration of Exhibition: 21 February – 31 March 2012

On Tuesday, 21 February 2012, Kalfayan Galleries, 11 Haritos Street, Athens, between 20:00 and 22:00, will present the opening of Aikaterini Gegisian’s solo exhibition “Who Doesn’t Like a Good Old Story?” with new work based on images of Soviet Armenia collected from commemorative photo albums and tourist guides dating from the 50s to the 60s and salvaged from flea markets and second hand bookstores in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

As images of Soviet modernity have become, over the past 20 years, another modality in consumer nostalgia and are treated as “exotic” variations of the modern, works presented in this exhibition react precisely against this impulse to consume the “world as image,” reflecting instead on the construction of historical memory and the representation of space.

In the series of collages titled “A little bit too much, A little bit too late,” archival images of the countryside and the city are juxtaposed to details of dustbins, lampposts, playgrounds, street signs and gas pipes that furnish the contemporary urban environment of Yerevan. The works act as memorials that commemorate the modern as a distant past and at the same time, turn into central emblems of a new landscape.

In “Who doesn’t like a good old story?” a work consisting of two panels of postcards, archival images presenting a manicured Yerevan are juxtaposed to a geometrical assembly of close-up of gas meters that are dotted in the contemporary urban landscape. This contrast between the old and dysfunctional is also evident in “Listening In,” a photographic triptych that focuses on details of domestic spaces.

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Aikaterini Gegisian (b. 1976, Thessaloniki) lives and works in London. In 2010 she began her studies toward a PhD at the University of Westminster in London. Her work has been presented in solo and group shows and Biennales of contemporary art in Greece and abroad. Awards and grants: Arts & Humanities Research Council, Arts Council England, Visiting Arts, Picture This Moving Image Agency, Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art. Works in collections: State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), private collections in Greece and abroad. The multi-faceted work of Gegisian negotiates the plasticity of the moving image, sound, photography and text, focusing on the relationship between space, memory and narrative. She is represented by Kalfayan Galleries (Athens-Thessaloniki).