Andreas Lolis
The Garden Sees
July 6, 2017–September 17, 2017The Athens Concert Hall, Athens
Andreas Lolis participates in the exhibition “The Garden Sees” at The Athens Concert Hall, curated by Anna Kafetsi.
Exhibition entitled The Garden sees (the title of one of the Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience by Odysseas Elytis) is presented in the Garden of the Athens Concert Hall (Megaron) and the so-called Service Yard.
The history of the Garden is more or less known. It originated from the segmentation of a public space, the Eleftherias Park, from which it is separated by fencing, thus creating an enclosed area of 22 acres, a protected and guarded “shelter” of particular natural beauty, on the boundary between private and public space. The new underground buildings of the Megaron lie hidden in a considerable depth under the Garden’s surface.
The Service Yard is a sheltered area of particular industrial character at the garage entrance with direct access from Kokkali street and originally intended for waste recycling and bulk cargo loading.
The initial stimulus for the exhibition is the enclosed world of the Garden and its hidden secret. It is also the relations that are born in its own body, cut off from its natural continuity in the public space, with areas of reverie and sociability, with hiding places, trails and open green areas. And it is also its visual or even invisible contact with introverted, silent public buildings-landmarks surrounding it, such as the American Embassy, public hospitals and, of course, the Megaron itself, for which it is an exit into the light.
The exhibition The Garden sees, without the theological or metaphysical connotations that could be read in the borrowed title, seeks the connection -the conversation- of the Garden with the social space and the City, the transcendence of the boundaries of its physical reality and its opening to imagination. The Garden, as a seeing subject, emerges from its closed physical self-sufficiency, it recalls collective memories and experiences from the public space, listens to human stories, creates new poetic relationships and fictional openings. It becomes a place of images. Each of them, through its innumerable perspectives, invites us to surpass the boundary, to experience the promenade or the contemplative moments in the Garden as continuous passages from reality to fiction.
The works in the exhibition, installations, sculptures, texts-sculptures, video projections, luminous and sound works, will be shown during the day, especially after sunset, until late at night. On the lawn and on trees, between foliage, on free screens on the ground or directly on the pavements, as well as in the utilitarian spaces of the Service Yard, the works converse in a light, playful and poetic manner with the natural environment. Emotions, associations, memories, desires meet and intersect revealing an interior garden of self-awareness and encounter.
The search of light, a broad metaphor and connective tissue of the works, lies always at the center of the exhibition, visible or guessed. A solar and moonlit search.
