Press Release: Adelos

Adelos, the invisible, floating island, is cut off from the grounds of history and wanders in an archipelago of temporalities. If you follow the old Egnatia Route, the ancient passage that for ages connected Asia to Europe, you may arrive at Adelos.

Like a retrospective traveller in contemporary Greece, aiming at discovering the unseen fold of places, Kalara attempts to reveal what insists there as a phantom. Through her artistic practice, she reconstructs the encountered spaces, expressing the historical anxiety that dwells in them.

In these images, one follows the fabrication of a spatial entirety, constituted by fragmentary and un-composed pieces of marble, some amorphous, some shaped. In this cosmos made of marble, ancient forms reappear persistently, albeit as copies or residues of an original. Here, structures are erected as remnants: whatever is produced is being added, not in order to complete a building, but in order to make it more ruinous. It is a temporal construction-site where one is watching the constant genesis and repetition of a ruin.

Yorgos Ikarus Babasakis, Notes from the Repealing of Time

– on the occasion of Nadia Kalara’s talk in Beton 7, and as part of her exhibition Adelos –

An archaeology of the present. Landscapes that derive from particular time periods but become lost/last well into the vastness of now, the uncharted present.  The sacred and the base in tandem, in a dialectic exchange, a conversation, but also a game around the incongruousness of that encounter (reminiscent of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the anatomy table of Isidore Ducasse).

The Tropics freeze. The sky remains the sky, pale blue, rarefied, beauteous – but where? In what time? The sky is now a background to ruins, its music is the humor that makes tragedy more bearable, if not explicable.

Willie Deville heartrendingly singing the blues amid the blue plumes of his cigarette smoke, “and heaven stood still…” And when the sky stands still. time, too, stands still, it freezes.

Time freezes. Magritte knew how to read Hegel. Time freezes. Nadia Kalara knows how to read Magritte/Hegel but also Hegel/Heidegger [Adelos/ Delos, Un/Manifest] reminding us that clarity may well entail a profound disquiet – one that (the artist intentionally) wishes to be disquieting.  I am here, but where is that? Nadia Kalara is in a disquiet state as she directs her gaze (in the plural!) first to space and, then, like those desperates in Chris Marker’s masterpiece  La jetée (1962), to time. To a time that is frozen, by the artist, and made disquieting in order to make us pick up again the thread of reflection.

Yorgos Fraklas writes: “Heidegger’s reminder is that the thinking being is first of all a dweller. I identify with a place. As a thinker I do not belong somewhere and I appropriate all that is somewhere. But as a dweller I belong, I feel at home, out of place, I am myself appropriated by some other thing, and this, before I start to think.”

Guy Debord writes: “Man, ‘the negative being who is only to the extent that he abolishes Being’ is identical with time.”

As I look at the works and listen to Nadia Kalara speak about Rovert Smithson and George Kubler and The Shape of Time, why is my mind all the while stuck on the word ‘disquiet’, why can’t I stop thinking that the artist is, quite intentionally, using a discursive ruse to initially reassure us so that then, we almost mechanically pick up disquietude, the way we pick out hat from the coat rack, and take it home with us?  Why, as I jot down in the Moleskin phrases by Kalara and the titles of works that she mentions, out of nowhere (yes, but which nowhere?) Cy Twombly comes to mind and his penchant for using titles borrowed by forgotten lyric poets of antiquity? And, finally, why do I consistently, unfailingly, associate what I hear uttered by the artist with music pieces (also, song titles and even the name of Blixa’s band itself) by Einstürzende Neubauten?

Zissis Kotionis, Then and now: genealogical agenda to the programmatic work of Dimitris Pikionis

The desire of architecture to affiliate itself with artistic practice, has a symmetrically opposite variant. Namely, the desire of artistic practice to grasp space and structure it in the ways of architecture. In Nadia Kalara’s project titled Adelos (‘unmanifest’), the realm is described of an imaginary island which is not rooted in the earth under the sea – like Delos island – but floats and roams, cut off from history.

It comes as no surprise that this severance from history is signified by means of the juxtaposition of historical fragments in a meta-historical assemblage. The material of the assemblage is not made of architectural artifacts and fragments from archaeological sites but of fragments mainly from scrapyards of construction materials where copies of archaeological fragments are sold as décor for the living rooms and gardens of newly constructed homes. One of Kalara’s works in the Adelos series has the emblematic title, I Would Wish to Build. We might take this as a reversal of the will of Pikionis’ subject who, in the process of building, might have said, I Would Wish to Paint. The common ground is a will, a desire, for the impossible, which abets and fuels a practice of inverted means, and is aligned with its project of frustrating desire.