Tipping Point

With the financial support and under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture

Contemporary art is neither imitation nor construction according to the desires of instinct and good taste. It is a process of expression.

14 artists, seeking the depths of the silent and solitary experience upon which culture and the exchange of ideas are based, will initiate a dialogue with the audience where the visible trace of the sound of the internal equivalent that awakens things within us will be the translation of thought, perhaps even a copy of the reality dictated by a predetermined and unchanging nature. The human nature.

Man and the way human culture has evolved its physical behaviour into a sexual character. Sexual harassment, common, everyday, deeply ingrained in us, will be the conceptual axis, the basis and the primary material of this exhibition.

By simultaneously developing a dialogue with subjectivity, each artist as well as the spectator will have the opportunity for conversation and interaction. This process will give the spectator the ability to discover, decode, and interpret the works in their own way, to identify with them, to disagree, to remember, and perhaps even to become angry. They will follow a path within the objective space-time in which the exhibition will guide them and gradually enter into a perceptual exercise where they will not only delve into the “processed” phenomena in detail.

This exhibition functions as a plot device, reversing the course of the narrative.

We started by going back to the source, the information that existed within us, our experience from generation to generation, but backwards.

Starting from the past and reaching the present, the works of art in the exhibition will tell stories, stories about how we live in this world.

Echoes, insinuations, repetitions, and connections between today and just yesterday, of sexual harassment. Is this phenomenon processed enough?

The exhibition does not aim to provide a solution, it wants to convey a message. It observes the world. It creates and poses. Because the visual impression is always powerful.

This is the material. It contains the whole spectrum of life, which includes violence. The spirit reads itself in the works, which are nothing but sets of images, but they guide us through these images, and these images come to life, perhaps even consciousness, which is based in a world that exists.

This is what art does when it doesn’t stay within stereotypes: it enters directly into us.

All of this may be so foreign to us, yet at the same time we understand it perfectly, deeply and immediately.

Not with the mind. It is an understanding of life in a different way.

It is not something like: “Here is the answer”.

It is an offering. The fact that it raises questions is the offering.

The world and our body are one thing, we are intertwined, we participate in the generality of the Sensible, we are unfoldings of the same flesh.

According to Greek legislation and Law 3769/2009, sexual harassment is defined as “any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical behaviour of a sexual nature, with the purpose or effect of offending the dignity of a person, especially by creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating or offensive environment.”

When does a symbolic code of seeking love, flirting, cross the line? When does it transform? When does a smile not mean “go ahead”?

In this exhibition, works of art will be the framework, a frame of reference and recording of what is happening, to the extent that it is still happening. Without racial characteristics, without biased views, and without discrimination.

Just like the Rubik’s Cube, with its countless different arrangements of its sides, so is Sexual Harassment multidimensional in form and interpretation.

Just as visual artists aim to communicate with their audience, art that portrays movement also seeks to raise awareness about the relationship of Sexual Harassment as yet another remake of contemporary society and its approach towards it.

What is the fundamental condition that raises such questions? Well, it is the personal attitude of each one of us, as we, the human species, by definition, have a substantial answer to the question.

Flirting becomes sexual harassment when it is unwanted and persistent. “No” means “no”. “Maybe” does not mean “yes”. It cannot mean anything more than what it says, “maybe”.

Of course, the artworks will have a material clarity, but they will also be an excavation into the heart of the unexpected ways in which human culture has evolved its bodily behaviour of a sexual nature.

Sociological and psychological criteria do not provide a specific solution, but the Tipping Point exhibition will try to record Sexual Harassment.

All the means available to artists are applied to it, from painting to sculpture and multimedia, through which the exploration of the self results in the consumption of life’s components, memory, the concept of biographical time, but mainly the inherent need in all humans to define themselves, and their sexual behaviour.

The curatorial practice in this exhibition aims to recognize, through the works of 14 artists from Greece and Sweden, the violent disturbance that successively lays the foundations of a developing post-conflict society, and to record the concern and generate possibilities that can redefine a better future through new rules and practices, for the audience.

Participating artists

 Perfect Relation Zone (Sweden)

Yiannis Ziogas (Greece)

Mary Roussioti (Greece)

Voula Ferentinou (Greece)

Μaria Andonatou( Greece)

Maria Schina (Greece)

Aikaterini Kriezi ( Greece)

Lydia Margaroni ( Greece)

Anthi Zahou(Greece)

Martha Tsiara ( Greece)

Elias Papanicolaou (Greece)

Maria Korombili, Natalia Kartsonaki, Eleni Asprogiani, Lina Spyratou (Greece)