Greece in USA is launched with a report-cry for the imprisoned body
22/01/2021 Athinorama.gr
Forty-three influential artistic voices of today were carefully selected by Sozita Goudouna for the kick-off event of Greece in USA, the non-profit platform she founded and directs as a tool to promote and represent the contemporary Greek art scene in the other side of the Atlantic. The group exhibition is presented at John Jay College of CUNY City University of New York.
Subject of the exhibition “Right to Silence?” is the prison body and the invisible subject, the penitentiary policies currently in place and the pathogenesis of detention systems, directions that are being interpreted in the light of pandemic and incarceration.
Artists associated with Greece and enjoying international recognition (who live in Greece, Cyprus or are expatriates in America) are presented through the platform. Giorgos Drivas, Steven Antonakos, Eva Giannakopoulou and Panos Sklavenitis, Dionysis Kavallieratos and Maria Adelman are some of the participants in the first exhibition (the second one is scheduled to take place in February, with the other forty present in February). The selected body of projects reflects different practices, giving more priority to new media, efficiency and interdisciplinary approaches.
“A component of the prison is the silence, the silencing of the prisoner’s life, often of justice, pain or political expression,” said acclaimed curator and artist Sozita Goudouna in the accompanying text of the exhibition.
“The group report examines the penitentiary system to see if art and aesthetics can break the silence on critical political issues, such as mass imprisonment and criminal justice reform, corruption and ill-treatment in prisons. gender rights and the rights of minors. “The exhibition’s concerns also extend to the conditions of self-confinement we experience, examining the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual pressure and the ways we are affected in isolation.”
