Coitus Interruptus - exhibition

Curator: Marina Athanassiadou
Artists: Rania Emanouilidou – paintings & Mariana Iganataki – drawings

The civil society initiative Public Room in the period of 10th September – 10th October 2008 is official host of the exhibition Coitus Interruptus,  presenting the artworks of Mariana Iganataki and Rania Emanouilidou. Curator of the exhibition is Marina Athanassiadou.
This is considered as a first individual presentation of Greek artists in Macedonia.

Mariana Iganataki and Rania Emanouilidou  are considered as one of the most talented young contemporary artists from Greece. In the last five years, both artists are actively participating on group and solo exhibitions and art fairs in the country and abroad including the last presentation on Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and Mediterranean in Bari 2008.

Rania Emanouilidou - paintings

Rania Emmanouilidou’s  painting concentrates on pictorial references in which female figure as a focal emblem supports the main narrative structure. The painting compositions are presented almost like theatrical scenes that impose uncanny, perhaps disquieting situations, in which the irrational, impossible or vague aspect of the presentation acts as compensation in relation to the realistic elaboration of the image. The main characteristic of such places is that they are usually dwelled by the double version of the central figure, a double on stage. If in Emmanouilidou’s painting all figures are schizoid representations of the same person, then similarly all representational actions are perpetual repetitions, versions of the same situation in which the viewer is also asked to participate.

The “intrinsic viewer” of such works is the one defined by the implied discord of the protagonist. If we understand the stage actions of Emmanouilidou’s heroes as vague gestures amidst borderline places, it is because they reflect us in the form of diverse imaginary subjectivities. How we participate in the suggested drama of actions and implied intentions is the secret to the images-enigmas Emmanouilidou poses. We are addressed in various ways, by figures staring directly in our eyes, figures posing to us, avoiding our eyes and challenging our voyeuristic curiosity with gestures that hide away from us the face that is portrayed. In this respect, the rhetoric of concealment and disclosure, no matter how self-referring it is –usually, paintings have an autobiographical point of reference– is endorsed by the other person’s invitation while the point of reference is the viewer himself.

Precisely because such narrative scenarios presented to us are dwelled almost exclusively by women, they are eventually recorded as purely gendered places. Does, therefore, the artist create neo-feminist, “revealing” places of female sensitivity or post-feminist, playful places of female masquerade, a “show of femininity”, the production of her own self as “a female overstatement”? That is the main question in Emmanouilidou’s work. As Marry Ann Doane says “the mere fact that we can say a woman uses her sexuality or her body to have specific gains means a lot –not because a man cannot do so with his body, but rather because he does not need to do so. The masquerade calls for double representation; it consists of the overstatement of femininity paraphernalia” . In light of this, the viewer is invited to take a stance, by defining such surplus of femininity either as a femme fatale’s vice that scandalizes, or as a representation of a woman’s body by a woman who in fact as a replica, as a construct, deregulates the hegemonically male structure of seeing.

by Sotirios Bahtsetzis

Mariana Ignataki - drawings

The element of controversy that permeates Mariana Ignatakis’  drawings in the form of connective tissue refers to implied psychological occurrences of violence. This element is often concealed with the use of particular patterns that refer to narratives connected with childhood and sex life experiences. It would probably be wrong to purport the artist’s work has an autobiographical tone, in which “she merely tries to manage" personal experiences, even though this case is not excluded altogether.

The element of battle carried out obviously in gendered categories should be defined as an anthropological component. The recurrent pictorial symbols (mask, animal, severed limbs) are not simply a personal mythology fetish, but they assume a rather allegorical quality particularly so when involved in special directions-narratives. In such images, the element of contradiction is prevalent, as seemingly normal and predictable situations are negated due to the distinct mental tone they manage to foment. Perhaps, the most distinctive aspect of such negating contradictions is the way in which the artist deals with desire as an ambivalent, constantly intermittent, strangely bisexual direction of looks counteracting any aspect of voyeuristic desire. In the perspective of inter-pictorial communication, the looks never cross one another, but are always cast on parts of the “other's” body, while the object of desire sometimes has a woman’s face, other times a man’s face, attesting to the potential for its being re-signified.

The concept of the asexual spoken of by the anthropologist Kath Weston, whose strategic aim is to allow for the interpretations of both or multiple sexes , is obviously corroborated at the borderline of vagueness in the desire implied in Ignatakis’ works. The anthropological aspect of the controversy not between the sexes but of the subjectifications of performatively dealing with desire becomes an ontological convention of inherent sex multiplicity, a fact easily perceived in her work.

by Sotirios Bahtsetzis