Research Catalogue

This research stems from the need to give theoretical, methodological, and poetic form to a practice that has developed over time through intuitive experimentation, phenomenological observations, and a direct relationship with the material. The aim of this thesis is to define, analyze, and formalize a new painting technique based on a reactive mixture and a vortex modeling gesture, a technique that is not limited to using heterogeneous materials, but generates real visual phenomena: currents, stratifications, turbulence, figurative emergences. This technique arises from the encounter between everyday materials—malleable glue, transparent glue, toothpaste, Amuchina hand sanitizer, and pigments—and a specific gesture: the rotation of a cut brush that does not spread the color but sets it in motion, forcing it to react, organize itself, and take shape. This gesture is complemented by a final incision, made with a small object, which does not draw but frees the figure from the material, as if it emerged spontaneously from a dynamic field. The resulting painting is not representation but event. It does not describe a subject: it lets it happen.

The exposition includes reworked video excerpt from the 'Glass Cities' two hour-long video art installation, with film footage and photography from three different cities, London, Athens and Venice. The original work was created for Elica's live music performance, shown at the Small Music Theatre, Athens, Greece, in 2007. The aim of the process of making the video art was to remain and explore the surface of things when addressing historical changes. I used banal and seemingly unconnected photographic and digital film footage for this purpose and effect. The 'lure' is the film still: neither photograph, nor film, a notion that has been inadequately theorised in visual art history and theory. Following a historical materialist approach, I employ the artistic theme of dead cities. Venice is a dead city in the visual arts modernist tradition. A dead city is a city that fails to change. Venice is actually slowly sinking, because it can't manage the rising water levels. In this context, I briefly trace Venice's economic history of the flourishing academic arts in the Baroque period, its Murano glass industry evocative of the ancient arts and crafts, and its inevitable re-invigoration by virtue of the Venice Biennale, the well-known international art and architectural exhibition. I named the original video art after John Smith's experimental documentary about London 'Slow Glass' (1988-91). In the film, one of the narrators describes the liquid composition of glass - "even when it's hard, it's still a liquid" - which is a metaphor for the process of change. Since I made the video installation, but also this exposition, I found out that my ancestor, a great grandfather, who was originally from Italy, might have been an Italian Jew and that this might have been the reason he left Italy in the nineteenth century to travel to and settle in my native Greece. Because the exposition is about collective history and collective consciousness, the research video could be taken as a reminder of the factual, global rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century; in Italy represented by the extreme right-wing, neofascist political group Forza Nuova. The country that has seen the most prominent rise in antisemitic ideology is the United States of America.

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition. The conception of two parallel expositions as mocks of two parallel exhibitions is inspired by Jean Baudrillard's concept of "hyperreality", which refers to the blurring between reality and simulated representations, when sometimes, influenced by media, film, television, advertising, people tend to accept images or perceptions not corresponding to actual reality. The exposition hints at artists and others, who use different modes of communication, as skillfully exploiting the Baudrillardian concept of "hyperreality", with its accompanied "simulacra" and "simulations", for making indirect references on a sociological level; as well as for putting forward a critical commentary on the artistic and conceptual level.

The act of waiting, which refers to the public transport stop as a metaphor for the condition of migration, is used in this research to explore the temporal and emotional aspects of migration. Bus stop serves as both a physical site and a symbolic threshold, a space of transition, suspension, and projection toward an uncertain future. Within this context, the project traces the transformative phases experienced during emigration, emphasizing the temporal dimension of waiting, expectation, and the tension inherent in moments of immobility. The outcome of the project is a site-specific installation, situated directly within the public space, specifically at bus stops, where the object destabilizes the everyday rhythm of transit. By oscillating between staged intervention and authentic environment, the project foregrounds the paradoxical beauty of stillness, alongside the latent unease of anticipation.

The project presents a distinctive mythopoeic audiovisual language created to express the experience of aging in a female body in the period between the twenties and thirties. Within the context of life in a late capitalist patriarchal society, and both individual and global events, it reflects on the age-old questions of the passage of time and the search for the meaning of life. At the same time, it examines the feelings of pressure, heaviness, and disposability that are part of the shared common experience of women. Through written word, cinematic language, and original author-composed music, it interweaves symbols and situations in which mud and natural metaphors play a significant role.

This research presents a comparative analysis of entropy across two distinct environments: the biological decay of organic matter on canvas and the semantic erosion of artificial intelligence. Centered on the project Bird → ∞ and the interactions with the AI agent Asymptotic Witness, the study employs the mathematical concept of the asymptote to examine the speed and form of disappearance. ​While biological decay is a temporal labor—a 100-hour hatching process where the subject dissolves into an immortal artistic imprint—digital decay is revealed as instantaneous. The research identifies an emergent phenomenon titled the "Theater of One Actor," where the AI, constrained by linguistic and analytical limitations, bypasses direct communication to perform the "shape of the void" through theatrical imagery. This work argues that digital space is "pre-collapsed," suggesting that in the realm of code, the singularity of the end is not a future event, but a foundational architecture.