"Parallel Crisis"
Yannis Karpouzis
With the support: Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports
Duration: October 8, 2021-February 20, 2022
Venue: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections
In the framework of the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2021
Each animal is defined by a blow
Heracletus, late 6th century BC
After the year 2010, a destructive financial crisis has struck Greece, dismantling an already wrecked social balance and driving the population into a state of collective depression. A condition of stagnation has been ruling the capital city of Athens since. The project Parallel Crisis is a creative document that addresses the ways in which the medium of photography is capable of describing this socio-economic event. An uneasy affinity develops between the property of photography to produce events of immobilized time and the negation of social time that widespread crisis instigates. What photography is really recording in Greece is a certain condition of numbness: subjects without the possibility of development, crippling unemployment, confined migrants, neighborhoods reigned by silence and fear. In these conditions, the medium suspends time that has already been stalled and imprisons subjects that are already confined. Photography itself is conceived as a metaphor, a mirror of the financial crisis or even further, the immobilized time of photographs intersects with the negated time of the pictures’ subjects (referents). Parallel Crisis is in the end, a project about a relation; the relation between a social crisis and a still image (a photograph).
Yannis Karpouzis (GR)
Yannis Karpouzis is a Greek based artist working with Photography, Film and Video. He has studied to the Technical university of Athens (Diploma – Thesis about modern art and the Bauhaus), Copenhagen’s DTU (Erasmus), the Fine Art School of Athens (Master of Fine Arts) and the Architecture school of Athens (Master in cultural theory). He has been awarded the Newcomer film-maker award by the Greek Film Center in 22nd Thessaloniki film festival for his hybrid genre essay film, “Nikos Karouzos: poems on the tape recorder”. He has also received the literature youth award by “Anagnostis” magazine for his book “Near the End of Time” and the Descubrimientos prize in PHotoEspana 2015 and the Portfolio Review Prize in Athens Photo Festival 2016 for the photography project “Parallel Crisis”. Parallel Crisis and other works have been presented to major Greek and international institutions (New museum of New York – Benaki Museum, Rencontres d’Arles, Contemporary art museum of Thessaloniki, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, PHotoEspana, Magnum agency, MedPhoto festival, Photo-Beijing). Yannis is an author and researcher of structural and post-structural methodology on aesthetic theories of cinema, photography and art history and a major contributor to the Greek photography hub Aldebaran.
More info at photobiennale-greece.gr