A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas

“The fourth chapter, The Sea of Departures, is the moment where social space is created. It starts with an image of a worker sculpting rocks – the way it is collaged it’s almost like he sculpts an ancient theatre. Performing the everyday. There’s also the relationship between men and women, the individual and the group, in the diaspora of living.

“The Sea of Actions is the moment of labour.  It’s about where men and women work to produce things.  Then The Sea of Waves – waters starts merging into each other. I slowly allow water to take over. This allows things to metamorphose. This is the moment where I say that nothing is fixed. I might have been constructing things but things can always change. The water has this power in my narrative.

“In the last chapter, The Sea of Images, is the moment of diaspora – we are broken into pieces. We expand into the cosmos. The narrative, documentary aspect of the work becomes abstract. It’s literally a sea of images. The last chapter contains all other chapters. You have a kind of circular narrative.”

 

Sea of Departures
Sea of Departures

 

 

Sea of Images
Sea of Images

 

The Sea of Echoes, Actions and Waves are in Venice. The other four – Reflections, Passions, Departures and Images – are at a concurrent exhibition in Athens. In the Greek exhibition extra features like a film extend the narrative further.

Gegisian considers the two exhibitions as being two parts of a whole. She sees it as necessary to have the collages visible alongside the artwork to make the features of size, quality and physicality of the works apparent.  

The curator of the Greek exhibition at Kalfayan Galleries, Dr Kostas Prapoglou, says: “It struck me that most images represent geometric forms, sometimes in a clear formulaic sense and other times in a more abstract way. The viewer not only travels through the emerging imagery but also unlocks a narrative that echoes Gegisian’s family past.”

 

Sea of Waves
Sea of Waves

 

He continues: “Viewers not only enjoy the visual experience of the works on show but also find themselves being part of them, like some of the characters in Gegisian’s collages. With the recurring phenomenon of migration shocking public opinion on a daily basis, Gegisian’s visual language could not be more topical.”

Through the gentle overlaying of images Gegisian moves the photographs beyond their original catalogue-bound confines. They rise and fall with the tides of the book as the narrative floats, like a message in a bottle, from the shores of one time and place to another.

Find more of Aikaterini Gegisian’s work here.

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