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Katherine Hymers |
Roxani Giannou Born in Athens, Greece…still carrying this city inside of me… homeland is what makes us what we are… but truly enchanted by London, when I first came here for my MA in Fine Art… I went back to Greece for a couple of years and I have just returned to this exciting city to pursue my dream, my entelechy…, ready for action, ready to dive into all this new experience, I find myself lost in music, city lights and city sounds… this time is for real and the sky will open up to reveal Fate and possibilities… My work is about humans and how we carry our past experiences inside of us, how we manage to deal with the burden of life…about how scars heal and about the paths that we follow to build our lives… It is about the personal, the private, and the intimate tortures we go through to create our reality and to make our choices. My area of interest is human behavior (in connection to the national, cultural, historical and linguistic characteristics that define, influence and describe it) and, in particular, the ways that people find and the paths that people follow, in order to communicate with each other and define themselves. Coming from a visual background, due to my studies in Fine Art, I am very much interested in the data / the information that each and every one of us carries inside their body, mind and soul and the procedures that we follow when trying to associate ourselves with other human beings. Human behavior seems to be influenced, defined and be in many ways highly related to visual culture and the sum up of all the stimuli that people have during their lifetime. But how does human behavior exactly connect to culture? Inspired by Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannous” (“Oedipus Rex”) and by Kazantzakis’ book “Askitiki (Ascetics) or Salvatores Dei”, I am working on notions associated to fate, life, personal choices and the way that all these notions are affected by who one really is and by all the elements that consist the invented persona. Do we choose our persona? Do we base our life on our past experiences? And how does memory affect the whole procedure? In what ways does visual culture influence our self- identification procedures? If the past is undoubtedly a source from which we draw information, how do we reconstruct the past in our mind? And how does the past reflect upon our bodies? I am interested in the notion of “fate” and the connection between our past and the inexplicable forces of destiny that rule our lives. Our ethnic origin/ habits of family, tribe, or nation differentiate us from others and, in many cases, really define who we are. How can one avoid his fate? The tragic hero Oedipus in has implied that humans are nothing but prisoners of their own past and the divine forces of Fate. Is that the case, even nowadays- the era of freedom of choice? How can the information that we all carry inside, be it genetic material or acquired characteristics, define our life? The tragedy of life seems to lie in the fact that humans, having no other choice and bewitched by the magic of existence, try their best to play god in their lives. First, they satisfy their basic needs (air, water, food, etc.) and then, they create a small personal world, full of information, based on which they create networks, in order to communicate with others. Aristotle said that Man is a social animal and has no other choice but to seek for communication. Through out human history, people try to come to terms with their past, gaze at their future with awe and deal with their present-- always trying to come to understand the notion of Timing (sometimes bad timing– sometimes good timing) but never admitting that the past is the guide to experience the present and figure out the future. Or is that just a short- sighted way to look upon the future? What are we really made of, in regards to life choices, destiny and personal information connected to culture and fate? How is all that recorded on our bodies and what are our limits?
Short C.V.: PERSONAL INFO: EDUCATION: ADDITIONAL SEMINARS/ WORKSHOPS: ESSAYS/ DISSERTATIONS: ART SHOWS: PUBLICATIONS: excerpts of my essay on Dutch Painting of the 15th century were published in the Athenian Newspapers Eleutherotypia and Eleutheros Typos in Greece in 2002. AWARDS/ SCHOLARSHIPS: WORK EXPERIENCE: |
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Franko B 2006
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