ISLAND HOPING 

CITY OF ATHENS ARTS CENTRE

 

From 9 November 2018 to 3 February 2019 

 

FREE ENTRANCE

The new photographic project by visual artist Christina Dimitriadis was introduced to the art-loving public through the exhibition ISLAND HOPING / ΑΤΟΠΟΙ ΤΟΠΟΙ, hosted by the City of Athens Culture, Sports & Youth Organisation at the City of Athens Arts Center from November 9, 2018, to February 3, 2019.

The exhibition marked Dimitriadis’ first solo presentation at a public cultural institution in Greece. Its title plays on the term island hopping, through which Dimitriadis explores the imagery and mythos of the Mediterranean. While the Mediterranean is a geographic entity, it is, above all, an imagined reality where an appreciation of beauty and collective spirit is deeply rooted. Though often depicted as a cultural space, the Mediterranean’s historical and political reality is more complex.

In these aesthetically structured photographs, islands and rocky islets emerge from the sea as undefined landscapes. The rugged coastlines of the Aegean, with their striking morphology and harshness, evoke mixed emotions, from optimism and hope to uncertainty. Dimitriadis transforms this landscape from welcoming to barren. The series began with a black-and-white photograph of Helgoland, an island in the North Sea with a unique political and geographic history that represents her family’s origins and the beginning of her migratory journey. Past and future, personal and collective, merge, making ISLAND HOPING a hybrid of North and South.

Christina Dimitriadis: “Through these small, rocky islands, I sought to focus on a distinctive landscape, which mostly goes unnoticed. These photographs compose a different kind of ‘map’ of Greece, a second reading of the country, questioning commonplace, stereotypical imaging.

The curator of the exhibition, Denys Zacharopoulos, remarks: “This project casts a penetrating gaze on limits as moving, variable focal points, as borders, or walls, both threatening and sheltering at the same time. In this photographic series featuring islets of the Aegean, devoid of human presence, the human element is suggested by the limit, whether visible or not, which pops up between us in the form of either a desert or inhabited space. Each rocky island in the series “Island Hoping” is a placeless place and, as such, it may be a stop on the journey; it may also be the final destination.” 

The photo shoot took place in the Fourni Korseon archipelago, between Ikaria, Patmos, and Samos—a region of great geological, geopolitical, and historical significance that has the highest number of shipwrecks since antiquity and is tragically emblematic today of the life-and-death waves of migration.

The exhibition was made possible with the support of NEON, in collaboration with the Municipality of Fourni Korseon, EuroMare, and the Eleni Koronaiou Gallery.