Haris Epaminonda at Sylvia Kouvali

It takes strong imagination to travel well.

It takes containment to understand space, interiority to think of the outdoors.

She grew up in a divided city, a divided island to be precise, at seemingly peaceful times, postwar, her plateau has been the idea of other side.

When I say the other side, I mean all of it, with what’s inside and with what is not in; not yet.

Her language is spatial, her main medium is the void, in all its spectrum, from xxs to macro.

And as confirmed by art history, the biggest compositions are made on tiny surfaces.

She has cut and cut and cut and twist and glue and open and through a small window a whole new world reveals in fulldom;

buildings of faith and devotion brought inside out, archaeological sites twisted, people in gatherings, people alone, fragments of people, ruins, vistas, all extracted from books, and books and books.

Endless images, windows to the other world, clippings of her interiority.

The house she carries on her head is huge, heavy and ever growing;

there exist doors never opened, staircases that lead nowhere (at least today);

maybe tomorrow and not unlike any other magical story teller, she writes;

instead of words and pages there are images, walls, openings and personal objects, behind the walls, in front of them and occasionally on top.

She draws straight lines, through which light comes through, and colour. Her colours are distinctly hers and relate to a faded world, one that seemingly vanishes but not.

She designs possibilities, turns and twists and the way back is not always feasible, like in a broken place, one way without return.

Designated areas from this ever growing edifice have appeared through the years and only by invitation;

She’s displayed an innumerable amount of constellations, arrangements (spatial crimes one can say), replicas or memories of where she grew up, of where she would like to grow up, where space, image and object sit together without an agreement, like in a broken family, or a child’s room.

and for this or for that sake, she chose to expose the cosmos that anxiously awaits to be picked and get used while stack on endless shelves (in-her-room and in-her-chosen-to-live-divided-town);

rearranged for each occasion, by instinct and her compositional terrific ability of spatial tremor.

To built walls and spaces made for the body of the guest to go through and the body of her objects to sit in and look back at us;

the highly populated institutions she transformed into metaphysical zones of discover, meditation, texture, color and objects from the history of art, and the history of vision,

dispersed into flea markets and the internet.

Semi frozen in time through composition that on that occasion she said here ‘pause’ or maybe ‘stop’. For now.

Sometimes objects or pages repeat; but are they ever the same?

The post- suffice for her language adds on to the words: war, humous, modern, internet.

One can add and keep adding words.

She is composing within the space of metaphysics, in an effort to create a whole composed of fragments. The whole will never be, and should never be whole again, ethically and aesthetically, reconstruction is not necessary when we have to take care of the present.

The gorgeousness of the ruin, wherever this stands, she reframes, she elevates, not through the need of historical accuracy [does such a thing exist after all], but through a way to exist in highly charged places where politics have ruined and history has eaten up.

I am honoured to have been granted access to the house, that for the past twenty years has appeared in many museums, biennials and venues who have decided to offer their spaces to her for transformation, and transference to new possibilities of being a body within history.

Works from VOL. XXXIII have appeared at:

VOL. I, II & III, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2009

VOL. VIII, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012

VOL. XVII, Casey Kaplan, New York, 2016

VOL. XXII, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2017

VOL. XXIII, Secession, Vienna, 2018

VOL. XXVIII (Fall of the Giants), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, 2022

VOL. XXIX, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, 2023