The exhibition utters excess in between opened at State of Concept on 28 February and came to an abrupt close with the Covid-19 lockdown on 23 March. The show's two young curators, Ioanna Gerakidi and Danae Io, have brought together works spanning from textile and photography to performance scores and film by Mehraneh Atashi, Rana Hamadeh, Christian Nyampeta, Falke Pisano, Yorgos Prinos, Janis Rafa and Marina Xenofontos. We publish the press release in full, followed by the exhibition's documentation:
The group exhibition utters excess in between, draws on the linguistically intangible; that which resists legibility and cannot be uttered in language or explicitly understood through its canonical syntaxes. It is inspired by Hypatia Vourloumis’ work and research on paralanguage and excess. The unintelligible, the one which remains in between speech formulations, which escapes words or rational meanings, is used as a metaphor. The works presented in the show, aim to legitimise what is in excess of language; undeciphered cries, unfiltered screams, human and non-human idiolects. They draw on voices unheard, silenced, or not yet documented, to speak about a subverted archive of desires, memories, senses and affects.
The show utters excess in between , strives to stay with identical or collective ruptures, agonies, traumas, with narratives unfolded otherwise. The artists exhibited, are thinking through suppressed histories, socio-political frameworks and economic patterns, whilst forming links and resonances between them. From the dispersed installative gestures of Falke Pisano to the subtle filmic thesis and sculptures of Janis Rafa, the show seeks to traverse canonical rhythms, times and spaces. Accordingly, from Rana Hamadeh’s practice drawing on “that which subsists within the documental voice, both because and in spite of that voice,” to Christian Nyampeta’s film as an ongoing enquiry into ways of living together, the exhibition functions as a means of rearranging hierarchical structures. Through capturing aspects of the quotidian, Marina Xenofontos’ intervention on Christophoros Kyriakides archive, Yorgos Prinos’ large-scale photographs and Mehraneh Atashi’s textiles, remap scenes, activities and feelings uncanny.
How can the exhibition operate as a methodology where unruly and disorderly visions come together as justified forms of being? How could the works be potentially felt, touched as metaphors, as fluid movements towards alternation? Acts of production and exchange, fictional and diaristic experiences, construct a visual vocabulary that questions the universality of governing ways of living. utters excess in between, lingers over the incalculable, the occult, the mythical but also the subjective in an attempt to confront the politics of total legibility.
