Seeding Circles
Curated by Ivana Marjanović
Friday 7th March OPENING
7 pm Welcome by Daniela Lanziner Mühlberger (president), Ivana Marjanović (director), Aikaterini Gegisian (artist)
(doors open 6:30 pm with a guided tour through the exhibition)
Opening as part of the “8th of March” events*, the exhibition Seeding Circles offers a retrospective look at the Greek-Armenian diasporic artist Aikaterini Gegisian, who works between Thessaloniki and London. The exhibition weaves together reimagined and re-collaged older works with new commissions inspired by Gegisian’s experience of returning to agricultural practices. Seeding Circles consists of evocative collages in the form of images, textiles and humorous videos. The artist works with collage as a feminist method that aims to redistribute power relations. In this process, Gegisian goes back to the archives of popular culture and mass media from the 1960s to 1990s. She invites us to rethink and reimagine the past as she develops new imagery for the future as a world-making practice marked by emotional joy and visual pleasure. Seeding Circles is about “small things” like gardening, vernacular practices and decorative arts that play equally important roles in the circles of life, nature and art that are all the focus of Gegisian’s analytical and sensual art. The exhibition is conceived through the agricultural narrative of a garden.
EXHIBITION AS COLLAGING FOR THE FUTURE: A JOURNEY THROUGH VISUAL ARCHIVES
Seeding Circles brings together three series of Aikaterini Gegisian’s expanded photographic work and video collages from the past decade: What happens if we only see in circles? (2023 – ongoing), Goddesses (2014 – ongoing) and The Manipulator Vlog (2021 – ongoing). Interwoven, albeit not chronologically, these projects—along with a few older works—construct an immersive environment of visual worldmaking.
Seeding Circles presents collages as photographic readymades, together with collages with self-adhesive dots or dry flowers, video works, and multiple collage fragments forming wallpaper or textile patterns. At the same time, this exhibition premieres new textile works commissioned by Kunstraum Innsbruck (some of which are Special Editions). In the form of curtains, pillows, and restored armchairs, these works merge Gegisian’s artistic practice of collage as image-making with the tangible and utilitarian nature of textiles, which expand photography into space. Collage emerges as both an object and an installation, offering a new visual and material experience of the flat photographic surface.
Gegisian’s practice understands collage as a medium that creates a dialogue between diverse materials. It enables equal relations between images that challenge Western-centric views and reveal multifaceted image histories, knowledge and ways of being in the world. Gegisian does this, for instance, by including input from vernacular cultures, alternative visual cultures or impulses from applied or decorative art, a historically female terrain of creative work in which women* were much more present than in the “fine arts”. As Gegisian states: “In thinking about potentialities for non-alignment, there is an urgency to rethink vernacular cultures as processes or modes of production (poetics) that do not derive from a centralized history of imagination.”*
Furthermore, Aikaterini Gegisian’s work is critical of monolithic identity constructs (national, gender etc.) and proposes transcultural belonging. It takes found images, archive material and personal collections as starting points for analysing mechanisms of power. Departing from this material, the artist makes new proposals that challenge hegemonic narratives, which shape identity and memory, subvert conventions of visual culture and art, and present visual impulses for different storytelling. In her storytelling, women* are free subjects, rather than objects of the patriarchal gaze or of national representation. Reappropriating the female body and sexuality from the patriarchal gaze, they become independent with their own sensual pleasure and erotic joy. Gegisian calls this procedure “resistance against the commodification of the body, of emotions and of experiences”. Gegisian’s practice makes an important contribution to the project of redefining visual pleasure from a feminist perspective.
The art works presented in Seeding Circles are part of Aikaterini Gegisian’s mission to transform images. The focus is on images representing the female body, nature and landscapes, which were produced and circulated in mainstream media during the second half of the 20th century. Even though the materials used are derived from various sources and geographies, including national geographic magazines, mountaineering expeditions, wildlife photo albums and photo albums documenting vernacular cultures, Aikaterini Gegisian crafts an imaginary space that is not defined by borders, geography, or fixed belonging. Instead, she envisions a fragmented proposal for a different world in which becoming is based on a re-thought and re-imagined visual genealogy of the world of images.
The art works’ display is inspired by the artist’s experiences of cultivating the land, gardening and her agricultural story. Reflections on crops, plants, animals, insects and sun light are intertwined with ways of rethinking mythology related to the productivity of land, the position of female subject in the world, the place of the periphery and the means of production. Crisis forms the context of these artworks, which consider different challenges, such as pandemics or the rapid increase in dry lands.
The process of analysing images that the artist has been devotedly collecting, consists of deconstructing hegemonic visual regimes of power found in lifestyle magazines, tourist brochures and other popular materials. However, Aikaterini’s work does not aim to show how destructive gender, national and other exclusionary mechanisms of representation are. Instead, she seeks to unsettle and bring these regimes into crisis by creating “inappropriate dialogues” or adopting images and placing them (or their parts) in another context and into new constellations. Through this performative gesture, she changes the “destiny” and function of archival images.
As an “image-maker at heart,” which she calls herself, Aikaterini Gegisian creates new images that go further, propose something new, something soothing, something to dream of, even if it is somewhat unclear and ambiguous. She calls this practice “worldmaking,” described as a process for looking for new languages, creating new worlds of images, and proposing new directions that disengage with problematic image histories. Working women* from textile industries from the past become visionaries of the future. Although the path is thorny, and appears gloomy there, the work upholds a belief in continuous transformation beyond mere survival. Unglamorous faces, everyday women* in traditional or modern robes become the Goddesses of the new pantheon of divine female power that Gegisian envisions. Seeding Circles aims to plant seeds that will nourish our visual and mental landscapes and maintain the balance of the circle. The circle here represents the whole of life as an inclusive principle.
Text: Dr.in Ivana Marjanović
*Quotation: Aikaterini Gegisian, Non-Aligned Forms, in LEAP. The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China, June, 2017, p 126-129.
All other quotes are from unpublished texts by the author.
AIKATERINI GEGISIAN: ARTISTS’S TEXTS ABOUT THE COLLAGES’ SERIES
Vernacular | Rural
The new projects and works-in-progress form a layered dialogue between diverse histories (from art history to the histories and archives of the earth), and between diverse ways of producing culture (learning from the earth, learning from the rural, learning from ‘others’). Positioned as a critique of the ‘neoliberal subject’, without collapsing into the position of the ‘noble savage’ or in ‘self-orientalising’, these projects acknowledge western representational strategies, such as portraiture, still-life, first person narration, by bringing them into equal relations with the organic, the animal, the land, the vernacular and the rural. These projects continue the process of worldmaking in my practice, of creating new world of images that make visible new
forms of imagination. On a deeper level, this strategy does more than critique dominant western visual histories. The production of new imaginations also deconstructs visual hierarchies that place certain imaginations and traditions at the periphery of thought, while making visible the continuous circulation of visual languages.
The Manipulator Vlog (2021 – ongoing)
YouTube Channel, 6 Collage videos | Variable Duration
The Manipulator Vlog documents a shift in my life and work during the coronavirus crisis. It is set against the backdrop of my teenage magazine collection I rediscovered during the ‘archival fever’ of the pandemic. The videos show images of flicking through issues of Manipulator magazine juxtaposed with amateur recordings of my garden activities. These are then intercut with 1990s cultural references accompanied by a voice-over narrating the details of my changed daily patterns. The Manipulator Vlog brings attention to autobiography, and an intimate understanding of time passing, as these are interwoven with larger histories of images. By rereading the visual experiences of my youth and their influence on shaping my memory and identity, I reflect on my construction as a consumer—part of the neoliberal enterprise that has been shaping subjectivity in the West. The Manipulator Vlog documents the on-going struggle to learn to cultivate the earth, and moves away from an introspective gaze at the past, with upcoming episodes departing from the 90s magazine collection that focus on the balancing act of making art, travelling for work and finding time to garden. The Manipulator Vlog continues to question the construction of the ‘neoliberal subject’ by allowing histories of the earth and agricultural labour to reconfigure the dynamics of visual technologies. The project is attuned to the persistent notion that telling a story (having a narrative) and circulating it in the media constitutes power of representation within neoliberal capitalism.
Goddesses (2014 – work-in-progress)
Collagen-Serie with dried flowers, Variable Dimensions
The ‘Goddesses Project’ is an on-going collage series that draws upon the representations of divine femininity in vernacular cultures. It references regal, royal, spiritual, and mythical female iconography by collaging portraits of women from popular magazines with dried flowers. Following Silvia Federici’s call for a ‘re-enchantment with the world’, this project celebrates female empowerment and proposes an alternative universe, which is based on the ephemeral images of women in popular publications across a range of geographies and chronologies, which reimagine them as powerful joyful gestures. My intention is to produce several alternative Goddesses, write speculative histories for each one and to create a new pantheon of divine female power. Reflecting on the relationship between organic forms and the static surface of the image, between cosmologies and blooms of the earth, Goddesses seeks to give voice to images of anonymous women captured by the camera lens. The first two collages of the series were completed in 2016, with subsequent experimentations resulting in several sketches.
What happens if we only see in circles? (2023 – work-in-progress)
Inject prints, Variable Dimension
What happens if we only see in circles? is a new body of work in its initial stage of development. Engaging with the expanded photographic field, the series employs found images of landscape and wildlife photography gleaned from a variety of sources that are then collaged with adhesive dots and printed into large-scale inject prints. The project addresses conflicting histories of photography and combines early notions of the photographic as capturing the magic of the spirits with what later emerged as the predominant scientific paradigm of photography’s mastery over nature and of what can be seen, and the control of visibility through optical technological advancements. What happens if we only see in circles? forms emotional landscapes and questions the notion that photography can represent and thus control the image of nature and the animal world.
Text: Aikaterini Gegisian
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and of Armenian descent, Aikaterini Gegisian’s work reflects her diverse cultural background and academic rigor. She holds a PhD from the University of Westminster, London, and has participated in numerous international residencies and fellowships (Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen, among others). Her practice spans video, photography, installation, and now includes textiles, and consistently pushes the boundaries of visual art. Aikaterini Gegisian works as a visual artist, filmmaker, educator, and researcher (currently teaching at London Metropolitan University).
Gegisian’s contributions to contemporary art have been widely recognized. Her works have been featured in prestigious international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale, where she was part of a group of diasporic artists who represented the Armenian Pavilion and received the Golden Lion for best national participation. Her art has been showcased in major museums and galleries worldwide, from the Mathaf (Museum of Modern Arab Art) in Doha, ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York, National Arts Museum of China in Beijing, MOMus-Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, IVAM (The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) in Valencia, to the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle. Further, her works can be found in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Frac de Pays de la Loire, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, MOMus Thessaloniki, and California Museum of Photography. This extensive list of exhibitions underscores Gegisian’s status as a critical voice in global art discourse.
*The exhibition is dedicated to March 8, the international day that celebrates the achievements of feminist, queer, intersectional, global and planetary movements and makes demands on urgent current social and political issues.
VERANSTALTUNGEN WÄHREND DER AUSSTELLUNGSZEIT
WORKSHOP
08.03.25, 13:00 – 17:00
COLLAGE ALS FEMINISTISCHER WIDERSTAND
mit Aikaterini Gegisian
MEHR ERFAHREN
