Poly Kokkinia

a.antonopoulou.art Aristofanous 20 105 54 Athens Greece (city map) Send E-mail tel +30 (0)210 - 321 49 94 www.aaart.gr

Poly Kokkinia presents her first solo exhibition on October 14th at a.antonopoulou.art gallery.

"How easily we neglectfully consider harmless the most horrible things"
Rene Magritte with reference to his work "The Red Model".

The children often play a game with each other: they observe the mouth of each other while pronouncing words reversely. This simple reversing of a completely familiar reality is enough to create an extremely gruesome image in front of their eyes, which can provoke priceless chills of horror.

That is exactly what Poly Kokkinia is trying to reveal with her work, the "inquietude" and the horror that exist in the ordinary, which we do not notice since we have got used to it. She wants to reveal its' normality with her view, to reveal its' horrible and "alien" form and to show an unexpected aspect of it. Her goal is to create a "mechanism" through which the familiar world around us that seems to be "harmless", can become aware of its' gruesome aspect.

"There is no worse thing than to check your own hands as if they were pieces of meat on the butcher's counter".
This phrase by Jonathan Ree expresses in the best way the difficulty of dissociating from something so familiar like our hands, but it does not reveal the fascination of such a practice, namely the fascination of horror, which is so intolerable, but also so intoxicating.

The method mainly used by the artist is the "anatomic violation". One part of the body (for example the tongue-a real point of stimulation) is related to another (the internal part of the hand- an imaginary point of stimulation) with which it is not anatomically related. This kind of "anagrammatism" of the body produces repulsive, absurd and monstrous images, because besides the fact that they are artificial, they seem gruesomely natural and they are annoying, although completely harmless.

These unbearable images, which are produced by this "cut and paste" method, are being projected by Poly Kokkinia on peculiar constructions that refer to instruments of torture, while at the same time they serve as projection screens. They are really harmless, almost delicate instruments of torture, unable to provoke any kind of physical abuse or sufferance - a parody of real practices of physical suffering.
The parody together with the humour serves as an antidote-relaxant against the repulsion provoked by the videos. The exhortation "be calm" that slips into in different ways in the work has the same function, as well as the depressant title of the exhibition "breathe, keep breathing".

In the end these instruments of torture remind us of a fine form of mental adventure full of trouble to which leads the mining from the world, in which we feel nicely, of another uncomfortable and unfamiliar world, in which we participate without noticing it.