"Amputated Finger" – Braggart Gallery: Joist Innovation Park
Braggart contemporary art gallery presents the Intersectional Exhibition, Amputed Finger by Vassilis Alexandros and Dimitris Palantzas curated by Yannis Mitrou, from December 1-10 at the Joist Innovation Park
The Inauguration will take place on Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 18:00
The severed finger (and other pedagogical techniques?)
The transfer of knowledge is a process that involves interaction as a basic condition. I am not referring to the simple information that the digital age has now generously offered and the post-digital transition promises us even more diverse versions of it. I am talking about the lived situation of transference in which in the present tense a supposedly knowing subject interacts with one or more receiving subjects. In the end, of course, no matter how objective this knowledge is, it is subjective in terms of the modality of its acquisition. Does the teacher just have to know? Or he must mainly invent the ways of the transfer as well as the inspiration that will cause the student.
In Ranciere's "Ignorant Teacher" the question is shifted through the narrative of the text to the concept of the presence of the teacher as a person who initially desires the meeting with the students. It is about meeting in terms of perception, the search for knowledge but also psycho-emotional connection. In the living space with their living bodies and not with their digital representations, as was so widely the case during the pandemic period.
Institutional teaching is a condition of power. A power based on an educational system based on the "castration" of the free student-teacher relationship. Mainly the teacher directs and does not intervene creatively so that the student works participatively in the transfer of knowledge. As the great psychopedagogue M. Lobrot said in his famous Non-Directive Intervention method, interaction alone guarantees a pedagogy of freedom. And perhaps this commitment to freedom is the greatest knowledge.
This exhibition, through the formation of a landscape of installations in the space of the two artists, wishes to produce an interactive relationship with the viewer and the produced work to the extent that this poses the basic question. What is learning without the "cut" freedom of how the student will approach it. A question that permeates the social and the political and concerns all social ties. The position of V. Alexandros and D. Palantzas and the curator Yiannis Mitros is inscribed precisely in the way that the dominant "pedagogical" logic is deconstructed and the Socratic question about the search for knowledge appears. Especially in the age of the new biopolitics which directs our lives through the techniques of a metaverse perspective of knowledge as a capitalist product aimed at control and profit
Resume Santa Alexander
Vasilis Alexandrou was born in 1990 in Thessaloniki. In 2014 he graduated with honors from the School of Fine Arts of Aristotle University. In 2019 he completed a Master's "Audiovisual Arts in the digital age" with a focus on Interactive Installations and New Media in art at the Audio and Visual Arts department of the Ionian University. His credits include a permanent visual intervention in a public space "On the occasion of the burnt piano of the University of Macedonia" (2015), six solo exhibitions "Digital Seduction" Lola Nikolaou Gallery (2020) "Bragheia Mnimi" French Institute of Thessaloniki (2020) "Machines Eudaimonias" old fortress, Corfu (2019), "learning by force" French Institute of Thessaloniki (2017), "object's origin, rejected" Alimos Cultural Center, Athens (2017) and "mother tongue" Gallery space 18, Thessaloniki (2014), as well as over seventy group exhibitions. In 2017 he represented Greece at the Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale "Home", National Gallery of Tirana, Albania and in 2019 at the 24th Biennial of Humor and Satire in the city of Gabrovo, Bulgaria. He has delivered courses, seminars and workshops at University Institutions and since March 2020 he is a PhD candidate at the Ionian University, in the Department of Sound and Visual Arts on the topic of political art in the digital age. In 2020 he was awarded by ARTWORKS and is a Fellow in the Artists Support Program Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Resume Dimitris Palanza
Dimitris Palantzas was born in Larissa in 1992. In 2011 he was admitted to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in the School of Fine Arts, with professor G. Tsakiris. In 2017 he graduated from the department of Visual and Applied Arts with Honors. He lives in Larissa and works as an Educator/Artist in education since 2019. In the artist's work we find a variety of ideological and symbolic readings. The central core of the work is the reuse of the object, where it always has identity, wear, substance and materiality. The artist created an immaterial alphabet, where the idea and concept dominate the reading of the work, focusing on the identity of the object he chooses the "discarded objects" where history, dysfunction and time become the primary structure of his art. To his credit, he has a permanent project at the French Institute from the exhibition "Unknown Object, objet in-connu" (2018), a solo exhibition "Object's origin, rejected", Alimos Cultural Center, Athens (2018) and has participated in a large number of reports, including: 2012– "INSPIRE", Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki
2013– "ISPIRE", Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2013– "Re Art", Goethe Institute, Thessaloniki, 2014– "Art Athina-REM-BRAND name project", Athens, 2015 – “Ode to the Sea”, Piraeus Archaeological Museum, Athens – “27th International Art Exhibition”, Istanbul, 2016:– “Logos – Noise” University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, 2016– "Ode to the Sea", Hellenic Cultural Foundation, Odessa, Ukraine, 2016– "Vanishing point", Alatza Imaret, Thessaloniki, 2017– "ex libris AUTH", Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2017– "Through fire and iron", Lola Nikolaou Gallery, Thessaloniki.
2018– "BRidges", Yedi koule, Thessaloniki, 2019– "Fantasy vs Geometry", Lola Nikolaoy Gallery, Thessaloniki - "Generations 1960-2019", Museum of Contemporary Art, Heraklion, 2021– "LOOK AND DON'T GET ILL", Bensousan Han, Thessaloniki.
Resume John Uterus
Ioannis Mitrou was born and lives in Thessaloniki. He is a visual-performance artist, Director and Theoretician of Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis. He has been teaching for the last four years at the School of Fine Arts of AUTH, Department of Visual and Applied Arts. He founds the International Performing Arts Research Laboratory-Alma Kálma, which he directs to this day and directs his research.
The rich theoretical experience of Ioannis Mitros as well as his multiple intersecting research collaborations, testify to a spirit of interdisciplinary that constantly seeks every possible interaction between the fields of Positive, Social Sciences and Art.
The directions of his master's degree concerned the philosophies of Art, Language and Politics. His work on aesthetics was concerned with the postmodern logic of the work of art in late capitalism and the question of its autonomy (based on the philosophical approaches of Fredric Jameson and Alain Badiou). His final master's thesis entitled "The end of manual labor and the imaginative freedom of modern man", deals with the representational quality of man according to Leroi-Gourhan as well as the "language of forms" and more specifically the phenomenon of "living art".
The study of removals of bodily experience and direct experience as components of scientific-technical dominance produce an imaginary in man that gives a new meaning to the concept of his freedom. Ioannis Mitro's research concerns a particularly different approach to the unconscious, the phenomenological, which is why he studies the phenomenon of art, language and politics and their interrelationship.
Editor: John Uterus
Organization: Braggart Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel: 6908622813
Grand opening: Thursday, December 1, 2022, at 6:00 p.m
Duration: 1 – 10 December 2022
Hours: Daily 11:00 – 21:00 Saturday and Sunday 15:00 – 21:00
Locus: Joist Innovation park Valtetsiou and of Tripoli, Larissa
