The Adelaide Festival, Australia’s largest multi-arts festival, begins on Friday 2 March, and this year one of Greece’s most prolific contemporary artists has been invited to participate.
Danae Stratou, a Athens-based visual artist, will be exhibiting The Globalising Wall, which explores seven social and political divisions around the world. This work is a progression from her earlier work focusing on nature and the environment, to concentrate more closely on the sociopolitical influence human beings have on the earth.
Danae’s focus shifted firstly while travelling for her exhibition River of Life in 2004, during which she realized the influence of humans on nature, and conversely, of nature on humans. Her interest increased while travelling to create Cut – 7 Dividing Lines in 2007, when she visited seven political divisions around the world, including Cyprus, Ireland and Kosovo, and photographed them from either side of the ‘line’. This became a large-scale installation of 14 photographs accompanied by a sound installation that “shared both sides of the story,” Danae explains.
This increased her interest in the political perspectives of these sites and so she revisited the seven divisions with her partner Yanis Varoufakis, an Athens economist. From this Vital Space was created, a non-profit organization that combines visual arts and research into environmental and economic crises, with the aim of taking steps to change the world for the better. This formed the basis of the collaborative work The Globalising Wall, for which Varoufakis wrote a paper tying the separate divisions together as a similar entity, and Stratou created a video containing 14 stills that move across the screen in turn, so as to emphasize the intrinsic sameness of these “walls”.
This collaborative work has taken Stratou and Varoufakis to different locations around the world, including New York. This month in Adelaide, Danae will present a re-edited version of The Globalising Wall, which she says, “retold the whole story of my original travels, where I combined the walls and everyday life of the people.” Danae will be part of a group exhibition entitled Restless at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, which will feature the work of 18 international artists. Danae will also participate in a panel discussion on the third day of Artists’ Week Into Cosmos: Ambient Images, on 4 March. This panel, entitled Seeing Into Ubiquity, will focus on role of images in both social media and visual culture.
Danae obtained a Fine Arts degree with Honours in 1988 from the Central St. Martin School of Art and Design in London, and has exhibited in Greece and around the world. Since 2007, she has also held the position of Adjunct Professor (Master of Fine Arts Degree) at the Superior School of Fine Arts in Athens.
In 1999, she represented Greece at the renowned Venice Biennale. She has also exhibited at the 2006 International Biennal of Contemporary Art in Armenia and the 2010 La Verriere (Fondation D’Enterprise Hermes) in Belgium. Now she will be adding to this list; the Adelaide Festival is her first time exhibiting in Australia. After Adelaide, Danae’s work continues – prompted largely by the current economic crisis in Greece. Her next exhibition, which will show in Athens in April is an installation entitled It’s Time to Open the Black Boxes. It is a direct reaction to events both in Greece and globally.
“It takes conceptually the idea of the black box from the plane that has all the secrets, and when you open it you realise what’s been happening,” Danae explains. It is an interactive work, as Danae has placed an open call out to Greek citizens asking them to send them one word that most represents what they are afraid of losing and what they want to protect most in their lives, and 100 of these words will be placed in individual literal black boxes.
She then hopes to take this project to other countries that are experiencing similar economic crises and incorporate words contributed by their citizens with the intention to donate all profits to the location of the exhibition. Danae explains that this work represents the need to move past the crisis and find “a new way of functioning…we need to find new ways to recycle the economy, and everything, for that matter.”
You can view Danae’s artwork as part of the Restless exhibition at the Anne and Gordon Samstan Museum of Art, until 18 March. For more information visit adelaidefestival.com.au