Logos / Λογότυπα

For the Stoics of late Antiquity, logos is the “reason” that animates matter. It is the world’s soul: the intrinsic connection between living beings. A complex idea perhaps, for an organising principle for an exhibition. Yet curator Kon Gouriotis, takes logos as a “way” to bring together works by Greek-Australian artists from across Australia in his first curatorial project conceived along ethnic lines—Logos / Λογότυπα at Hazelhurst Art Gallery in Gymea, Sydney.

Walking into Logos / Λογότυπα is to enter a nebula explosion. It is a kosmos—there are worlds within worlds. It is a rich textural space full of emotions, references, messages and meanings. It is alive and about aliveness, responsiveness, action, and encounter. It gathers forty Greek-Australian artists (including two received by the Greek Orthodox Church as adults), born or emigrated, from a complex daedalus of geographies, peninsulas, continents and islands in Greece. Many of the artists known nationally and internationally—Stelarc, Simone Mangos, John Conomos and Effy Alexakis—are the children and grandchildren of the post-war Greek-Australian diaspora. And within this vast reservoir of over 180 works are records drawn from living memory, from the1960s to the present.

How does a curator take on such immensity? By refusing to be daunted. By refusing to be afraid of the task ahead. How do they start to install such an epic collection of pieces? By being a weaver, a linker and joiner of spaces. “A culture constructs in and by its history” says Michel Serres, nodes of “very precise and particular connections.” What joins and differentiates them is their way of linking spaces. And the exhibition reflects this. From the outset two very different interpretations of logos were brought together as part of the collaboration between Saint Stylianos, the Greek Orthodox Parish and the Gallery. For the parish priest logos is “participation and unity” and for the curator, logos is “a pathway, to connect and allow for different directions.” Here the curator takes a role as pathfinder and weaver of radically different spaces.

An order underlies the cloudburst of multiplicity, or allows it. Gouriotis says simply “twenty artists grew to forty” and describes approaching the chaos calmly. “By starting with a path, another and another spring up and connect.” Serendipitous associations were made: bridges and links formed between entryways and corridors, between personal testimony and mixed media. There are rooms with enigmatic sculptures including Lauren Brincat’s A city without a street trade looks like an unfinished model, 2021, that refers to a culture that “has been one constant trade, living a shared experience without a shared identity.” Basil Papoutsidis’s anarchic primary-coloured steel sentinels stand near niches for contemplation of time-based works such as Stelarc’s Promethean human-machine assemblage Reclining Stick Man, 2017, and Conomos’ poignant homage to his family and ancestral home in Kythera, Autumn Song, 1998, and Girl from the Sea, 2014.

In the portico or entry way to the Gallery is stationed the moving The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios’ Soup Kitchen, 2021-23, and Binding Threads, 2023, Effy Alexakis’ reflexive and performative photo-portrait series exploring the threads that bind us, not only to community and culture but to regional and national agendas, and a suitcase history. Her works are juxtaposed with traditional Greek Dance Costumes (from Epirus, Mani and the Island of Rhodes), Jordan Gogos’s This is Greece by Gogos, 2024, (an assemblage of variable cloths and fashion pieces) and Sophie Georgiou’s video documentation of Gogos’ encounters with textiles, embroidery, fabrics, history and experiences in Athens. Here a logos materialises as personal accounts, through performance as testimony and encounter, woven across media.

“The Greek-Australian artist community, like family, is a negotiation,” says Gouriotis and observes that the exhibition design is as much about his experience as the artists. “Every discourse” says Serres, “is an itinerary.” A journey. To curate is to consider one’s own itinerary, subjectivity and formation. It is a reflexive process. A circumnavigation of relationships, memory, places, events and people. To curate is also to document, to take a snapshot of particular relations and conflagrations within time.

In the gallery there are unconventional arrangements. Gouriotis speaks of the “creation of a line” where video works by George Tillianakis, Chris Gaynor, Phillip George, Veniamin Gialouris, Nicholas Nedelkopoulos, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Nara Walker, and Tina Stefanou are placed centimetres above the floor. He manipulates the volume of the exhibition through unusual placements and the creation of clusters and constellations of meaning. Graphic and photographic works are stationed above and appear to take precedence at eye level with video works below. But this is not the case. This layering of media is an excavation. Meanings are vertically and horizontally constructed and connected.

Video and sound as time-based works, strangely, become strata. An immaterial liquid. A shifting horizon of potentialities, or emotion, such as the incandescent interplay between ancient ruins lapped by a coverlet of aqua sea, shot by drone footage, in Phillip George’s Swimming to Hades, 2024. Or, an expression of pain: Tillianakis’ mournful elegiac song in Litourgia: A Performer In Rehearsals, 2008; and Stefanou’s enigmatic performance-film Meta / After, 2017, that raises the question: “How does a human being reintegrate into society after an emotional impact, emergency or personal crisis?”

Such profound and often socially buried issues are brought out into the open.

There are surreal and arresting insights into the great chain of connection between community and family in Stefanou’s video Back-Breeding, 2023. Here a farm community pulls a tractor, wrapped like Ulysses in a sheepskin, that lumbers along Amangu Country in rural Western Australia. In Grandmother’s Started the Revolution, 2021, female family members pass a hard-boiled red egg from one mouth to another. Stefanou’s approach materialises the inter-logos. Logos as interaction: as participation, as insight into the invisible threads and responsibilities that connect and join us.

In Autumn Song, 1998, Conomos weaves an account of a life through the stammering of language. A homage to a broken line of geological inheritance from the island (Kythera) to the continent (Australia). An elegy for his encyclopaedic elliptic Uncle Manoli who threw himself down a well. It is a song for the dark night of the soul, the weight of life and an unutterable logos.

It was the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, (fifth century BCE) who first articulated the logos as a type of “puzzle of existence.” His writing invokes multiple meanings for logos: as word, account, discourse, truth, measure, proportion and nature (everything). And the exhibition reveals this.

These diverse ways of articulating the logos seem to imprint into liquid, fabric, canvas metal and paper. Not through words, or language, but as encounters with something larger. Elena Papanikolakis’s floating and dreamlike collage print On A Star-Burdened Night: A dreamless sleep takes hold on the floor of an empty shipping container, 2018. Nike Savvas’ atomic abstractions on canvas, the liquid surfaces of Phillip George’s abstract prints. And, Andrew Christofides explorations of geometry in Byzantium II, 2009, and the lyrical Gossamer Breeze, 2019,—metaphors perhaps for the logos as a mathematical order that underlies the universe.

For Heraclitus the logos is also a riddle that the reader has to decipher to discover—that opposites and multiplicity coexist—and from contradictions spring hidden insights and unity. Perhaps this is why the exhibition is also chilling, terrifying, humorous, sublime and dark in places (works twist and turn), as the artists’ confront fear, joy, brutality and prejudice impressed into the evanescent transmigratory surface of art.

There are puzzles, as well as folds in space and time, and rapprochements. Those moments where we make unexpected connections, have chance encounters, or “bear witness.” In a small cluster of works—flanked by Michael Zavros’ hyperreal photograph Dad Like Summer, 2020, and Ben Terakes Blake Lively’s teeth, 2017,—lies a small oil painting with the chilling title House of the Gestapo, 1972, by Stephen Caldis. It reminds us that the Hellenic landscape was a place of repeated terrors and invasions—where an ordinary house could become a Nazi stronghold. A truth clearly documented in Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog, 1956, about the holocaust where “even a meadow in harvest / with flights of crows and grass fires . . . can lead to a concentration camp—Struthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz.”

In this cluster of works lies Simone Mangos’ silver gelatin print of Goebbel’s Bunker, 1990s, with his crypt and remains and two works from Still Lives: Portraits from Oświęcim / Auschwitz, 2009. Tony Garifalakis’ young Palestinian sharpshooter, Loving, 2012, fires toward the viewer from a print overlaid with vinyl text musings on creativity. Juxtapositions, chance grouping and clusters create connections between atrocities—past and present. Adjacent to this constellation of works is Zavros’ tiny painting, Man in a Wool Suit, 1999. Its incongruity adds to a sense of a chilling anonymity in contemporary life, magnified by the larger-than-life Amour, 2018. Here the glossy world of self-image, narcissism and celebrity captured by Zavros and Terakes, appears in stark conjunction to Mangos’ series of pieces and are perhaps another kind of terror.

According to Heraclitus the logos is designed to be experienced. If you experience its richness, you can grasp the message. Here the logos is the “message” that the world offers, if we can hear it.

Pieces shape-shift and oscillate in relation to each other. The joyful Lapsana, 2022, Nike Savvas’s mobile construction of yellow mirrors and polished stainless steel, turn on their nylon wires and reflect fragments of other art works as flotsam and jetsam. The visitor is mirrored back in glimpses. Intermixed and atomised. Conjoined with the reflections of other images and people. The world is in motion ̶ shifting and changing. Giving insight into the face / farce of reality, its multiplicity and the mercurialism of identity.

Being inside the exhibition is to enter a painting, a piece of music, a concert, a crowd. It is a call to participate. To awaken to the logos that connects all things. It has that kind of aliveness, that kind of energy. The exhibition joins a shift in the contemporary mindset away from borders, edges, and fragments—instead we enter into matter, we are part of space-time, we are inside the logos, not outside it. Here it is up to the viewer, as participant in Logos / Λογότυπα, to make their own connections and pathways. This is not logos as law, as the word, or that which is spoken. This logos is not laid out beforehand. It is found and intuited through our connections and experiences in the cosmos / world of the exhibition space. The visitor has to contemplate it and do the work to interpret it, to seek what truths co-exist.

The collective breakthrough for this exhibition is elegantly articulated in Brincat’s description of her Mediterranean ancestry. It is a recognition “that the local culture, architecture, food and symbols had penetrated our subconscious.” This is an inheritance of intangibles—the indomitable Hellenic spirit and exuberance for life—captured in the work of the generations coming after the post-war diaspora. To this we can connect Stefanou’s concept “pinning” or, a starting from somewhere that is “already there”—to go elsewhere. To stammer, hum, cry, sing, document, capture, materialise and gesture to the seen and unseen in this surrounding swirling life of energies and infinite matter.

In Memoriam: John Conomos and Lex Marinos

Artists: Effy Alexakis, Vas Andonakis, Emmanuel Angelicas, John Aslanidis, Eleni Vlahos Bukalan, Leonard Brown, Lauren Brincat, Andrew Christofides, Olga Cironis, Stephen Cladis, Alex Conan, John Conomos, Sarah Contos, Veniamin Gialouris, Tony Garifalakis, Phillip George, Andreas GG, Chris Gaynor,  Jordan Gogos and Sophie Georgiou, Angela Kolistasis, Simone Mangos, Peter Michalandos, Nicholas Nedelkopoulos, Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, Elena Papanikolakis, Basil Papoutsidis, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Emanuel Raft, George Raftopoulos, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Nike Savvas, Tina Stefanou, Stelarc, Ben Terakes, George Tillianakis, Sophie Underwood, Nara Walker, Diana Wood Conroy, Salvatore Zofrea, Michael Zavros.

EXHIBITION
Logos / Λογότυπα
Hazelhurst Art Centre  
21 September – 17 November 2024