Look at how streets get lost
in people...
…
Noises in movies and in dreams are deafening
only in fear and in life
doors close noiselessly behind.
Film in movies is in color.
In life black and white
—Katerina Gogou (from Idiom, 1980)

I use super 8 film or an analog camera.
I explore urban topography and record political realities through public sculptures and objects in the center of Athens. This is mostly done at the end of the day and the beginning of night, in a solitary way, without a film crew. I look at places associated with recollection - just before they cease to be. Right before loss. Film offers me the texture and indefinite time of a poetic narrative. I'm thinking of the music coming from the Greek scene of the '80s.

There is no going back, cutting, and editing when I shoot or photograph with film.

Screen 1

Omonia moon museum, 2024, super 8 film transferred to digital file, 2:53 minutes
Propylaia (gates) at night polytechnic, 2024, super 8 film transferred to digital file, 1:17 min
Archaeological museum inside, 2024, super 8 film transferred to digital file, 2:29 min
Theatraki (small theatre), 2024, super 8 film transferredto digital file, 2:54 min
Sleeping (female figure), 2024, super 8 film transferred digital file, 2:24 min

Screen 2

Amerikis Square, 2024, super 8 film transferred to digital file, 2:19 min

Biographical Note:

Katerina Komianou is an artist based in Athens. She studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2013-2018) and is currently reading for an M.A. at the Design-Space-Culture department of the National Technical University in Athens. Selected group exhibitions include: Outraged by Pleasure, curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Nobel building, Athens (2023); Plasmata II, curated by Afroditi Panagiotakou, Yiorgos Tzirtzilakis, Prodromos Tsiavos, and Daphne Dragona, Ioannina (2023); Tes Mais, curated by Florent Frizet, GB Agency, Paris (2023); The Same River Twice, curated by Natalie Bell and Margot Norton, DESTE and the New Museum at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2019). Solo and two-person exhibitions include: My Street, and the Films I Dream of (with Menelaos Karamaghiolis), curated by Panos Fourtoulakis and Titus Nouwens, Vatsaxi 6, Athens (2022); and Heirlooms at Radio Athènes (2024). Komianou was an Artworks Fellow (Artist Support Program Stavros Niarchos Foundation) in 2019. She was often DJing at the historic club Rebound.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Onassis Culture.

Heirlooms 

In the drawer silence lives, unruffled.
Images that stay on kodak paper
Grotesque figures, lost souls
I get scared and run to the black attic
lost in the woods of yesterday.
Voices taunting in the dark say I am mortal.
I lower my gaze and spit smoke.
I’m scared of boredom, I’m bored stiff.

—Metro Decay, 1983