CURRENT Athens is an online platform for the non-hierarchical promotion of contemporary art.
Bambi Woods Presents
Opening: 20.05.2021, 13:00-20:00
Tuesday-Saturday: 14:00-19:00
Bambi Woods function like a radio that never announces its programme in advance. Initiated in 2019 and gathering contributions from over fifty voices, Bambi Woods are a collective enunciation springing from the anonymity of murmur, a molecular vibration infiltrating processes of individuation while encrypting the status of the author. Like a balaclava-covered DJ sticking black tape on their records’ labels, B.W. distribute chains of reactions and affects that are no longer based on recognition and identification.
Bambi Woods’ next intervention will take place across two mirroring spaces, ERGO Collective and Space52, both located in Athens. Combining curating, art making, poetry and performance, Bambi Woods Presents is an assemblage of ready-mades, radio stations, internet portals, photographic slides and not- yet-determined works of art that will attempt to recode architectonic forms of authorship through delegated chains of commands and mechanical processes. Throughout the project, B.W. will shapeshift into constellations of nameless entities, inviting the audience to follow a story without script in which power play, meaning production and the ideological figure of the ‘present author’ dissolve into a cadavre exquis of situations. Less a manipulation of the real than a simulated reality, Bambi Woods Presents deals with the phantom of wording and unfolds like a game of which the only rule is to be a game without rules.
BAMBI WOODS
The ordinary can be understood as a shifting assemblage of things that happen and are felt in impulses, encounters, and habits of relating. These things that happen are intensive and immanent.
As a black shapeshifter, Bambi Wood is a multimedia and inter-disciplinary artist, writer and teacher who is based in London, Athens, Berlin and the Netherlands. Having studied and taught in various institutions such as University of the Arts London, Slade School of Art, Goldsmiths, John Ruskin School, Lancaster University, University of Aegean, Royal College of Art and many more; their work spreads across aesthetic languages to trace the aspirations, paradoxes and failures of concepts situated within experiences of society and identity.
Their own mythopoesis of preexisting notions of reality, thinking together the materiality and the impalpable, is the organic process that leads to the creation of their hybrid works of art. Their primary focus is to have a holistic approach, thus trying to eliminate ego-driven problems and accentuate teamwork and broad-mindedness. They are thus eager to participate in any project they get invited to regardless of genre: combining curating, art-making and poetry; blurring the limitations of each practice; aiming to create situations; and studying relations and their social context.
They attempt to write and tell non-linear stories with the materials around us. Since mediated communication always involves power play, they are committed to responsible story-telling and amplifying quiet histories as a means to expand traditions and cultivate polyvocality and relationality. They consequently reflect on commoning and other possible ways of living as a means of mirroring and dissecting a current existence; feeding their visual language with a point of view surrounding perpetual mysteries, that is, the continuous-malleable-nameless enigma.
To take care of the visual language, the source-image of their most recent work, that explored the historical and conceptual meanings of modern architecture and design, was selected from the first page of a Google image search result. They are currently working on a novel about misuse with a hearty dose of existential dread. They aim to supplant the original meaning of the source imagery, by subverting, shifting and complicating the narrative’s relationship and ideological enactment of subjectivity until the imagery becomes part of their own visual language through repetition.
This exhibition takes place with the support of ΝΕΟΝ Organization for Culture and Development and takes place as part of ERGO Collective’s curatorial programme for 2021.
More info: https://www.abysslocaltaste.com/bambiwoodspresents/
Event locations:
SPACE 52
Kastorias 52
Votanikos
Athens 104 47
37.9822° N, 23.7103 E
ERGO Collective
Egiidon 31
Kato Petralona
Athens 11853
37.9708° N, 23.7064° E
