Everything signs its name

Group exhibition curated by Evagoria Dapola

Experience can be an unreliable witness, as our place in the landscape of existence is not ‘cut out’ from the whole. Memories and knowledge must be excavated either from the plane of our ideas or from some kind of material substance. Sought after in tiny traces, in barely there clues, minimal moments, construct our understanding of the world around us. Yet we barely pay any attention to them. We seem to forget that each tiny piece, minimal place and softest gesture, embody the whole at a particular nexus within it. These micro-
scale instances that feel so embedded in us and our everyday experiences, fade in the background noise of everything else we seem to experience. However, our everyday lived experience owes much of its character to such sights, sounds and interactions, that constitute our life’s unique porous texture.
When did signatures become confirmation of our presence?

The exhibition "Everything Signs Its Name" brings together the multifaceted practices of nine artists and emphasizes the ordinary as a powerful tool for socio-ecological and cultural reflection. The concept of the "Infraordinary" / sub-normal, as introduced by Paul Virilio and Georges Perec, seeks to explore the ordinary and overlooked aspects of everyday life, the small, almost invisible moments that make up the fabric of our experience and shape our sense of self in the world.

At a time when we collectively grapple with the aftermath of rapid global changes, climate crises, pandemics, and technological overload, the exhibition shifts focus from the grandiose to the everyday. This is a timely exploration of how the overlooked details of our routines reveal profound truths about who we are and how we live.

The exhibition presents works by Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, Danae Io, Marina Kassianidou, Phanos Kyriacou, Christos Kyriakides, Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis, Panos Profitis, Constantinos Taliotis and Dimitris Tampakis, bringing to the fore the impact of personal intimacy within broader cultural, social, political, communal and architectural contexts. It is an opportunity to regain contact with everything we dismiss as obvious, and rediscover all that is already speaking to us.

The exhibition becomes a place of reconnection with what we often forget: the soft gestures, the subtle images, the micro-circumstances that shape our collective and individual experience. By exploring how these moments function simultaneously as both mental environment and cultural image, the exhibition brings to the fore relational practices that combine spatial sense with mental topographies, opening up the repositories of our everyday, ordinary memories. Through different media, the artists propose a poetic reading of intimacy and memory, bringing forefront the fragile but fruitful relationship between matter, time and perception. Thus, the exhibition becomes an opportunity to deeply engage with what surrounds us, whether physical, mental, emotional, digital, structural, habitual, but ever so ordinary that we do not pay attention to it anymore.