Meliti Kontogiorgi

Participation in the "Urban Paradox Art Fair" with the projects "History lessons", "9 little terrorists" and "Space copies", October 2011, Paris, France

2011-10-20T21:12:00.001+02:00

some exhibition views from the "History lessons" installation ( scenographic idea by Lydia Kontogiorgi )

2011-07-06T21:11:00.009+02:00

History lessons

Mixed media installation: 10 figurines-statuettes, food

series of 10 photographs, C-print on adhesive paper, variable dimensions, 2011

falafel & pita

pasta

dolma

oreo

kefte

baguette & pâté

chou de Bruxelles

marshmallow

muffin

meringue

Participation in the Dave Bown Projects, June 2011, New York

2011-06-20T00:02:00.012+02:00

PRESS RELEASE

15 June 2011

Dave Bown Projects is pleased to announce the results of the 2nd Semiannual Competition which was curated by Kashya Hildebrand, Galerie Kashya Hildebrand, Zurich; Daneyal Mahmood, Private Art Dealer, New York; and Pete Surace, RARE, New York from submissions that were received from artists from at least 20 countries. This competition features images of the work of 25 contemporary artists. A total of $7,000 USD (7 artists will each receive $1,000) will be awarded to Justin Bower, Michael Davis, Aurora Robson, Tim Rusterholz, Candice Smith Corby, Pat Swain, and John Westmark.

Justin Bower
Michael Davis
Viraag Desai
Margot Gran
Kim Holleman
Jake Johanson
Duncan Johnson
Elsie Kagan
Vineta Kaulaca

Meliti Kontogiorgi
Larry Louie
Rachel Meuler
Keri Oldham
Anna Oya
Yvonne Petkus
Elly Prestegård
Aurora Robson
Colin Ruff

Tim Rusterholz
Paul Santoleri
Candice Smith Corby
Pat Swain
Chris Trueman
Hans van Meeuwen
John Westmark

Dave Bown Projects was founded in 2005. The initiatives of the privately held U.S. company focus on advancing the field of contemporary art by engaging in scholarly research and distributing unrestricted monetary awards to visual artists.

Justin Bower Michael Davis Viraag Desai Margot Gran Kim Holleman Jake Johanson Duncan Johnson Elsie Kagan Vineta Kaulaca Meliti Kontogiorgi Larry Louie Rachel Meuler Keri Oldham Anna Oya Yvonne Petkus Elly Prestegård Aurora Robson Colin Ruff Tim Rusterholz Paul Santoleri Candice Smith Corby Pat Swain Chris Trueman Hans van Meeuwen John Westmark


Meliti Kontogiorgi
Last Life, 2008
Chromogenic print
35 7/16 x 43 5/16 inches (90 x 110 cm) Edition of 8
© 2011 Meliti Kontogiorgi

Participation in the "mailto" project of the Drift Station Gallery, June 2011, Lincoln, Nebraska

2011-06-16T20:07:00.012+02:00

 mailto: a gallery, an email address, and a printer
The “mailto” tag was born with the web itself, creating a very useful link opening an email message to be sent to the site’s author. But the tag has become the scourge of web designers, with spamming robots trawling the web, targeting this bit of text to harvest email addresses. It is now generally considered “risky” to so openly publish one’s email address. Instead, designers resort to writing out the address as “anything [at] driftstation [dot] org” or more complex methods using JavaScript, PHP, etc.

For this exhibition, we exuberantly publish our email address and print anything received, and in doing so argue for a curatorial practice akin to chaos theory or aleatoric musical composition – that the initiation of a specific but open structure creates unexpected and diverse results. In this case, that structure is the open portal of an email address. As the digital files reach the printer (up until this point infinitely malleable and scalable), they are made manifest as fixed, physical objects. When hung on the gallery wall they each represent a small document in a curatorial process divorced from the geographically-focused perfection of the unique art object.

João Ribas’ 2009 exhibition Fax at The Drawing Center in New York City was built around a similar construct: a technology that allowed artists from around the world to deliver their work not by courier but by an electronic message. The site of production became dual, with the artist creating a piece in his or her studio that was then translated by the fax machine into an electronic signal, and finally back into physical form in the gallery.

mailto: differs in two important ways. First, it uses a contemporary and more flexible means of transmission, unlike Fax’s embrace of flawed and retro technology. But more importantly, we have not just asked well-known artists to send in works on a closed line. Instead, the doors have been thrown open to anyone with an email address. The flood of responses – almost 600 emails making up over 2,000 printed pages – included unexpected and exciting works such as photographs of homemade superhero costumes, intricate ASCII drawings, a series of spam email look-alikes targeted at art collectors, and continuous blasts of copy/pasted Facebook updates arrived in our inbox.

There are also the unexpected correspondences that come from the structure of email itself. A faulty email address sends a “message undeliverable” reply, which is auto-replied by our email, much like Cory Arcangel’s Permanent Vacation where two computers running email programs constantly auto-reply to each other until they crash or the exhibition ends.

Perhaps more than anything, the response to our open portal seems to sum up the kind of interactions a gallery receives when thoroughly and exuberantly engaging the internet: the colloquialisms and lingua franca of email communication, the diverse approaches and stylistic differences to how to respond to such an open invitation, spam and phishing attempts, and some great and weird art.

Jeff Thompson (June 2011)

From: meliti Kontogiorgi
Subject: "headhunter" - Meliti Kontogiorgi
Date: May 31, 2011 3:26:29 PM CDT
To: anything@driftstation.org
1 Attachment, 2.1 MB
--

Meliti Kontogiorgi
http://meliti.blogspot.com/

Solo show at the Agathi-kartalos art gallery, May-June 2011, Athens

2011-06-03T17:04:00.009+02:00

some exhibition views

2011-05-22T14:09:00.004+02:00

Η Αίθουσα Τέχνης αγκάθι-κartάλος (Μηθύμνης 12 και Επτανήσου Πλ. Αμερικής, τηλ 210 8640250) οργάνωσε και παρουσιάζει την έκθεση φωτογραφίας της

Μελίτης Κοντογιώργη

Τα εγκαίνια θα γίνουν την Τρίτη 24 Μαΐου 2011 στις 8 το βράδυ.

Η έκθεση περιλαμβάνει 21 φωτογραφίες από 3 διαφορετικές ενότητες: την ενότητα Space copies, την ενότητα Last life και την ενότητα 9 little terrorists.

Από την ενότητα Space copies παρουσιάζονται 3 εικόνες αστικών τοπίων. Η επιλεκτική απομόνωση και επανάληψη στοιχείων της εικόνας στοχεύει στη δημιουργία μιας σύνθεσης που μετουσιώνει τη βαρύτητα της πόλης, « παγώνει » τα τοπία αυτά και τα τοποθετεί σε ένα διαφορετικό χρόνο και χώρο.

Από την ενότητα 9 little terrorists εκτίθενται 12 φωτογραφίες που απεικονίζουν 9 διαφορετικά και επαναλαμβανόμενα πρόσωπα, ντυμένα με σύμβολα και χαρακτήρες της σύγχρονης ποπ κουλτούρας και της μυθολογίας του “καλού” και του “κακού”.

Τέλος, από την ενότητα Last life παρουσιάζονται 6 πορτραίτα ανθρώπων ως χαρακτήρες δυστοπικών σκηνικών, φορώντας μάσκες που απεικονίζουν το ίδιο τους το πρόσωπο. Έμπνευση αποτέλεσε η φράση του Γιώργου Χειμωνά «Ο κόσμος να γίνει εικόνα. Αυτή θα είναι η τελευταία ζωή των ανθρώπων, να τους σκεπάσει μια εικόνα»(Οι Χτίστες, Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2001, σ. 7).

Η Μελίτη Κοντογιώργη γεννήθηκε το 1978 στην Αθήνα και από το 2003 ζει και εργάζεται στη Γαλλία. Σπούδασε κοινωνιολογία και φωτογραφία στην Αθήνα και στο Παρίσι και από το 2006 έχει συμμετάσχει σε ομαδικές εκθέσεις σε γκαλερί, πολιτιστικούς χώρους και φεστιβάλ στην Ελλάδα και στη Γαλλία. Αυτή είναι η πρώτη ατομική της έκθεση.

Διάρκεια έκθεσης 24 Μαΐου – 2 Ιουνίου 2011

Ώρες λειτουργίας: Δευτέρα έως και Σάββατο 11:30 - 13:30
& Τρίτη, Πέμπτη, Παρασκευή 18:30 – 20:30

Participation in Athens Photo Festival 2010 (APhF:10) with 7 of the 23 photos of the project "9 little terrorists", November-December 2010. Athens

2010-11-22T18:00:00.016+01:00

More about APhF:10 and the exhibition program 

some exhibition views

2010-11-22T17:59:00.007+01:00

2010-11-22T17:40:00.050+01:00

Where is my happiness?

He gazed vaguely and mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was. “I want my happiness!” at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping out the words. “Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!”¹

¹Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, Pennsylvania State University, 2008, p.139.

Mixed media installation

Words by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, 12 ashtrays, 19 smoked cigarettes (butts), ash, 2010

2010-11-22T17:36:00.018+01:00

9 little terrorists

9 little terrorists presents an ironic take on the stereotyped symbols produced by the current pop myths that provide the definitions of good and evil. These 9 figures are constructs of a social game where everything is included, deconstructed, reshaped and redefined as visual stereotypes. How does photography construct a face as an image? How does this process take its meaning from the surrounding social reality? These figures reveal the process by which the stereotyped images are manufactured and “dressed”. This cynical and mocking mix of some of today’s most clichéd social, religious, political and cultural characters challenges the use and usefulness of concepts such as legality and terrorism. Cut off from any other reference they stare at us unassumingly, dressed in these highly stereotyped symbols of today’s culture.

Series of 23 photographs, fine art print, 5 at 75x110cm and 18 at 50x75cm, 2010

2010-11-22T16:59:00.016+01:00

2008-05-03T10:37:00.012+02:00

Last Life

The world becomes image;

this will be man’s last life,

to be covered by an image¹

Last life is an attempt to portrait people in the state of becoming an image, an attempt to imagine the world that becomes image. This transformation of image into life becomes a cover for the living. In this state, people are trapped by a cover that depicts their face. These are humans that are becoming image representations, hybrids that are jailed/protected into/by their own face. Their faces are formatted images of themselves, masks that dissimulate their characteristics. These people’s presence is ambiguous: they are exposed in the image but at the same time they are hidden by it. They are only offering us an image of their face, a facade. The visible face acts as a veil while the real face is hiding behind the mask, under its own visibility. The face is now an opaque surface, a wall against the world, evoking funeral masks, the final representational cover of the human. These are humans that are becoming image representations, hybrids that are jailed/protected into/by their own face. Their identity is thus repositioned somewhere between their presence, their image and the representation of this image. The anxiety of these portraits comes from the representational and perceptional rupture between a person and its image. There is a gap between the person and its image, a distance in perception between a person, its representation and the medium that creates its image.

¹George Chimonas, The Builders, Kastaniotis, Athens, 2001, p. 7.

Series of 12 photographs, C-print, 110x90cm, 2006-2008

2008-05-03T10:36:00.001+02:00

2008-05-03T10:35:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T10:34:00.003+02:00

2008-05-03T10:32:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T10:31:00.013+02:00

2008-05-03T10:30:00.003+02:00

2008-05-03T10:29:00.003+02:00

2008-05-03T10:28:00.012+02:00

2008-05-03T10:27:00.004+02:00

2008-05-03T10:26:00.004+02:00

2008-05-03T10:25:00.004+02:00

2008-05-03T10:24:00.004+02:00

2008-05-03T10:11:00.005+02:00

Homage to David Lynch

2008-05-03T10:00:00.006+02:00

Paricipation in the group show "Cartes Postales" with the project "Alphavilles", October 2006, Legion of Honour, Saint-Denis, Paris

2008-05-03T09:30:00.004+02:00

2008-05-03T08:30:00.004+02:00

Alphavilles

3 photographs and edition of post cards, fine art print, 70x50cm

2008-05-03T08:28:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:26:00.002+02:00

Participation in the group show "Mix Cities Paris-Londres" with the project "Space Copies", September 2006, Espace Khiasma Gallery, Paris

2008-05-03T08:22:00.010+02:00

2008-05-03T08:20:00.005+02:00

Space Copies

Series of 10 photographs, C-print, 130x90cm

2008-05-03T08:18:00.005+02:00

2008-05-03T08:15:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:12:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:09:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:06:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:03:00.002+02:00

2008-05-03T08:00:00.002+02:00

Petite Mythologie Urbaine

2008-05-03T05:37:00.004+02:00