kiki kouniari

2017, Double-Channel Video

Composition is the work I presented for my degree show at Athens School of Fine Arts in September 2017. It looks at alienation as a social phenomenon and as a psychological condition. It is divided in two sections: Chapters and Portraits.

​The first section, Chapters, gives a record of contemporary reality, and attempts to criticize visual culture and capitalism, describing it as a prison where the individual loses itself. Specifically, in Chapter 1 subjectivity, separated from the self and portrayed as a fish, is trapped in a multitude of images, commodities and patterns, where it tries in vain to focus its attention. The individual, like fish in a bowl, is locked into this constant flow of information. In Chapter 2 the repetition of a person’s figure-patterns by another person, pertains to mimesis as a form of influence. Individual and figure-patterns aim to become one, however, this identity is false and is constantly failing. In Chapter 3 two projections inside a sink, one on top of the other, define a new collective “reading” of images. Optical fragments from the Second World War and from the film “Gilda” are subject to a levelling, an equation of meaning, by becoming “images” of the same significance and value in culture industry.

​The second section, Portraits, communicate the psychological condition of the contemporary individual as a result, and in relation to, Chapters. Here, three faces float in an indefinable and timeless universe in which they loudly experience their loneliness.