The passion and the wave

6th InternaIonal Istanbul Biennial, 1999 (Catalogue)

Works included in the exhibition: Building Living Leaving (Living Together + Cranes)

What if you could measure time in relation to every inch of space you have occupied and trodden? Would more space translate into richer experience? Would time resonate as longer or shorter or harmoniously accompany your pace? Being and Time. Building Dwelling Thinking. A Point in Space. Untimely Meditations. Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon you have the scene arrange itself; or as it will seem to do / an atmosphere like Juliet's tomb (Heidegger, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot).

This art deco bed exists in a room in a house at the southern end of Paleo Psihico, one of the most convenient of Athens' suburbs because of its proximity to the city center; it can be as little as 20 minutes by car on a heavy traffic day / hour (summer afternoons are great; everyone is too lazy to move, the streets are yours).

In this house of several rooms and a few corridors, Christina Dimitriadis has tread for a few weeks or days at a time during the last three years. Christmas, Easter, Summer. Is she in a contraction, is she in a release on this twin bed? The mattress and the sheets are not visible; this looks like a courtroom. Naked in wood. Egyptian like. Compare this image with her blue angel period of several years ago set in her own bedroom in Berlin ("La topographie de notre être intime", says Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space).

The artist's personal history is reflected in the Plätze (locales) and Räume (rooms) that she photographs. The cranes over Berlin, against this colorless sky, are arrested in a moment of limbo. They appear as emblems of speculation: neither earth, nor sky, nor mortals, nor divinities cross their paths. Whether they assist in the building of a new imagination-one that will provide meaning-is only a question of time.

Helena Papadopoulos