Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 — The Sound of Screens Imploding — Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève

Demos Bar

Demos Bar is a modular seating system upholstered in gold leatherette, arranged either as a hangout area or a punctuation device between spaces. The idea of working with gold came to Angelidakis during the last great economic crisis, which hit Greece, the artist’s country, particularly hard. In every corner of Athens, he witnessed the flourishing of “sell and buy gold” shops; he experienced the reappearance of gold as the ultimate capitalist ghost, as the extreme form of exchange in a devastated economy. To a certain extent, gold seems to be the hidden engine of human history and of the exhibition itself: we can find its traces and effects in the work of Elysia Crampton on Aymara culture and its genocide, in the migration-related piece by Meriem Bennani, and also in the Abu Hamdan installation about the recent flourishing of walls all over the world.

Andreas Angelidakis’ work straddles the line between art and architecture. Drawing on existing buildings and digital artifacts, his animated videos and ornaments address the passing of time and “the question of site specificity at a time when to be in one place is to already be in several others.”