The Loot
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Islington studio flat 4, at 14 Barnsbury Road, London, 2022, privately rented. Interior design as an art installation. Looted, 2024.
My personal belongings were still at the property for two months, after I left on 27 March 2024 and was asked to collect them by 3 or 4 April from Woolwich. After I left, the landlords moved in two or three under aged, who I have never met, so that they pretend to be my daughters. Subsequently, they must have been removing them one by one over the last few months and until October 2024.
14 Barnsbury Road was deemed illegal through the courts, on 22 April, shortly after I was forced to leave in March. The maintenance employed many Polish citizens, all dressed in black with black caps, following the XRW supporters' fashion code.
Twenty-one (20+1) digital photographs for twenty (20) missing Albanian and of Albanian ethnicity, non-EU immigrants, as well as one (1) missing Italian citizen.
The twenty-one persons whose details got stolen were abducted by mainly Golden Dawn and, secondarily, the NRM; they are deceased. Golden Dawn were originally pagans, drawing from the ancient Greek mythology and ritualistic practices, also of human sacrifice.
My personal details were stolen, too. Was I going to be the twenty-second victim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_(magazine)
Investigatory research with artworks. The art world has been traditionally male dominated. This has changed a bit in contemporary art, but not dramatically. Female artists have sometimes adopted male attitudes or personas to break into the art scene; see Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin from the YBA movement. I hold the view that art is not gendered, that there is no art for women or so-called women's art. Good art transcends such categories, tapping into more universal experiences. Saying this, I would like to quote Nancy Spero, who doesn't crudely distinguish between male and female art, as follows: "What if the default gender for 'artist' were female? What if, when we looked at a work by a woman, we said to ourselves, "That is art," and when we looked at a work by a man, we automatically identified it in our minds as 'men's art'?"
In 1999, I wrote a long essay about the architectural uncanny that I submitted as my graduation thesis for my first MA in architectural theory. I called it "Space as a 'Bad' Object: A criminal investigation on the notion of space". I got inspiration from detective novels and real-life crime stories. The long essay was about the role of architectural space in crime. It was completely unsupervised: I received a distinction by a Bartlett staff member. I took the digital photographs in conceptual adherence with that essay.
I was a postgraduate philosophy student 9/2017-11/2019 at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In this exposition, I include two new photographs from a series of digital photography called "Forensics", taken with my mobile phone, after I was forced to leave the property I was renting on 27 March 2024. I gave the photography series that name, because it has served the purpose of investigating, recording and tracking a crime, for which architectural space has been used.
For Chris, who was suddenly transferred by his employer, from London, where his daughter lives, to somewhere outside of London; and for Lawrence, whose temporary post was prematurely terminated, though he was planning to return to his legal studies. To all those who don't just "play" the cultural and racial diversity clause; they don't just rely on identity politics, because the class problem has not been resolved for them, either.
See exposition in connection with "The Origins of The Game", "Debris", and "XRW (Implicature)".
XRW (Implicature)
(2024)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including:
3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos.
12 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers.
13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 wo-sided.
17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish.
1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside.
1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers.
Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings.
22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen.
I did the art between 2023-2024.
I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012. I mixed this with stylistic elements of the architectural sketch, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children. I wanted to emphasise that, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition. Using this visual approach, I wanted to evoke a comically sharp twist to the otherwise dark subject matter.
"Pop and Politics" (Pop Og Politikk)
Where does the boundary run between art and popular culture? Pop art embraces the iconography of mass culture. Themes are taken from advertising comics, cinema and TV. The slick, impersonal style is a deliberate provocation.
In Norway, pop art is part of a broader left-wing protest movement. Everything from capitalism and imperialism to environmental and gender politics is subjected to critical scrutiny. The exclusive, unique artwork is replaced by mass-produced prints and posters, well suited to spreading a political message."
From the National Museum, Oslo, Norway, 2024.
For Nikos, Filip and "Brandon".
See exposition in connection with "The Origins of The Game", "Debris", and "The Loot".
LOVE LETTERS
(2024)
Joonas Lahtinen
LOVE LETTERS is an ongoing multimodal artistic research project exploring strategies and politics of participation, love letters as a form of communication, performativity of text and writing, intimacy and (imagined) boundaries between the "private" and the "public", forms of fandom, discourses on liveness, and the materiality and performativity of the LED ticker as an artistic medium.
PROJECT TIMELINE AND CONTRIBUTIONS
2024 // Lecture Performance "How to Facilitate Careful Listening and Non-Coercive Participation in Artistic Research? LED Tickers and Love Letter Writing as Research Tools", Forum Artistic Research // Symposium "Listen for Beginnings", Gustav Mahler Private University Klagenfurt
(Proceedings article forthcoming in 2025)
2023-2024 // Participatory installation at the Kunstzelle // WUK Vienna and Vienna Art Week 2023 festival
2020-2022 // Experiments within the frame of the artistic research project "TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY" at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, PI's: Renata Epifanio Lamenza and Stef Assandri
2021 // video contributions LOVE LETTER TO JENNY HOLZER and WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? in the Facebook Lockdown Calendar of WUK performing arts Vienna