|
Artists Main Programme Parallel Programme Workshop Performance Festival A-Ζ |
| biennale mission biennale shop |
| Hellenic Ministry of Culture
State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art Visual Arts in Greece Art Editions |
|
|
|
| McMillan Megan and Murray He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. Text from Talleyrand used by Bernardo Bertolucci as an introductory inscription in his film Prima della Rivoluzione in 1964. In Megan and Murray McMillan’s work The Listening Array, six dinner guests enjoy a banquet, surrounded by a semi-circular structure of cylindrical tubes, painted in a bright golden color, converging inwards just like a halo. Outside this semi-circle formed by the tubes, some self-invited observers peek at this scene, remaining invisible in the dark. As the spectator enters the installation, a famous song welcomes him: Epesate thimata adelfia esis se anisi machi ki agona… [i.e., Brothers, you have been sacrificed in a rampant battle and struggle…] in Russian. It is a well-known 19th century revolutionary anthem adopted by the Greek left party as a funeral march for the victims of the Greek National Liberation Front during the Greek Civil War. The spectator’s sight follows the reverse path than the description: first, it traces down the sneak visitors, without –however- perceiving the subject of their observation, only to be graciously awarded by the revelation of a rather evocative scene of the “Last Supper”. In the center of this quaint circle, a figure revealed at the end reminds us of Lenin. This homogeneity is broken by the inherent threat of betrayal or revolution. The video records the features of religious iconography in a contemporary language, using the setting of hagiography and the function of light as a carrier of spiritual revelation in the Byzantine art. Megan and Murray McMillan's work is gifted with an unusual terseness full of meaning; within about one and a half minute it visualizes and represents, in exquisite density, simplicity and technical perfection the unformed meeting of two contradictious -implicitly conflicting- worlds: on the one hand the representatives of a declining yet elitist aristocracy, who continue their journey in blessed eternity, while the boat is sinking, without having the faintest worry -although the watchful eye of the workers (?) excluded from this circle spies on them with unsolved intentions. This work constitutes a poetic, social psychograph of the fin de siecle, the dead calm before the storm, the sweet life on the verge of revolution. Syrago Tsiara  Download CV |  The Listening Array, 2008 |
Sponsors - Media Sponsors
