Evanthia Tsantila

In her work Evanthia Tsantila is using various media such as drawing, photography, film, text, digital printing collages, etc. She composes different elements in complex associations: “I attempt to generate the internal logic of objects and images, through relationships sometimes overt and sometimes hermetic“. With her work, she raises questions about the mechanisms of reproduction and representation of memory, identity issues, and the socio-political role of the artwork.

For the TEMPUS RITUALIS exhibition, Evanthia Tsantila has developed a new installation with the title 9 attempts to type the South. It comprises different images as well as a poem on the South by Friedrich Nietzsche, excerpts of which she typed out 9 times on an old typewriter dating back to 1904. Alongside a photo of a Greek landscape, a screenshot of the Reich Archives in Potsdam and a photo of the dark green waters of a Berliner lake, another central element of her work is a ritual that took place in a church, an incident the artist witnessed by chance. From a bird’s-eye view perspective, we see people just standing there, after taking part in a ceremony. The digital techniques she is applying, the chosen angles and the fragmentary presence of mirror-like reflections, add a painterly and enigmatic quality to the images. “I explore the efforts of the individual to claim social identity and to gain collective memory. Do certain images reveal only from certain places or can they be seen anywhere? And how are they related to the ideologies and the symbolics of the crisis? How do these severe changes affect people and under which conditions can this be visible and legible?“

“I try to face, obliquely, what cannot appear in itself but also try to record the failure of generating the memory that could have sheltered it — Evanthia Tsantila stated — How to allow the incomprehensible appear? That which we fleetingly catch sight of at a side glance and, while turning our heads trying to grasp it, flees again to the perplexed regions of a strange margin.“

www.evanthiatsantila.com