Exhibition: Canvassed Encounters – Encounters on Canvas

Canvassed Encounters – Encounters on Canvas is the title of the exhibition hosted at the Herakleidon Museum in Athens from 1 August to 15 October 2024 on the subject of weaving and clothing at all stages of their functional chain. Drawing on the entire chaîne opératoire of textiles (manufacture, use, recycling) and on the wide scope of textile consumption, ranging from indispensable everyday items to artistic masterpieces, from low to high culture, the fabrication of “culture” or “civilisation” as a heterogeneous admixture of diverse and anything but authentic elements lies at the heart of this exhibition.

Seen through the uninformed gaze of Alissa, an unaccompanied refugee child who travels across Europe just as European explorers once roamed the rest of the world, awkward comparisons appear, rather than established or even scientific ways of acting and thinking.

What does she know and how does she see through:

the history of textile labour;
fashion or a recycling of various forms of sewing and dress;
the imago mundi decorating certain textiles;
various ways of interlinking work on textiles with writing at the level of both raw material and metaphor;
the dissociation of the plant origin of fibres from the floral representation on textiles;
modern era Western painting as “oil on canvass”;
the shaping, clothing and depiction of the human body;
the resourceful use of this trait in order to both conceal and reveal different tropes of sociability;
the use of textiles in establishing a home and its often coterminous gendered division of labour;
and, last but not least, the ways in which all the above translate into lived experience?

Curated by: Dimitra Douskou, Iris Tzahili, with the contribution of Sophia Vakirtzi and Vaya Papazikou

Original works by: Polyxeni Angelidou, Lida Anastasiadou, Angela Castresana, Sophie Desrosiers, Sara Ettlinger, Marie-Helène Galton, Christian Grelier, Marina Kassianidou, Yannis Rogdakis, Iris Tzahili.

The exhibition serves under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Representation in Greece.

Greek