Art Rug Projects by Soutzoglou invites artist Helen Marden to experiment for the first time with the carpet medium. Her intuitive watercolors inspired by the memories of Hydra Island are translated into the hand-made carpets by Soutzoglou expert artisans.
Adding to the exhibition are works of Dimitrios Antonitsis that blur the boundaries between art and tapestry. Described by the artist as “loom-abacuses,” these intricate pieces defy categorization, oscillating between drawings, sculptures, and temporal artifacts. Their presence within the exhibition further enriches the dialogue on the intersection of art, memory, and heritage.
Curatorial Foreword to The Warp of Time book: Memory lives simultaneously in time and outside of time. Unlike history, memory lacks linearity and includes the act of forgetting. As our recollections alter every time we attempt to gather them, memory becomes a continuous creative process that fuses imaginary interpretation and historical reality, intertwines poetic and encyclopedic, and blurs the line between myth and reality.
Since Antiquity, memory and place have been inextricably connected in our minds. Ancient Greeks invented the art of memory, which taught how to use architectural spaces to map images and text to aid orators in recollecting their speeches. Because memories are never free-floating, they attach themselves to places turning some of them into the “sites of memory”where the heritage of cultural communities gets crystallized. Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and artists have written about the importance of memory in understanding the self, going as far as calling it a “pillar of our identity.” Thanks to human creativity, our personal and collective identity persists against the destruction of memory in times of war, political conflict, and radical social shifts. When people die, buildings crumple, societies change, artworks left behind turn into memorials of human skill, emotion, and values.
The narrative thread of this book doesn’t stretch in a straight line. By mixing history and memory, it distances itself from the chronological retelling of events with contemporary artists, writers, poets, and musicians creating a dialogue with history through their collective selective memory. Staged at the Old Carpet Factory, a historical mansion on Hydra Island, the accompanying exhibition invites the viewer to navigate through the past, remembered, forgotten, and imagined, presenting a warped historiography of the place. (© Ekaterina Juskowski, 2024)
Curatorial advisors - Dimitrios Antonitsis, Electra Soutzoglou
Co-Produced by Old Carpet Factory, Soutzoglou Carpets and Mnemosyne Projects