DANAE STRATOU: AFALES | NAVELS

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Conceived specifically for the Service Yard at Megaron – The Athens Concert Hall, the exhibition examines the relationship between humans and the natural environment through time, gravity, the flow of water and the lunar cycle. It considers forces and processes that operate beyond the human scale and shape the natural landscape. The exhibition also traces Danae Stratou’s artistic and personal relationship with the work of her mother, the sculptor and poet Eleni Potaga. The passage from the cosmic scale to matter and from there to the human scale develops through a series of new works created specifically for the exhibition and through the first presentation in 25 years of Breathe (2000), on loan from the permanent collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST).

In Afales|Navels, Stratou returns to natural matter and to the forces that transform the landscape, organising the individual works around the movement of water and the lunar cycle. The soundscape combines sounds of water and the sea with excerpts from Eleni Potaga’s poem Marvellous Pebble, recited by the iconic actress Reni Pittaki. The recitation of the poem and the sound of the waves introduce water as an acoustic presence and anticipate the visual progression from the Moon’s gravitational influence to tidal movement and, through the sea’s prolonged action, to the shaping of the pebble.

The works Afales I and Afales II, two sculptural transcriptions of the same natural pebble collected from Afales Beach on Ithaca, one in resin and the other in metal, translate a small-scale found object into monumental dimensions. In both versions, three-dimensional scanning and digital modelling of the original pebble are combined with traditional casting and hand-finishing. These two sculptural pebbles retain the traces left by water and connect the natural prototype with the exhibition’s title and with Potaga’s ovoid sculptures. Phonetically, Afales is linked to afalos, navel, a mark of the severed umbilical cord and of the transition towards autonomous existence. The sculptures’ ovoid form also recalls works by Eleni Potaga that surrounded Stratou as she grew  up. Potaga’s Muse (2006), permanently installed in the Megaron Atrium, brings her work into dialogue with the exhibition.

Close to the two sculptures, Tidal Ellipse, an elliptical disc sixteen metres in diameter made of raw salt, gives spatial form to the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. In the light-based sculptural installation Selene, the Moon’s gravitational influence, fundamental to tidal movement, links the installation to the pebbles, whose form has been sculpted by the movement of water. A scaled sculptural model of the Moon appears to float in space as programmed lighting alters its illuminated surface, following the succession of the lunar phases. The photographic installation Lunar Phases draws on a three-year photographic record of the Moon rising in different phases. Each photograph captures a specific moment of observation, while the sequence as a whole records the succession of lunar phases over time. 

In Breathe(2000), this cyclicality is brought to the rhythm of the human body providing a grounding element. The installation comprises soil, light, sound and a specially designed mechanism that makes the earthen surface rise and fall rhythmically, echoing both the rise and fall of the tide and the rhythm of breathing. The inclusion of Breathe in Afales|Navels makes the earthen surface rise and fall rhythmically, echoing both the rise and fall of the tide and the rhythm of breathing.

As curator Alia Tsagkari notes, “As art becomes an extension of nature and nature an extension of art, the exhibition traces the continuous oscillation between macrocosm and microcosm, natural process and artistic act.”

Breathe (2000) by Danae Stratou is presented on loan from the permanent collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens. 

The exhibition Afales | Navels is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with texts by Danae Stratou and Alia Tsagkari.