The National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation presents on Thursday, February 7, at 20:00 at the Thessaloniki Centre of MIET, Villa Kapandji - Vasilissis Olgas 108 the photography exhibition:
Aris Georgiou
USA-Russia: Draw
“America of 1978" is perhaps the most fundamental unit in Aris Georgiou’s entire photographic oeuvre. Product of his first major trip to the United States, which he spent two months crossing from coast to coast, it provided the material for his first solo show, “Photographs from America”. Georgiou’s “America of 1978” collection became the subject of a monograph in 2018,[…], forty years after that first journey to the fabled land, so dreamed of in his youth. The Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece decided to publish it as a twin edition to "Russia of 1998", also an anniversary collection, created 20 years later. As a photographer’s exposé, the Russian collection stands in contrast to the more youthful eye that recorded the "other pole". In his own words, “...for our generation, the two countries, especially in their post-war political form, with their all too familiar antagonism, antipathy, incompatibility, were ― at least, in our eyes at that time ― the two eternally opposed poles of the stable/unstable equilibrium that could never be overthrown.”
The two parallel books, “America at 78 rpm. A 1978 Travelogue” and “Uncurtained: Russia ’98”, each 200 pages long and with magisterial texts by Yiorgos Chouliaras and Robin Baker respectively, remind us of the degree to which “...we who lived outside America and Russia, the ‘little’ citizens of the Western world, had preformed and unchanging reflex perceptions of the World through the image that the two giant states emitted with no intervention on our part”.
Although the two books are not linked, they are presented together in the context of the single exhibition titled “USA–Russia: Draw” curated by Giannis Epaminondas, in which the mixture and juxtaposition of images from the two great powers of the time seeks to demonstrate similarities and differences between the two places, to identify and engage with likely and unlikely conjunctions and disjunctions.