Author: Victerela1

These works,  objects that were collected while they were functional ( as fans ) , were undone and remade,  becoming non-functional.

From being manufactured,  were crafted by undoing,  became handmade and now remain perpetually in process.

With the feeling of not-yet made, the making do and the unmaking, continue working to re-create themselves and evoke new forms of consciousness.

They are precarious, they don’t endure, they fall apart by themselves, I stick them together with glue, tape or little nails.

They are small and light so they can travel with me.

The show opened in October 14th and the installation changed at the end of November ( right after the completion of 11 days silent retreat in my studio in Athens ).

The second part of the installation is still on view and the exhibition is extended till mid January 2022.

 

click below to read the interview (in greek) :

Καφές

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A series of small-scale sculptures and silkscreen prints in organza form Eva Mitala’s

“Atelier Portable”.

The central element of her new work are the Japanese fans and the portable impromtu reconstruction of the artistic experience that is created in us. The artist, while traveling to Japan, collects small mementos which she later integrates into her artistic practice. The main element of her practice is an eclectic feminine nomadism that took her to Asian, European and American cities.

Drawing upon Paul Claudel’s poetry collection: Cent phrases pour éventails*, Eva Mitala creates her artistic universe “Atelier Portable”, which she is bringing with her everywhere. These fans reflect how the material form negotiates the immaterial and how the corporeality of the small bronze forms come in contact with an intangible trace of air that drifts imperceptibly: “Éventail, De la Parole du poète il ne reste plus que le souffle”

Eva Mitala in her “portable atelier” processes her personal experience in the East into an inner microcosm rich in handcrafted poetry, whose aspects and segments have been invoked from places along her path. Traces of her personal experience in San Francisco (2020) and Athens (2021) are accrued in her artworks, unraveling silent memories, thoughts and shapes of a breath, inviting us to dialogue with them, as well as to feel them and decipher them.

Curating and Catalogue Text: Efie Falida

*A hundred phrases for fans is a 172 haiku collection authored by Paul Claudel between June 1926 and January 1927, while he was the French ambassador in Tokyo. For the Greek translation, see Thanassis Hatzopoulos, Gavriilidis, Athens 2002.

 

 

“L’automne aussi est une chose qui commence”

Paul Claudel

 

HIGH PRIESTESS
by Eva Mitala
“Live online Tarot reading from Greece with Eva Mitala’s Major Arcana Deck”.

 

 

Float constitutes a vast and subtle meditation on the reality of urban living.

Recognizing absence as the presence of a conscious activity within the brain, these works are a result of a meditative process that engages what is considered trash, forgotten and unwanted as a starting point to honor the decay and the beauty of things modest, humble and impermanent. Impermanence (literally, “the pathos of things”) has probably the clearest link: the works embrace the wear, tear, and sometimes damage that comes with age. They reveal the transient and mystical as well as the mundane and obvious as features change.

A big rolled vintage raster film found in the garbage, was appreciated, taken and cut into pieces that led to eight large scale experimental handmade wooden silkscreen canvases. After a test print of all canvases on a paper surface, the first piece of these works appeared, transforming the medium of silkscreen into painting.

The paintings were created using in studio silkscreen techniques, which translate the defaults and irregularities of the process into an aesthetic that simplifies the form and prioritizes material experimentation. In these works, the actual silkscreen canvas takes the place of the brush and when the ink comes in contact with paper or cotton, instead of a technique for mass production, the process becomes a way to produce unique prints. The result sometimes appears blurry – as if frozen in a permanent state of becoming, like the ethics of Wabi-Sabi that focus on finding beauty within the imperfections and accept peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.

By deliberately defying permanence, through a state of freedom and joy of being imperfect and incomplete, new ephemeral spaces are revealed and a whole body of work comes out naturally. These unique prints, defined by delicate forms which fully blend with each other, appear in the space in between; willing to alter expectations regarding gravity, the surfaces have no weight and assume an abstract meaning of floating where anti-gravity is visually natural. Floating has almost the same meaning as traversing, it indicates a mode of indeterminate human behavior. A shared common space.

 

Curated by Greek filmmaker Telémachos Alexiou, this selection of work manifests Alexiou’s personal relationships with the artists, shedding light upon the intimate moments, struggles, pleasures and agonies of being queer in 2019. The exhibition’s curation is a love letter to the artists, intended to bridge the geographical distance, and emotional longing between continents.

 

 

Unique silkscreen prints on paper and cotton 

 Tracing back our digitally conditioned present to one of the very first reproduction-techniques –  silkscreen prints on paper and cotton – Eva Mitala confronts plain, layered printed surfaces with the living materiality of time. Gaps, spots, patches, the real fading of the organic materials used for the prints expose the printed surfaces to transiency, contingence, evanescence. Uniquely related to nothingness out of which emerge the drift of time – life –, the layered surfaces reveal their own becoming as the singularity of a living now. It’s not about experiencing what is depicted, it is about awareness: floating within, be this now, be the living plasticity and ever-new transformations of matter opened-up in Mitala’s works – be the relational excess that makes up and recasts our present.

(Text: Marita Tatari)