Drawing together film, sculpture and sound, the exhibition Hollowed Water at ARCH, Athens, asks: how can you turn affect into language?
Empty ceramic armours, resembling fragmentary parts of hybrid figures – somewhere between humans and sea creatures – punctuate the floorspace in Athanasios Argianas’s Hollowed Water, which premiered last year at London’s Camden Arts Centre and is now restaged at ARCH. As if washed up on a displaced shore, these unidentified sculptures, Tilebodies (sleepers) (2021), make you wonder too about the ‘missing’ bodies they once enveloped. Were they damaged or destroyed, were they healed? These ceramics deviate slightly from those in the initial exhibition: developed during the lockdowns, they seem even more unfinished, roughly made, more fragile.
Over our heads, like a drawing in the air, a set of suspended steel and brass ribbons (Song Machine 20, 2020) is inscribed with text: it reads, among other phrases, ‘The width of your shoelace, of the length of your nail. The width of a coral snake, unfolded. Of the length of a coral snake, curled up.’ You might use the words to ground yourself if you lack a background in music, given the potentially puzzling references to its history and technologies constantly present in Argianas’s work. Texts, recycled from older works, slip and then return, like a loop. They may not give fixed meaning to the objects – luckily – but they amplify
the counterpoint among different sensations, sounds and textures in this grouping, maybe the artist’s most textural work to date.
Waiting on a manual turntable is Pivoting Music ( for strings and cat purr waveform in A) (2020): involving strings and a drone made from a waveform of Argianas’s cat’s purr, written as slurring glissandos, it is heard through Principal (aberration) and Metalique (aberration) (both 2020), two sculpture-speakers, both aberrations of the historical design accompanying the ondes Martenot, a proto-synthesiser invented in 1928. Principal, playing the right channel, has a relatively clear sound, but in Metalique, a gong framed in plywood, the sound is distorted, the cello stands out, everything seems to be collapsing. This could be the sound of dust. Meanwhile, two Brancusi-like heads, cast in bronze from 1970s binaural microphones and each titled Binaural Head (2020), lie on the floor. Their ears, replaced by mollusc shells, touch the ground: gold diggers scanning the sound of the earth, perhaps, or dowsers looking for water. Historical modernism, an inexhaustible tank from which the artist regularly draws references, is present but not overwhelming. Again, sensations overcome reason; aural connections seem more important than the objects themselves.
The water suggested but missing from this gallery is to be found upstairs, in Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times) (2020), a three-minute film installation with music for harpsichord, voice and drum. The dazzling effect of the continuous alternation between two images – a drum falling into the ancient Athenian river of Kifissos and a closeup of a woman’s hand wearing a bismuth crystal ring – is accelerated by continuous jumps between tonality. The near-stressful result reminds one of fractals, chaos visualised. The music’s crystalline form is pivotal to the exhibition, as is the motif of the cast, the cell. Different fragile, organic forms, like a grouper jowl or a leaf, as well as moments and sensations, are cast throughout the space in an ever-changing choreography, reflective and open to interpretation and intuition. How, it all suggests, can you turn affect into language?
41 x 28 x 11 cm. Courtesy the artist and ARCH, Athens
Octopus (2020), by the exit, is a black-and-white image, printed on a record cover, of a cat nesting inside a seashell: it’s possibly the artist’s pet, the sound of its footsteps still haunting the space. This sheltering animal seems to hint at the tenuous encounters and connections around us – in the works, in life. The sensation created by this image and the exhibition as a whole is open to definition, like an alien conversation, yet one coming from the depths of the earth or the sea, the mind of an animal. Where is my voice in this, I wonder, walking around the old centre of Athens, where the gallery is situated. Can I communicate with this universe? Does it relate to any of the thoughts that trouble, say, a writer’s mind at an intense moment of their life, all the obligations delayed during lockdown pressing to be resolved? The previously ‘picturesque’, now highly activated sight of cats nesting on the ceramic roof tiles of the neighbourhood’s traditional neoclassical houses does not permit the obvious, negative answer, but rather keeps reopening the conversation, bringing back images, textures and scores from Hollowed Water. It’s like a song looping in your mind, asking you to sing it again and again, even though you might not want to. It’s stressful. It’s also cathartic.
Athanasios Argianas: Hollowed Water at ARCH, Athens 3 June – 31 August
From the September 2021 issue of ArtReview
