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‘Drawing The Waves’ Diana Blok & Ruthi Helbitz Cohen - on show till 3 November 2024

Datum

Friday 11th October 2024

Drawing, Photography & Video

Drawing, Photography & Video

11 October - 3 November 2024

Vernissage: Friday 11 October 2024, 19hrs
Finissage: Sunday 3 November 2024

Visiting hours: Wednesday till Saturday 4 - 8 pm

[SiC] Athens

[SiC] Space for International Cooperation Athens
Nileos 6 Thiseio Athens

On show: 'Drawing the Waves' from Friday 11 October - Sunday 3 November 2024. We look forward to welcoming you to SiC Athens for this artistic collaboration project!

The exhibition can be visited on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 4 - 8 pm. On show until Sunday 3 November 2024, finissage.

Μια καλλιτεχνική συνεργασία των:
Ruthi Helbitz Cohen & Diana Blok:
Συνδυάζοντας το σχέδιο, τη φωτογραφία και το βίντεο, η έκθεση αυτή σας προσκαλεί σε ένα μεταμορφωτικό ταξίδι, εμπνευσμένο από το έργο της Βιρτζίνια Γουλφ «Τα κύματα», εξερευνώντας τον τρόπο με τον οποίο η φύση αλληλεπιδρά με την τέχνη. Η διαδικασία της καλλιτεχνικής δημιουργίας περιελάμβανε τη βύθιση των σχεδίων στη θάλασσα, επιτρέποντας στα στοιχεία της φύσης να επαναπροσδιορίσουν την εικόνα και να δημιουργήσουν νέο νόημα.

σε έκθεση έως τις 03.11.2024 πρόσβαση στο: Τετάρτη έως Σάββατο 4 - 8 μ.μ. ή με ραντεβού

Curator Maggie Kuzan about 'Drawing the Waves':

"Drawing the waves is a collaborative project between artists Diana Blok and Ruthi Helbitz Cohen, which challenges linear representations of women in literature, history, mythology and religion. Merging the disciplines of drawing, photography and film, the project uses Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves (1931) as a starting point for re-imagining our socio-historical understanding of femininity. Just like the rigid rules of prose unravel in Woolf’s characteristic trails of consciousness, so does the notion of a stable feminine whole dissolve in Isreali artist Helbitz Cohen’s half-limbed scrawls and Uruguay-born Dutch artist Blok’s stuttering speech recorded on film. A single sheet of paper flaps and flails within the water. A pebble keeps it anchored to the shoreline, as the page skips and skims its surface like a handshake. The frame transitions and the camera pans, as the audience surveys the dimensions of the page, a figure of a woman emerges before it. Gazing away in a stone-cold stare, a dagger pierces her left underarm, nodding to the icon of the martyr, a popular visual motif littering Christianity. However, in Helbitz Cohen loose drawings familiar religious and mythological archetypes are turned on their head – a half-human, half-bestial form emerges on one page, while a kneeling, penitent figure, vulnerable and unclothed, bears the words I will be your Mata-Hari on another. The artist toys with the representation of women in history as a fixed ideal – instead beauty and abject coalesce together in the organic pen strokes on paper. Figures glide off paper just like the characters in the pages of Woolf’s books. The gender-bending protagonist Orlando, transitions from man to woman, from Elizabethan nobleman to Lady Orlando. Based on her female lover, the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, the time-travelling character bends the confines of gender and sexuality, just as Helbitz Cohen’s loose, freehand sketches break apart a cohesive, feminine form. Sound adds an additional layer of distortion to Blok and Helbitz Cohen’s experiment with femininity. Accompanying the visual recording, Blok reads aloud snippets of her interpretations of The Waves alongside other books, at a steady pace, echoing the rhythm of the tide. One thought seems to gradually appear, as the other fades away. Woolf brought the sonic play of the waves into her literary style and grammar, dotting her writing with semicolons, what James Antoniou writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019 has observed as ‘the shape and function of which resembles the wave, her most famous motif.’ Other times Blok hesitates or draws out her speech – the syncopated rhythm interrupts a linear congruity to the film and to the idea of a feminine bodily ideal. Process plays a vital role in Blok and Helbitz Cohen’s experimentation with femininity, challenging the idea of feminine history as a linear trajectory. Helbitz Cohen was originally gifted the book by a friend, and then began drawing directly onto the pages, drawings melting and fossilizing into the words. After a series of exchanges between the artists, Blok decided to place the book into water – to return the words to their original source. The natural landscape becomes like a digital filter – the fizzing and bubbling of the salty sea on paper adds new meaning the mass-printed words. As Blok states, The sea was undistinguishable from the sky. Form, speech and representation merge to create a multilayered, sensory experience, and challenge the representation of femininity in history."
- about the author: Maggie Kuzan maggiekuzan.cargo.site is a freelance writer and curator living and working in London. Working across a variety of fields, she explores the body, gender and sexuality from a feminist phenomenological perspective. Maggie holds a Masters Degree in Gender, Media, Culture.

Diana Blok @dianaelenablok
Ruthi Helblitz Cohen @ruthi_helblitz_cohen

SiC Athens is pleased to invite you to the upcoming exhibition "Drawing the Waves", a powerful collaborative work by artists Diana Blok and Ruthi Helbitz Cohen.

Vernissage: Friday 11 October 2024
Finissage: Sunday 3 November 2024
Location: SiC Athens
Time: 7:00 PM

For more information, follow us on Instagram @sic.in.athens see our website www.sic-athens.com or contact us via email: info@sic-athens.org

Open Friday 11 October - Sunday 3 November 2024

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