+9
Title
+9
Researcher
Academic Year
2018-2019
Brief Description
The site-specific installation Viomen (2019) (a made-up acronym deriving from the words violence and women) by Adonis Volanakis, receives its inspiration from the myth of Zeus whose birth implicated the escape from his father Titan Cronus' practice to consume all his new-born children.
Cronus fed on a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes that Rhea offered to him instead of her baby Zeus, giving him the chance to grow up secretly and eventually fight to become the king of the gods. Volanakis juxtaposes the robustness of the physical material as narrated in the ancient myth against the fragility of a congregation of ceramic vessels. For him, these ceramics are representations of female identity and their number is associated with the number of Zeus' consorts and lovers, which remains a titillating debate amongst scholars to this date. Greek mythology portrays the multitudinous ways that Zeus used to invent in order to capture his female prey and involve them in sexual activities mostly without their consent. Suspending his ceramics around the dark space of the venue, the artist creates a domain of uncertainty, isolation and despondency reflecting on the feelings of those women experiencing distress and desolation due to domestic and family violence. Employing the luminous cobalt blue to embellish the surface of his works, Volanakis' otherworldly choreography mediates a prayer for the troubled souls and turns his installation into a sea of oneiric landscapes voiding all sadness, infusing them with hope and dreams. With mythology as the conduit of veiled meanings around patriarchy and male dominated societies, Viomen (2019) is a hymn to all mothers and all lovers who have played such an important role since the beginning of time, deserving a better place in every society and culture.
Cronus fed on a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes that Rhea offered to him instead of her baby Zeus, giving him the chance to grow up secretly and eventually fight to become the king of the gods. Volanakis juxtaposes the robustness of the physical material as narrated in the ancient myth against the fragility of a congregation of ceramic vessels. For him, these ceramics are representations of female identity and their number is associated with the number of Zeus' consorts and lovers, which remains a titillating debate amongst scholars to this date. Greek mythology portrays the multitudinous ways that Zeus used to invent in order to capture his female prey and involve them in sexual activities mostly without their consent. Suspending his ceramics around the dark space of the venue, the artist creates a domain of uncertainty, isolation and despondency reflecting on the feelings of those women experiencing distress and desolation due to domestic and family violence. Employing the luminous cobalt blue to embellish the surface of his works, Volanakis' otherworldly choreography mediates a prayer for the troubled souls and turns his installation into a sea of oneiric landscapes voiding all sadness, infusing them with hope and dreams. With mythology as the conduit of veiled meanings around patriarchy and male dominated societies, Viomen (2019) is a hymn to all mothers and all lovers who have played such an important role since the beginning of time, deserving a better place in every society and culture.