Curated by: Denys Zacharopoulos and Alexios Papazacharias
Duration: 2  February- 24 March 2013
Opening night: Friday, 1 February 2013, 20:00

Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art presents Eleni Kamma’s exhibition “P like Politics, P like Parrots”, curated by Denys Zacharopoulos and Alexios Papazacharias and produced by Eleni Kamma in collaboration with the Museum Alex Mylona – MMCA.  The opening reception will take place on Tuesday 12^th of June, at 20.30. The installation presented has been specifically developed for the Museum MMCA in collaboration with Belgian architect Breg Horemans and is accompanied by a special edition-200 copies only-catalogue designed by Salome Schmuki.

“What is unlikely to happen never goes alone. With this happy closing phrase, a real golden key for a sonnet, breakfast came to an end.”

Jose Saramago, Seeing

Eleni Kamma’s solo exhibition, P like Politics, P like Parrots, is the first part of a trilogy investigating possible and manifested contemporary European notions of common place created at the crossroads of music and architectural practices. Kamma examines the notion of spectacle in spaces of production such as the Lijnbaankwartier, the back stages of Architecture Museum in Stockholm, or public spaces like the piazalle Michelangelo in Florence. Through folding and unfolding gestures in emblematic places and spaces, a series of paradoxical hypotheses and strange identification experiments develop in her latest videos, drawings, and objects. Each result of these experiments verifies a hypothesis, which enables the creation of relations that reveal hidden common ground between different models and systems in Kamma’s work.

The exhibition develops, extends, engages and connects the two videos the artist created in Sweden in 2011, with the architectural space of MMCA. Inspired by the social phenomenon of choirs in Scandinavian countries, the videos P like Politics, P like Parrots and Malin and Τor: two architects in conversation mark the starting points of a single installation, where the whole and its parts coexist in order to create an interlude. Kamma undermines identification mechanisms and concept- generating procedures, gradually revealing the manipulation and speculation of experience, opinion, aesthetics, knowledge and history.

In Greece, museums are usually defined as places of preservation and exhibition of Greek antiquities and Greek tradition. Kamma’s work strongly comments on the role of the museum as a dynamic social structure with an active social role, turning the museum into a place of social coexistence, where the creation of meaning and history is not due to a single man or authority. At a turning moment of big economic and social uncertainty in Greece, Kamma’s solo exhibition at Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki and Museum Alex Mylona-MMCA Athens, where the exhibition took place in 2012 is an open invitation to the citizens of both cities. Self-mirroring, self-reflective processes introduce the public to different social forms and practices, proving that ideas and interpretations emerge from the actions and choices taken by an open and wide society.

Curriculum Vitae

Eleni Kamma was born in 1973 in Athens. She studied painting at Athens School of Fine Art (1995-2000) and at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London (MA Fine Art 2001-2002). Between 2008 and 2010 she was a Post-Graduate Fine Art Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, on a scholarship from the Dutch state. She lives and works in Maastricht and Brussels, where she participated in the 2010 WIELS Artist-In-Residency Program.

In 2007, Eleni Kamma was a nominee for the 5th Deste Award and was awarded the Premio Stima Lissone Award. Solo exhibitions include:From Bank to Bank on a gradual slope ,Villa Romana,Florence (2012), Enlever et Entretenir IΙ, WIELS, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2011), Enlever et Entretenir I, HEDAH,Maastricht (2010), Forgotten Ties, Nadja Villene, Lieges, (2009), Once past the years of green emotion, Lorainι Alimantiri/gazonrouge, Athens (2007). Her work has been included in numerous group shows, such as: On Dilettantism, ACC Weimar (2012), Found in Translation,Chapter L, Casino Luxembourg, (2011), Botanies of Desire, SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul (2011), Animacall-The Animation project, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, (2011), Weaving In and Out, No Longer Empty/Tapestry, New York (2010), Visual Dialoges, Onassis Cultural Centre (2010), Expanded Ecologies, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2009), Chanting Baldessari, Museum Bonnefanten, Maastricht, Holland (2008), 1st International Moscow Young Biennial, Moscow, Russia (2008), L’Art en Europe, Domain Pommery, Rheims, France (2008), In Present Tense. Young Greek Artists. National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007), Lissone 2007 Award, Lissone, Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan (2007), 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2007), Other Spaces, 1st Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial: “Heterotopias”, Thessaloniki (2007), 5th DESTE Prize, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2007).
In 2011 Kamma was a resident artist at the IASPIS Residency Program of Stockholm, at Villa Romana, Florence and at Duende, Rotterdam. In 2012 she was awarded the prize PREIS FÜR JUNGE KUNST by Neuer Kunstverein of Aachen, Germany.

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