Christina Dimitriadis

Home

Artists

Venues

catalogue | image | text | vita | contact

update

FAMILIE ENDE
INSTALLATION VIEW
BERLINISCHE GALERIE, BERLIN 2007

More images: www.artnews.org/christinadimitriadis

01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41

FAMILIE ENDE
2006 – 2007

END FAMILY is the inscription on a grave that Christina Dimitriadis photographed in a Berlin cemetery. The title of this extensive series of small-format canvases – collages, all with a reduced palette, ironed onto them using t-shirt transfer film – is already a playful indication of its thematic range: at first glance, it is only a bizarre coincidence. One almost has to force oneself not to add the word “of” that is apparently missing between “End” and “Family”, until one realises it is only a matter of the family’s name. The artist plays with precisely this subtle ambivalence between the tragedy of private destiny on the one hand and the lapidary nature of everyday found objects and their aesthetics on the other. The individual motif develops into a poetic cipher of a very personal life; a self-reference on the basis of the real object. Things and situations are independent of the places where they can be found or take place. They question the unfamiliar and simultaneously unmask the constant search for a reliable home.

THE TRAP
Berlin 2007
Four color photographs, each 70 x 70 cm
At the end of corridor, on the sixth floor of one of the abandoned buildings of Humboldt University in Berlin is the room – trap.
The space, evacuated of all human presence is inhabited now only with spiders and flies. The entry to the room is accessible for both of them. But not the exit. The coexistence of both of these insects inside this space is impossible. Impossible because, the one the fly, constitutes food for the other, the
spider. Thus, this space itself offers no future to either of them. The room becomes the "un – natural" equation of victim and perpetrator

CHIMNEYS
2006
Berlin
This work consists of 3 photographs measuring 120x120 cm
Colour photographs of smoking chimneys against a cold snow-white sky, a typical Berlin sky. This at first may appear as a continuation of the Cranes project but it is quite distinct from the earlier one. While the Cranes project interrogated the all too immediate elation at the unification of the city, trying to capture the absence of a substantial political realm that would mediate a genuine unification, the present project explores our greatest“Angst”: that of violent, impersonal life, impersonal death.

I REMEMBER ALL OF YOU
-One colour photograph, self-portrait. Dimensions 60x60 cm.
SPAZIERGANG
(Promenade)
-Three colour photographs (triptych). On a misty beach. In the second photograph a discernible human figure. My father. Dimensions100x100cm.
ÜBUNGEN UM ZU VERGESSEN
(Oblivion's exercises)
-Three colour photographs. Home interior. Dimensions 120x120 cm.
MEN AND WOMEN
-A colour photograph. A dark door. Dimensions 60x60cm.
The present four photographic projects and one construction were developed over a period of several years. They were not conceived linearly and progressively. In their fragmented way they began clustering around a theme that none embodied alone but that, also, could not have been formed without the whole of them.
The photograph “I Remember All of You,” shot in 1996, came to me when I realized that that I kept on having to remember to forget all the time. Everyday life was incapable of containing the desirable. Imaginary life became more real than real, everyday life. Space itself became emptiness, loss, deprivation.
How long can this last, I thought, when the impossible leaves no possibilities for the possible? “Oblivion’s work ” is the as yet untangible, unsayable answer.
In “promenade,” with my father, the question of horror, dread, fright and pain returned. So I added another door to my work. A dark door outlined only by the dazzling light that spills through the cracks. I named it “men and women.”
ROOM STUDY, NO.1
Miniature model. Materials used: cardboard,fur, latex. Dimensions 64x38x40cm.
“Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty”.
F. Kafka, “Letters to Milena”Transl. Tani and James Stern
My constructed piece is the first study of a series of room studies. Inspired by a letter Kafka wrote to Milena, it came as an immediate and strong impression that soon developed into an obsessive idea for visualising the dynamic description of the room that Kafka had dreamt of. How to bring to the visual field not merely a piece of writing but a piece of writing that narrates a dream, and, moreover, a dream confessed to a paramour that is more and more unreal, became the affective motive of this work. Like Kafka, I thought the best way to represent this situation was to line the pockets of the unreal, of fantasy, and to let this strategy illuminate the truth about reality. Upon this thought I went to work, I constructed a room, a particular closed-off space.

THE CASTLE
2002
Berlin
This project consists of 3 photographs measuring 1.20 x 1.20 m
The disappearance of the door enfolds the whole house on its way out. The faint shape left behind serves as the testimony of an artifice that could not realize itself. The photographic image has the capacity to engulf the viewer disallowing the necessary for reflection distance (the reflection of the work in the viewer and of the viewer in the work). In this respect I wish to stir a path in which these interior images unfurl: the engulfment is eaten up by the disappearance of the door into the wall leaving behind an ominous foreboding blot on the wall. Equally, the loss sing this disappearance is, affects any posture of a distance made safe by the viewer-object exhibited convention. These pictures capture my constant interrogation of the photographic image itself in the attempt to make it yield its dialectic of engulfment/distance, each unsettling the other, mirroring the structures of identity formation.

OBSCURE PASSAGES
2003
Berlin, Palio, Thassos
This work consists of 10 photos measuring 120x120 cm.
For this project I have photographed my father (quarry), my mother, my grandmother and myself (my home) and two seascape (childhood memorials).
The theme of this project moves from the images of an entombed figure in her private space to a ‘family conversation’ diptych, to the walled-in, solitary paternal figure to landscapes of the mythical land of childhood. Taken together the pictures form a story that can no longer be told. In the death-like repose of the reclining figure I wanted to convey a sense of loss, the loss of the capacity to represent our everydayness. It is the dumbstruck silence that follows this loss that has motivated these pictures. Along the same lines the other pictures forming the project carry signifiers of death, death not only as loss of meaning, mortality, biological cessation, but also as the threat of an ever increasing distance that suppurates our closest bonds. Anguish and desolation as the constant companions of our deepest loves.

BUILDING LIVING LEAVING
1996 -1999
Berlin, Athens
This project consist 58 photographs in 4 units measuring 1.20x1.20 m

Part 4: Living together - Psychiko
Athens
House in Athens, corridor, garden
Three figures sharing a life, shades moving in the darkened spaces of their loves, both helpless and menacing; menacing because of their helplessness. Their togetherness is one of merging shadows, a unity without companionship, a unity in which each a stranger to themselves and to the others becomes the pathos of pleading even without recipients.

Part 3: Brunnenstrasse
Berlin
Apartment in Berlin.
I photographed this apartment as a scene of an uncontainable “Angst”. The private space of an apartment -especially places like doors and corridors which draw a line between the exposed and the unexposed contents of one’s domesticity, a constant theme in my work- is flooded by a general and vague threat that cannot be addressed.
The photographs themselves become vessels of an unleashed and implacable fear.

Part 2: Cranes
Berlin
Potsdammerplatz, building activity.
Potsdammerplatz is a frontier place. One, though, cannot even call it that, a frontier, something that fronts onto something else. In truth it is the inner mark of an infinite and vague civil strife that cannot be met by the political imagination or whichever structure claims to have supplanted it. Conventionally the crane would symbolize a building upward, a ladder to a higher state of being, or the aim at perfecting the state of things. Instead, each one of these cranes stands desolate in a no man’s land, a parody of a former symbolic order whose loss did not lead to a remastery of a new one. The cranes appear trapped in a fateful history.

Part 1: Freiherr-vom-Stein Strasse
Berlin
Staircases. Nobody comes up. Nobody comes down. The steps have forgotten who trod them and they can neither call them back nor their image synthesize a memory for the scrutinizing eye. These stairs absorb an impossible memory, the imperative to remember what cannot be remembered.

OPEN CLOSED DOORS
1996
Berlin
This project consists of 3 photographs measuring 1.90x1.90 m
Each door opens and closes in a frail attempt to demarcate an inside and an outside. This attempt is met with an abstract resistance whose source is unknown. The doors bespeak the impossibility of a safe enclosure, the impossibility of a boundary between the inner and the outer that should have marked the possibility for protected privacy and for recognition of duties owed to the public.

Christina Dimitriadis

1967 born in Thessaloniki, Greece

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Education

1993 F.V.A. (Film and Video Arts) New York
1992 Parsons School of Design, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography,
New York

Solo Exhibitions

2008
"Symbioses" Curators without Borders, Berlin
2006
"Dystopia" Kanazawa Citizen's Center of Art, Kanazawa, Japan
2005
" I Remember All of You" Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
2003
"Obscure Passages" Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
2000
Galerie Deux, Tokyo
1999
" Building Living Leaving " Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
1998
"Outdoor Portraits of Reclining Women" Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
1997
"Open Closed Doors" Eigen+Art Gallery, Berlin

Group Exhibitions

2007
"In Present Tense: Young Greek Artists", EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
"Wir Haben keine Probleme", Kusthall, Bergen, October
"Neue Heimat", Internationale Kunst im Neuen Berlin, Berlinische Galerie, September
"The Athens Effect: The Photographic Image in Contemporary Art", La Maison Européenne
de la Photographie, Paris, June
"Heterotopias: Recreation maid in greece", First Contemporary Art Biennale of Thessaloniki, May
"Opening Hours", Metaxourgio, Athen, May
"Turbulance", 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland, March
2006
"An Outing" Beltsios Collection, Contemporary Art in Greece in the 21st Century. Matsopoulos Mill, Trikala.
2005
" Caravasarai " Artistic Exchanges, International Forum of Visual Art & Art Events, Contemporary Art Centre of Caucasus, Tbilisi, Georgia
" The Gesture. A Visual Librabry in Progress" Quarter, The New Center of Contemorary Art in Florence, Italy
" The Gesture. A Visual Librabry in Progress" Macedonian Museum Of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Greece
2004
"Berliner Zimmer" Kodra Art Festivals, Thessaloniki
"Any Place Any" Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art , Thessaloniki
"Breakthrough" Alcala 31, Madrid
2003
"Photography Now" Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
2002
Biennale Europea Arti Visive, Premio Del Golfo, La Spezia
"The Spirit of the Family" Photographic Center of Skopelos
2000
"La Casa, Il Corpo, Il Cuore" National Gallery in Prague
1999
"The Passion and The Wave " 6th International Istanbul Biennial
"La Casa, Il Corpo, Il Cuore" Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna
1998
"Neither Nor" Living Art Museum, Reykjavik
Hoffman Collection, Berlin
"Acting Out" Silverstein Gallery, New York
1997
"Special Event" Eigen+Art Gallery, Berlin
Image and Icon: The New Greek Photography 1975-1995,
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki,
Eigen+Art Gallery, Berlin
"Greek Realities" Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense
"Distanz und Domizil" Städtische Galerie Rähnitzgasse, Dresden
1996
"Spring Collection" DESTE Foundation, House of Cyprous, Athens
"Station Deutschland" Kampnagelfabrik, Halle K3, Hamburg
"Question de Genres" Mai de la Photo, Reims
"Suite Substitute II: Tempus Fugit" Hotel du Rhone, Geneva
"Greek Realities" Galerie im Marstall, Berlin
1995
Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
"Mama & Papa" Eigen+Art Gallery, Berlin
"Space Odyssey" Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
"Station Deutschland" Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
1994
Eigen+Art Gallery, Berlin
Eigen+Art at "The Independent Art Space" London
1993
Visionaire Photography Exhibition" Art 54 Gallery, New York

Projects

2006
CARK Artist exchange programm and workshop of art and culture Kanazawa College of Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Bibliography

REVIEWS & ARTICLES
Lena Evaggelou "Staging Photography" Nea Newspaper, 26-27 Febrouary, Thessaloniki
Alexandra Koroxenidis " ‘Obscure Passages’ of life from inward, reflective viewpoint" Kathimerini Newspaper, English Edition, Arts & Leisure, 22 of January2004, Athens
Natasha Adamou "Christina Dimitriadis" Time Out Athens Magazine, Issue 46, January 2004, Athens
Midori Matsui "Christina Dimitriadis" Studio Voice Magazine, Tokyo, June 2000
Yukio Kondo "Christina Dimitriadis" Ryuko Tsushin, Tokyo, June 2000
Sania Papa "The _private spaces“ of Christina Dimitriadis"
Pancelinos/Makedonia Newspaper, Thessaloniki, December 1999
Haridina Karaindrou, "Christina Dimitriadis: Outdoor Portraits of Reclining Women" Arti Magazine, Volume 29, Athens 1998
Helena Papadopoulos,"Outdoor Portraits of Reclining Women" Camera Austria, Magazine, Forum, Issue 61, Graz 1998
Natalie Hadjiantoniou,"Contemporary Odalisques" Eleftherotypia Newspaper, Athens, 16 of January 1998,
Maria Maragou, "After Photography" Eleftherotypia Newspaper, Athens, 5 of February 1998
Peter M. Hornung, "Graesk kunst fort ajour; Politiken Newspaper, Kopenhagen, 10 of June 1997
Karen Louise, Juhl Christensen, "At vaere eller ikke vaere...graesk"
Jyllands-Posten Newspaper, Odense, 13 of June 1997
Annette Tietenberg, "Mit doppelten Boden" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Newspaper, Frankfurt, 1 of March 1997
Harald Fricke ,"Kunst in Berlin: Christina Dimitriadis" Die Tageszeitung
Newspaper, Berlin, 1 of March 1997
Elfi Kreis, "Aus der Bild geschichen" Der Tagesspiegel Newspaper, Berlin 1 of March 1997
Emily Tsingou, "Christina Dimitriadis" Flash Art Magazine, January/February, Milan 1996
Katherina Gregos, "Spring Collection" Art Magazine, Athens, January/February 1996
Emily Tsingou "Some dots on the map: Art in the 90s " London Magazine, London, April 1996
Katherina Gregos, "Spring Collection" Zing Magazine, New York, Autumn/Winter 1996
Helena Papadopoulos, "Christina Dimitriadis, Lila Polenaki" Arti Magazine, Volume 24, Athens, 1995
Visionaire Magazine, No.8 Spring, New York, May 1993

CATALOGUES
Berliner Zimmer" Kodra, Thessaloniki, 2004 (general catalogue)
"Any Place Any", Essay by Harry Marandi, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art ,Thessaloniki, 2004 (general catalogue)
"Breakthrough", Curated by Sania Papa, Katerina Gregos, Dennys Zacharopoulos, Alcala 31, Madrid 2004 (general catalogue)
"Varianti Impresive – forme d’arte in atto e a venire" Biennale Europea Arti Visive La Spezia, Curated by Bruno Cora (general catalogue)
"The spirit of the family" Curated by Vangelis Ioakimidis, Photographic Center, Skopelos, 2002 (general catalogue)
"The Passion and the Wave" 6th International Istanbul Biennial, Curated by Paolo Colombo, Essay by Helena Papadopoulos, Istanbul, 1999 (general catalogues)
"La Casa, Il Corpo, Il Cuore" Curated by Lorend Hegyi and Henry Meyric Hughes, Essay by Sania Papa, " Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig , Vienna 1999 (general catalogue)
"Distanz und Domizil" Curated by Harald Kunde, Essay by Annette Tietenberg, Städtische Galerie
Rähnitzgasse, Dresden 1997 (general catalogue)
"Image and Icon: The New Greek Photography 1975-1995" Curated by J.Stathatos, Hellenic Ministry of Culture/Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, 1997 (general catalogue)
"Spring Collection" Curated by Helena Papadopoulos, DESTE Foundation, Athens 1996 (general catalogue)
"Greek Realities" Curated by George Tzirtzilakis and Birgit Hoffmeister, Essay by Helena Papadopoulos, Berlin 1996 (general catalogue)
"Station Deutschland" Künstlerhaus Bethanien,curated by Tatjana Herrmann & David Maas Essay by Emily Tsingou, Berlin 1995 (general catalogue)

Links

http://www.koroneougallery.com
http://www.curatorswithoutborders.com

Christina Dimitriadis

Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Str. 4
D- 10407 Berlin

(+49) 172 304 9952
christinadimitriadis@googlemail.com
www.christinadimitriadis.com

Eleni Koroneou Gallery
30, Dimofontos Str., & Thorikion
11851 Athens
Greece

(+30)210.34.11.748
(+30)210.92.44.271
info@koroneougallery.com
www.koroneougallery.com