Kostis Velonis

Mount the Air

26 November 2015 - 16 January 2016

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Velonis uses cheap furniture that one finds in precarious workers' apartments. At the same time he makes DIY structures in which he communicates the sense of urgency. The "activist architecture" in the show "Mount the Air", investigates the permanence of social structures as well as questioning their role and form. The design of objects that function outside the context of privacy refers directly to the provisional and impromptu constructions that are used in demonstrations, public speeches and protests.

 

A question that is expressed through all the works relates to the possibility of a political theory that targets an expanded environmental legislative body of «species». Velonis combines the fundamental technique of the design of the object using remnants of construction materials in a vocabulary in which sculpture is denied its monumentality. The size of the cat as a form and as narrative draws forth arguments that refer to the priority of privacy in the urban center in juxtaposition and dialogue with the public space.  The cat as a house pet incorporates domesticity in the modernist condition. On the other hand, sculptural constructions whose forms refer to the presence of birds in the Attic sky mirror dynamically the public sphere.

 

Velonis? sculptures with their playful narrations and "awkward" craftsmanship de-mythicize the "revolutionary" rhetoric and ideological taboos of an academic "political art", opening themselves to narratives of rural life and determine a time line prior to but also parallel to modernity.