#nøborders

The moral crossroads that Menelaos Karamaghiolis’ new moving image works generate expand the video space and introduce a new kind of realism the filmmaker has been constructing throughout the past decade, by mapping what is not central in the geography of the heroic.
#no_border_films (2019) is the name of an Instagram account the artist has created for a group of video works to be part of, selected, organised and uploaded by himself through a period of time. The viewer is able to experience the video given the time frame that Instagram allows. The video #nøborders, contrary to the Instagram version, can be viewed in its full length within the liminal space that’s been hosted by the gallery in order to turn Cloud space into materialised memory. It depicts a ceremony where a man with a phone camera is the centre point. The video is part of a larger project that started in a juvenile prison (and continues until today after sever years) making its filming a functional ‘tool’ for its protagonists to use and claim solutions to their problems.
We are watching him holding a mobile phone over the dead body of an old woman, unsure whether he is filming and slowly realises that it is a tele-mourning ceremony alongside the actual one taking place in the room. It happens that as he has just been released from prison he is under a travel ban and is not allowed to go to Albania where the actual burial of his mother is going to take place. He is connected to his sister in Fier who mourns in this ceremony that is being performed for him in Athens.

Following All Souls Day I, an exhibition that first opened in Piraeus in January 2019, the second part takes a different shift by inviting a group of Athens-based artists to respond to this call through their practices that deal with the commemoration and elevation of the life of others, the unknown-to-us heroes of the everyday. All the works are framed through an open dialogue with Duncan Campbell’s video, that is pre-existing.

ALL SOULS DAY II, PSYCHOSAVVATO II
RODEO GALLERY
April 5 – June 1, 2019

Menelaos KARAMAGHIOLIS