Vangelis Vlahos

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Vangelis Vlahos (Greek, born in Athens, 1971) is an artist based in Athens, Greece . His research-based work probes his native country’ recent historical past and its geopolitical role in the wider region of the Balkans, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, aiming at a reexamination that may yield alternative narratives . Through his archives, texts, and videos, he creates a network of references and relationships, exploring the possibility of seeing and understanding different historical moments outside of dominant narratives .

Biography

Since 2004 he has participated in various exhibitions, among which are Manifesta 5, San Sebastian (2004) curated by Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni; 3^rd Berlin Biennale (2004) curated by Ute Meta Bauer; Behind Closed Doors, curated by Katrina Brown, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts (2005); 27th São Paulo Biennale (2006); 11^th Istanbul Biennial (2009) curated by WHW; ISLANDS+GHETTOS, NGBK, Berlin (2009); Monument to Transformation curated by Vít Havránek and Zbynek Baladrán, Prague's City Gallery (2009); To the Arts, Citizens!, Serralves Museum, Porto (2010); 3rd Athens Biennial (2011); The End of Money, curated by Juan A. Gaitán, Amira Gad, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011); Gesture, Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014); The Fall, Rodeo gallery, Istanbul (2015); The Triennial 50JPG, CAMÉRA(AUTO)CONTRÔLE, Centre de la photographie, Genève (2016); The Kids Want Communism (Notes on Division) , Museum of Fine Arts, Tel Aviv (2017); Antidoron - the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Athens (as part of Documenta 14) , Fridericianum Museum, Kassel (2017); The Trials of Justice, curated by ILiana Fokianaki, La Colonie, Paris (2019); When the Present is History, curated by Dafni Vitali, Depo, Istanbul (2019); 7^th Thessaloniki Biennial , Thessaloniki (2019); Statecraft (constructing the nation) , curated by Katerina Gregos, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (2022); Machinations, curated by Pablo Allepuz, Manuel Borja-Villel, iLiana Fokianaki, Rafael García and Teresa Velázquez, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2023); Elefsina Mon Amour, curated by Katerina Gregos as part of 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture, Old Oil Mil Factory, Elefsina (2023); Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023 / The Spectre of the People, curated by Julian Stallabrass, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (2023).

His projects are in private and public collections including the Tate Modern in London, the Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art in Stockholm, Sweden, EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens , Greece and the Teixeira de Freitas Collection in Lisbon , Portugal.

Work

As writer and editor Stephanie Bailey writes in "Vangelis Vlahos Digs Deeper", a profile of the artist in ArtReview., Vlahos was born during the so-called Regime of the Colonels (Greek junta), when a rightwing military junta ruled Greece, from 1967 to 1974, and growing up amid the transition to democracy, he began exploring Greece’s post-dictatorship political history during the early 2000s, in an attempt to develop a sociopolitical consciousness through his artistic practice. For Bailey Vlahos "unearths historical traces to burn holes through official narratives that frame history as a closed book, which in turn treats the public as passive recipients of an established plotline. (...) With a focus on the mediated footnotes to Greece’s modern geopolitical history, the artist is not concerned with producing research that contributes to the field of historical study – he works with secondary sources and material found online and through the media, after all.". As the artist states: “My goal is to create an open narrative, an open platform, for anyone to project their own perceptions – if they have any – on the event I’m working through, rather than say how it should be understood.”

In his earlier projects such as Athens Tower (Tenants Lists 1974–2004) (2004) , Buildings like texts are socially constructed (2004) and Buildings that proclaim a nations identity to the world should not be misunderstood (2003), "1992" (THE RENOVATION OF THE BOSNIAN PARLIAMENT) (2006–2007) Vlahos concentrates on Greece's relationship with USA and Eastern Europe trying through the field of architecture to understand the discipline's ideological and historical framework. In these works Vlahos investigates the mechanisms constructing identity and political power as they are reflected in institutional buildings and symbolic sites. His sculptures, models, lists and technical drawings reproduce and dissect embassies and bureaucratic offices, recreating architectural symbols according to indications found in the media. For Manifesta 5, Vlahos conducted research on the relationship between high rise buildings and politics.

Later Vlahos started to explore the archive through found images, in works which take the form of collections of found photographs building up a network of references and relations which aim to test the possibility of seeing and understanding different events and conceptions of the past outside the official narratives . 1981 "Allagi" (2007) is an early example of one of these projects. The word Allagi (change) was the main political slogan of the 1981 election campaign of the Greek Socialist Party Pasok. The project tries to construct a reading of the first nine months of the Socialist Party's administration in the early 1980s through visual material found in the archive of the Eleftheros Kosmos newspaper, the semi-official mouthpiece of the Regime of the Colonels. The material of the project covers the period from the time the Socialist Party won the elections in October 1981, to the time the newspaper closed in June 1982. The artist organized the images like a calendar: chronologically according to date. As curator Tina Pandi writes “They report about political, social, and cultural events, as well as show images of daily life. By means of an arbitrary narrative composed of this material, Vangelis Vlahos attempts an approach to the multifaceted notion of change (“allagi”), as was the dictum of the socialist party—which first came to power in 1981, and was invested in sociopolitical restructuring and transformation”

The title of Vlahos' work Grey Zones (2009), first presented in the 11th Istanbul Biennale, curated by collective WHW, refers to the terminology used by Turkish authorities to describe disputed areas of the Aegean Sea that have repeatedly caused political and military tensions between Greece and Turkey. The installation presents two instances of such tensions, using parallel sets of photographs of boats found in Greek newspaper archives. The boats were part of Greek attempts to utilise the Aegean Sea in the 1970s. Using everyday images, the work becomes a meditation on how the contemporary media represents ideas of conflict and territory.

For the project Foreign archaeologists from standing to bending position (2012) the artist investigates postures adopted by foreign archaeologists during individual activities in the archaeological field in Greece after 1950 . The most frequent postures adopted by the archaeologists were taken into consideration. The selected images, originally produced to substantiate specific factual data, were removed from their original context and composed in such a way to create a sequence of movement based on the archaeologists’ postures. As the artist accounts to curator Dafni Vitali, on the ocassion of the first presentation of the work in Current Pasts at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, the decision to put an order outside the material’s original context or ideological connotations “was a way to interrupt the original narrative of the images and refashion the material, letting new meanings surface and opening it up to different interpretations”.

The archival project “The Bridge” (2013-2015) , recreates through photographs found in newspaper archives, online or in private photo albums, a fictional journey between the Thessalian city of Volos, about 300 km northeast of Athens, and Tartus, the second largest port city in Syria. “The Bridge” refers to a trade agreement between Greece and Syria in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to the establishment of a direct ferry service between the two ports, connecting Europe to the Arab world, and considered a fundamental pathway for transporting commercial goods to the region. The found images in “The Bridge”, portray everyday life on the ferry, amateur snapshots taken by traveling truckers and the ship crew, sunbathing in the open sea, or vistas of the seascape and the silhouette of the places the ferry was passing by. As writer and researcher Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes, Vangelis Vlahos “in his treatment of the archival document turns this process of neutral representation upside down, working entirely on found materials—where editing is impossible, not by removing traces of conflict and violence in the narrative, but by resisting the temptation of producing documentary linearity. In this open-ended discontinuity, the traces of the past, however absent, remain in latency, ready to return on short notice. The present tension and tenseness of these photographs in their spatial arrangement is not a reenactment of by-gone events, but rather of the condition of unfinished time: The same present, then and now, continues erratically, spilling out in all directions”.

Vangelis Vlahos’s most recent works involve unedited and found news footage and videos from security cameras and mobile phones sourced from different online networks . The footage and videos depict political meetings, forensic investigations and arrests that took place mostly in Greece after 2015, which Vlahos regards as a significant year that radically affected the country's political and social landscape because of the debt crisis. The found videos are converted into texts by adopting the structure of cinematic decoupage, a kind of shooting script which is produced before filming . In addition to a detailed description of the action, each of these texts includes, among other things, details about the location, the lighting, the clothing, the sound, the camera shots and angles. The text that emerges from this process becomes the key element of new videos, running vertically over a still image related to the context of the original videos. “Objects to relate to a trial (the door)” (2020), presented in machinations exhibition in Museo Reina Sofía in summer 2023, focuses in Aggeliki Spyropoulou, a university student sentenced to 28 years in prison for her involvement in a 2015 attempt to blow up part of Korydallos Prison in Athens in order to free the imprisoned members of the anarchist guerrilla group, the Conspiracy of Fire Cells . The project appropriates 14 seconds of found video from security cameras in late 2014, showing a 22-year-old Aggeliki visiting the offices of a chemical company to purchase a large quantity of nitromethane, a fuel used in motorsports and by model hobbyists but which can also be combined with other chemicals to make bombs. In the video we see Aggeliki enter the company disguised, and then as she attempts to open the door to leave. This video was converted into a script, which recreates in text form a detailed outline of the video’s action and incorporates details related to the position of the camera, Aggeliki’s clothing and the company’s reception area .

Further reading

2024, “Vangelis Vlahos Digs Deeper”, feature by Stephanie Bailey, ArtReview magazine, May issue: https://artreview.com/vangelis-vlahos-nikos-alexiou-the-collection-benaki-museum-tavros-athens-interview/

2022, “Hellas Syria Express Line”, text by Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Perambulation online edition: https://perambulation.org/contributions-en/hellas-syria-express-line

2015, “A Cartography of Events”, Vangelis Vlahos in conversation with Stephanie Bailey, ibraaz online edition: https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/161

2013, «Between Past and Present», Ivan Grubanov and Vangelis Vlahos discuss their project, Current Pasts, with Daphne Vitali, Artpulse magazine, no. 15, volume 4: https://artpulsemagazine.com/between-past-and-present-ivan-grubanov-and-vangelis-vlahos-discuss-their-project-current-pasts-with-daphne-vitali