The exhibition presents new works produced by seven contemporary London based artists, responding explicitly to a selection of international artists’ work in the idiosyncratic private collection of late Greek artist Nikos Alexiou.Incorporating diverse readings, the show explores the dialectical relationships between artists, and between contemporary collectors and artists.It also alludes to the larger conversation of the artist-as-collector and artist-as-curator.

ALEX BUNN responds to REMY RIVOIRE, ALEX ZIKA responds to ADAM CHODZKO, CHARLOTTE BERGSON
responds to PANOS KOKKINIAS, CHRISTINA MITRENTSE responds to NIKOS ALEXIOU, MARSHA BRADFIELD
responds to BERNHARD CELLA, MARTIN SEXTON responds to GIANOULIS HALEPAS, JONAS RANSON
responds to VASSILIS BALATSOS

The notion and practice of the archive seem to be very attractive in the case of Linear B project. Nikos Alexiou’s collection is revisited and becomes the tank for new works, new thoughts, new inventions and new connections. If the recorded and the unwritten, the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary are being registered in a way in every Archi(bio)ologie [‘Archiviologie’, Derrida], something similar happens in the case of Linear B.If we speak in terms of narrativity, the whole project is a narration. Through a narrative manipulation of the sequence of events, the accidental acquisition of the first object becomes the beginning of a collection. When another meaningful sequence occurs (we are there now), collecting continues its journey in time, space and people’s psychic life. In any case, Linear B becomes a project of re-collection through an initial collection. (When we look at explanations of motivation however articulation of understanding recedes and yields to another narrative). Only the principal agent of the narration is not here anymore. An imaginary ending-death could be a constitutive force in subjectivity and a real ending-death also.

Today someone else still “tells” a story, some other agents have driven the story to a new plot. The new agents continue to “tell” the story, regulate in their way the accessibility to some aspects of information and sustain what the art historians may miss; the depot aesthetics of the collection, a collection-archive that becomes a place of work and a method in the same time, a place and an institution. The new agents’ story of re-collecting also begins by initial blindness, although less than the blindness of the principal agent. Their motivation is the new narrative aspect of collecting and its intrinsically ungraspable beginning. And this beginning is enriched by the new function the artworks have outside of being collected items, but into the psychic realm of personal reconstruction.According to the logic of the plot, or of theories of fibula, of structuralist genealogy, the particular combinations of beginnings, middles and endings that make up a story of collecting allow illuminating specifications of ‘collections’. In this plotted nature of collecting, the new artists-agents recreate, reinvent, respond, keep the dialogue open and alive. If the new seed can be found in the tiny, minuscule fragments of Alexiou’s collection, if new techniques revise the old craft of Nikos, if the collection’s works are being extended, then the common ground is somewhere there. And it has nothing to do with pragmatic and concrete formal issues. It has to do with psychic bonds of first degree, an artistic affiliation that not even Nikos could have predicted (or did he?).Writing by Thouli Misirloglou, Art Historian, exhibitions and collections Curator MMCA, Greece.

Project kindly supported by KIPOS, Nikos Alexiou Foundation, Athens

For Press Enquiries please contact the Curators at: alexioulinearb@gmail.com

The exhibition is part of the gallery’s programme for 2011-12 anticipating the forthcoming Olympic Games.

A day Symposium around contemporary notions of collection including speakers Cornellia Parker and a number of Academicians will take place at the gallery on the 7 January 2012. A colour publication will accompany the exhibition.

For your free booking please contact the Gallery Director, David Waterworth
E: slg@gre.ac.uk T: 0208 331 8260 W: gre.ac.uk/pr/sl

For Visual Documentation Please Visit: http://alexioulinearb.wordpress.com/
http://nikosalexiouthecollection.blogspot.com/

Communications by Aeon Rose