Output details

Realities and Plausibilities: Re-enacting Realism in Contemporary Photographic Art

Drawing on 15 years of curatorial experience, Moschovi was invited, in 2009, to curate this group exhibition and author the accompanying catalogue by Xippas Gallery, a French commercial gallery (est/1990) on the international art circuit with six galleries in France, Uruguay, Switzerland and Greece. This exhibition examined in-depth and for the first time in relation to the Greek paradigm the impact that digital technologies and practices of reconstruction and re-enactment have had upon the realism of the photographed real. Moschovi’s 5,500 word introduction achieves this by contextualising work selected from eleven artists of Hellenic descent against the historical and conceptual premises of the “return of the real” in the visual arts and photography, arguing that in the case of the latter this is not a revisionist interpretation of modernist photography’s values, or celebration of the phantasmagoria of illusionism, as in the postmodern paradigm, but a new positioning on photography’s realist potential in tune with the hyperrealities we experience today. This project made a significant contribution to our understanding of photographic realism and its different expressions in contemporary Greek art. The dialectical relation that developed between the exhibits problematized anew traditional and current presuppositions around the ideological premises of realism as well as issues of hybridization and transgression among different media, disciplines and modes of practice. The exhibition received extensive critical acclaim in national press and TV and was viewed by 650 visitors. The exhibition text was selected for an anthology on Greek photography to be published by the Thessaloniki Photography Museum.