Nadia Kalara

Adelos, the invisible, floating island, is cut off from the grounds of history and wanders in an archipelago of temporalities. If you follow the old Egnatia Route, the ancient passage that for ages connected Asia to Europe, you may arrive there. Like a retrospective traveller in contemporary Greece, Kalara attempts to reveal what insists there as a phantom. Through her artistic practice, she reconstructs the spaces she encounters, expressing the historical anxiety that dwells in them.

Entering the pieces of this exhibition, one follows the fabrication of a spatial entirety, constituted by fragmentary pieces of marble. Inthis marble cosmos ancient forms reappear persistently, albeit as copies or residues of an original. Here, structures are erected as remnants: whatever is produced is being added, not in order to complete a building, but in order to make it more ruinous. It is a temporal construction-site where one is watching the constant genesis and repetition of a ruin. Kalara’s digital composing strategy compiles numerous photographic takes into a hypothetical unity that preserves the memory of its fragmentation. The initial photographs – automatic inscriptions of a gaze onto a material – are transformed by the commands of simulation and replacement of the image-editing program, resulting in digito-graphies that return a lost magic to our sight.

For Kalara, the photographic medium is the post-medium par excellence. Photography is not an objective recording tool for her. Its versatility and dynamics are used not in order to objectively record reality but rather to reconstruct it. Touring – mainly to the Greek suburban landscape – is also an important artistic practice for her. This experience is formed by the attempt of its representation. The landscape is constructed the very moment it is traversed.