Michalis Katzourakis
"Ninh Binh  - variations"
December 8, 2011 - January 21, 2012
Curator: Vassia Karkayanni-Karabelia

The Contemporary Greek Art Institute iset presents the exhibition of Michalis Katzourakis “Ninh Binh – variations”. The first part of the exhibition is a series of potographs taken by the artist when he visited in 2009 the town Ninh-Binh in Vietnam. The photos are arresting. The lens managed to capture within seconds on the blackened, mouldy walls, the gaping broken windows, the tin roofs, the falling plaster and the bamboo porches an ineffable world of impressions and emotions, the endless tragedy of human existence: war, decay, destruction, destitution but als, like a miracle, the pulse of an ongoing life.
The second series of works seems quite different from the first one, yet it is based on it or, rather, derives from it, hence the title Ninh Binh variations. Here Michalis Katzourakis, true to his own aesthetic inclinations and impulses, starts from the stimuli and the observations from this particular setting (“which is manmade and carries the imprint of life and decay”, as he says and as is true of almost all phases in his work) and subjects them to his usual “anatylical processing” which may last “a few minutes or several years”. The end result of this processing is works whose origin would be almost impossible to tell if we did not have before us their realistic versions – in this case, the photos from the city of Ninh Binh.