ATHENS.- Museum Alex Mylona – Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition Christos Chrissopoulos My mother’s silence, curated by Denys Zacharopoulos.

Nefeli Editions has published the bilingual album featuring Christos Chrissopoulos’s photographic works My mother’s silence, which was presented first, as part of The Symptom Projects, at Delmouzos House, in Amfissa, in October 2014. The exhibition was curated by Apostolis Artinos. The exhibition will also travel to France, as part of the Printemps Balkanique Festival, in Caen, curated by Laurent Porée.

In Athens, Christos Chrissopoulos includes for the first time to My mother's silence at the Museum Alex Mylonas-MMCA, his video Knitting the thread of time [HD video, 7.20min, 2014], which complements the photographic narrative of the project and was shot by Christos Chrissopoulos during his visit to the family home, in the winter of 2014. As he says: "Looking closely at the weaving of my mother’s knitting, examining each millimeter of thread I realize that is not a piece of matter, but a piece of time she spent concentrated in the path of the yarn. A depiction of dead time”. After visiting the exhibition in Amfissa, director Yiannis Misouridis created a video – study under the title “Etude”, on the selectivity of gaze, which will be shown at Museum Alex Mylona exhibition.

Writer Christos Chrissopoulos (Athens 1968, Academy of Athens Prize, Laure Bataillon Prize) introduces himself as a photographer, with a work that is intimate and intricate. Twenty four images and one video piece with a dark blue tint. A narration exploring how memory, biography and our innermost sense of selfhood are formed within the passage of time.

“I believe that my own personal relationship with photography is defined by a need to reconstitute memory. It is my own way to relate to the world, to other people around me, and to my own inner life. But since I also have a deeply rooted connection to writing, I feel that I am constantly oscillating between these two different aspects of my double identity: writer/photographer. For me, literature is a method of defamiliarization. Through writing, I explore my disjunction to the world. Photography, on the other hand, is a way to explore my acceptance of the world. In the end, photography is probably an effort to come to terms with life in general. Probably this is why it became important for me a bit later in life, later than writing, at my forties. At a time when everything around me becomes a bit more intimate. Even my writing…” says Christos Chrissopoulos.

According to Apostolis Artinos, the curator of Chrissopoulos’ first exhibition in Amfissa “The edge of a piece of furniture, the dull light of a lamp shade, the luster of porcelain, the crystal liquor set, two apples in a fruit bowl, the medicine box of the elderly mother, her framed picture at a young age, this motionless time of silence... a speechless witness of an emotional engagement that nails its subject to the context that surrounds it. [...] Only the camera lens can shape the existence of this world, can highlight its objective side. When the gaze is content in its topological downfall and semantic extinction”.

“The museum is proud to present this exhibition by the internationally active author and photographer Christos Chrissopoulos” notes Denys Zacharopoulos, curator of the exhibition and Artistic Director of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and goes on to add: "What I consider important in this series of photographs and also different in respect to Chrissopoulos’s entire photographic work, is the use of the blue filter, which acts as a filter for memory, by removing any anecdotal element and by giving to the viewer a mnemotechic approach, similar to the rhythm of the verse as used in poetry. Thus allowing us to activate our own memory, even if we don’t recognize the specific people or objects. These photographs are particularly moving, but like every poetic work also very austere, measured and simple. They are neither color nor black and white, but activate an edge, where the relationship between colors and words is equivocal, therefore requiring the viewer to read or to perceive them in his own way”.

”I visit my mother’s apartment when she is away. I believe that, in this way, I can understand better how she lives. I go from one room to another looking closely at every object that is in her company. Objects do not lie.” --Christos Chrissopoulos