BETWEEN WORLDS — POLIXENI PAPAPETROU
curated by Alessandra Frosini
Every threshold is a dream, a moment of suspension in a secluded space surrounded by the infinite, whose fragments are part of a tale without an end, which crosses time, solitude, existence. The fantastic enters our gaze as part of reality, showing the link between truth and imagination guiding our comprehension.
With Between Worlds Polixeni Papapetrou offers us the dream as reality and the invisible as vision, reflecting on the becoming which typifies the contamination between different worlds, different realities, and making them coexist. Hybrid characters, with human bodies and animal heads, live in allegorical representations, staged in a fictional world, between mythology, archetype and theatre.
These are inexplicable situations, disturbing in their precarious balance between dream and reality, detached from any temporal reference. A metaphysical representation of reality, in which upheaval and alienation play a pivotal role, staging contemporary culture as a dynamic process based on hybridism.
From Greek mythology to medieval bestiaries, from Symbolism and Surrealism to the contemporary experiments of artists like Matthew Barney, what is hybrid establishes a connection with the different and highlights the humanity and bestiality of men in their relationship with themselves and the surrounding world. Analysing the concept of own and other’s, the artist draws the attention on the process of identity and relation, facing the ambiguity and the mystery of existence.
Whatever the mutation, the passage from childhood to youth (and then to adult age), the contamination springing from any new encounter between different individuals and cultures, the ever changing perception of memory and history, crossing a border always marks an intersection and a stratification, a never ending connection.
These anthropomorphic figures, mythical and familiar at the same time, inhabit open spaces, natural backgrounds, are part of the imaginary of limit, creating a codified universe, almost systematic, through actions which are real and allegoric at the same time, categories beyond time which guide memory into conscience.
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards (L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871)
