Hollowed Water

Press Release: ARCH is proud to announce Hollowed Water, the second instalment of a major solo institutional exhibition by Athanasios Argianas (b. 1976, Athens), on view this June 3rd–August 31st, 2021. The exhibition was first presented last year at Camden Art Centre in London and consists of recent works in music, sculpture and video by Argianas. Like much of Argianas‘s work, Hollowed Water is an exhibition structured in layers. On the ground, hybrid bodies of ceramic modules cast from human hips and legs, plants from the artist’s home, and six abstract elements alluding to joints and limbs (and reminiscent of crustaceans, exoskeletons or bauhaus costumes) are assembled into what resembles human hips in resting positions of sleep and recovery, or a hip-stretch exercise. Titled Tilebodies (sleepers), these assemblages occupy the gallery floor, with additional modules stacked around the periphery suggesting replacement, change, flux. Two Bronze Heads, both casts of binaural microphones designed in the 1970s to approximate the specificity of listening through a human head, are placed on the floor with an ear to the ground, their forms simultaneously alluding to constructivist and brancusi-esque tropes, as well as cycladic or art deco figurines. In mid-air, a partly curved iron parallelogram occupies a whole other layer of the space – of air. Song Machine 20’s graphic frame floats diagonally, at head height, between ARCH’s adjacent gallery rooms, with pattern of thin brass ribbon-like strips draped upon it, elegant and weightful. They feature twenty meters of etched text, inviting a choreographed experience for the viewer who attempts to read descriptions of an object that seems vague and impossible, distant and familiar – intimating dimensions somehow larger than the room itself. The third layer of Hollowed Water materialises only sometimes. It is sound, and specifically music – Pivoting Music (for strings and cat purr waveform in A), 2020 – a piece composed by Argianas for strings and a drone in A, made from a waveform of his cat Diamantis’s purr and written entirely in glissando, each note slurring into another, gliding in a downward pivoting motion. It is only there when activated by the viewer through a turntable located in the west corner of the gallery, heard through Principal and Metalique, two sculptures operating as speakers, both aberrations of the historical design accompanying the ondes martenot, a protosynthesizer invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot. The fourth layer of the exhibition resides in a different physical space and contains several in itself. ARCH’s library has been transformed into an immersive film installation projecting the homonymous work Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times), a three minute film comprised of the artist’s musical composition for harpsichord, voice and drum and a script enacted between the scale of the surface of a tiny bismuth crystal, the hand of the singer and an old Athenian river – repeated every eight bars, twenty-four times anew. The piece is a vortex-like repetition of a complex series of gestures through scales, and the scale of the projected image – a two and a half meter square which optically and sonically envelopes the viewer into place. On the occasion of the exhibition, Species Counterpoint, the first comprehensive monograph on the polymorphous work of Argianas is produced by ARCH and published by Lenz Press, Milan. Alongside a generous range of illustrations, essays by three leading critics each highlight a different perspective on the artist’s work. Quinn Latimer taps into the use of language in all its varied forms within Argianas’s art, and the sonic formalities of his work; Jennifer Kabat anchors her essay in swimming, direct experience, memory and affect; and Dan Fox, from whose essay the book’s title is drawn, uses the format of fiction, animating the artworks through a back-and-forth historical and spatial time-travel, in a manner sympathetic to Argianas’s purposeful use of period style. The book concludes with an edited conversation between the artist and the critic Martin Herbert, providing insights into the methodology and intuition informing Argianas’s diverse practice, as well as its political and ethical underpinnings. ARTIST BIO: Argianas’s recent exhibitions include: Hollowed Water, Camden Art Centre, London (solo); Slow Painting, Hayward Touring, (various venues) UK; Line, Lisson Gallery, London; readingmachinesmovingmachines (solo), On Stellar Rays, New York; The Promise Of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Antidoron, Documenta 14, Fridericianum, Kassel; Art Of Sound, Fondazione Prada, Ca Corner, Venice; Art Now Live, Tate Britain, London; and Art of Its Own Making, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St Louis, MO. He participated in The Imminence of Poetics, The 30th Biennale of Sao Paulo, Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, Brazil, and at PERFORMA 13 in New York, and has held solo exhibitions and performances at We All Turn This Way, The Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Gallery, London; The Length Of A Strand Of Your Hair, Of The Width Of Your Arms, Unfolded, EMST National Museum Of Contemporary Art, Athens; and The Length Of Your Arms Unfolded, Barbican Art Gallery, London. Argianas’s immersive installation The Length Of A Strand Of Your Hair, Of The Width Of Your Arms, Unfolded is currently on display at the permanent collection of EMST, the National Museum Of Contemporary Art, Athens, and in September 2021 his work Song Machine 19 opens at the permanent collection of Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Brussels. INDEX OF WORKS: Tilebodies (sleepers) Set 1, 2021 Various ceramic bodies 25 x 110 x 80 cm. Tilebodies (sleepers) Set 2, 2021 Various ceramic bodies 25 x 80 x 60 cm. Tilebodies (sleepers) Set 3, 2021 Various ceramic bodies 35 x 110 x 70 cm. Tilebodies (sleepers) Set 4, 2021 Various ceramic bodies 20 x 90 x 55 cm. Tilebodies (Modules a–f, Set 8), 2021 Stoneware fired in two temperatures, tuna marrow bone 22 x 97 x 78 cm. Tilebodies (Modules a-f, Set 7), 2021 Terracota, sea sponge Dimensions variable Aggregate Series, 2021 Electroformed copper trade crates Dimensions variable Binaural Head (resting, spiny oyster, AKG), 2020 Bronze 27 x 15 x 23 cm. Prism (gatto), 2020 Oiled epoxy, debris, grouper jowl, paper 16 x 15 x 12 cm. Prism (urchin), 2020 Oiled epoxy, found plastic, sand 8 x 10 x 10,5 cm. Metalique (aberration), 2020 Digifab plywood, wax, gong, electronics 120 x 120 x 26.5 cm. Playing the left channel of “Pivoting Music (for strings and cat purr waveform in A)” Principal (aberration), 2020 Digifab plywood, wax, speaker 165 x 50 x 50 cm. Playing the right channel of “Pivoting Music (for strings and cat purr waveform in A)” Pivoting Music (for strings and cat purr waveform in A), 2020 10” lathe cut record, turntable (5:27 min.) 11 x 42 x 32 cm. Song Machine 20, 2020 Steel and brass 10 x 2,4 m. Clay Pressing (hollowed clay) No. 1, 2021 Acrylic resin, ground pinna shell 32,5 x 35 x 8,5 cm. Clay Pressing (hollowed clay) No. 2, 2021 Acrylic resin, ground pinna shell 41 x 28 x 11 cm. Tilebodies (Modules a-f, Set 6), 2021 Terracota, shell Dimensions variable Aggregate Series, 2021 Electroformed copper trade crates Dimensions variable Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times), 2020 230 x 230 cm. back-projected 4K video installation with sound 3 min. (looped) Octopus, 2020 10” record box, laminated inkjet print 33 x 33 x 3,5 cm. Binaural Head (resting, mussel, neumann), 2020 Bronze 27 x 13 x 20 cm.