This is not the siren call

It is in the wading, in the drift, the hesitant move towards the foam lapping at your feet, that you may find the resonance you are searching for. Those first, true steps into the foam are the gateway. Do you notice the seaweed, the furry hair of the shore, sticking to your calves? Shells prickling the palm of your feet while viscous and gelatinous kelp forms a net all around. Do you feel the residue of memory trickle its way through the ocean floor’s fissures? A salivary, salty lick. A bit further, a movement to the edge of uncertainty, maybe a hard ridge, sandy cliff, or soft basin. And the sound floods in. There is the ticking, the pulse, the whoosh, and the audible echo refracting to another’s temporary location. Take the resolute step. This is not the siren call. This, to be sure, is the inescapable tide, urging you to indulge in a directionless plunge. Coulisse Gallery presents This is not the siren call, featuring Dimitra Liogka and duo Annie Andersson and Villiam Törngren González. This presentation highlights the decadent, uncanny appeal to enter worlds more than our own, an appeal shared across both practices. Entering their realms requires a drawing on bodily knowledge and familiarity and, simultaneously, a vulnerable unhinging from the known fields of our present. [i] The presentation’s title echoes this key duality - the call does not come from another dimension; their works urge us to begin at once. A key point of departure in Liogka’s paintings is bioluminescence; her marked experience of wading through landscapes of light, the bright details of which dissipate on close inspection, sparked a link to the sea. Drawing on this metaphorical link, the distinctions between the animalistic, ecological, and human become intentionally blurred; Liogka apprehends that to know a cosmos is to recognise its half-hidden teeth. [ii] And so, waves and the spikes of the noxious female sea urchin hide the figures’ faces while columns of vegetation render the paintings as blurry mirages. The balance between abstraction and figuration mirrors her process of repetitive automatic drawing and writing before painting, continually harnessing a third zone between conscious and subconscious states of mind. Similarly, Andersson and Törngren González’s process relies on accessing a mutual intuition, with each project building on the last to explore the contours of a shared reverie. Their installation “AQUALINE” combines the structural element of a jacuzzi with sonic and animated video elements to craft an autonomous, beating life form. The animations lend their initial naissance to the myth of the birth of Venus, whereby from the vengeful castration of Uranus’s genitalia by his son Kronos into the sea emerged the goddess of love, desire, and fertility, born between the sky and the earth. The sterile concave of the jacuzzi then forms the ultimate seashell resonance, a vibrating cavity filled with all-too-familiar yet incomprehensible vocals, described by the duo as utterances ‘somewhere between a human voice and a tractor. meaty and metallic.’ [iii] The works each push toward a perimeter; the animated bodies move as if they may escape their confines, sound reverberates beyond the basin’s ledges, and painted figures converge into a subterrestrial chamber. Teetering and tipping into fiction, it would do well to remember that at some point, the sea comes to an end, the cavity is finite, and what may buoy itself to the surface, saturated and sodden, is surely worth the risk of the descent. This is not the siren call. [i] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 2003, pp. 156-7. [ii] Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under The Sea, 2022, p. 76. [iii] Annie Andersson & Villiam Törngren González, 2025.