Framing Transience
Shown at PERSONAL STRUCTURES - Open Borders, Venice 2017
The 20th century seems to have endorsed the emergence of a new way of defining art: taking something ordinary and placing it onto an artistic context; or more broadly, taking something new and defining it as art. Such were the ideas brought forth by Terry Atkinson, pioneer of conceptual art. This new definition along with the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi: the celebration of the incomplete, the rudimentary, the imperfect, act as key influences in Aspa Savidi’s work.
Savidi’s piece therefore does this: detaches an ordinary imperfection from its ordinary context by framing it and thus drawing the viewer’s attention onto it specifically as an object standing on its own.
By creating a framework around imperfections; marks on walls, the artist is inactively intervening. This engages the viewer detach the work from its context and admire it for what it represents - inciting the viewer to imagine their own world and narrative.
I Am Consumed
Shown at 2012 Open 15 Lido, Venice
Aspa Savidi uses collage, colour, ink and other materials to transform product barcodes into abstract shapes and colours. The resulting image is installed in public space, becoming available for the world –potentially a massive number of people who can access it in physical and digital space. An image that can be as free and public as an art work (can art works ever be truly free and public?) and as identifiable, marketable and private as a commodity (acquired and administered by institutions or collections).
The work does not only reference the nature of art as commodity (a product of human endeavor and intellect that can be sold and bought). Seen under the light of the current critical financial and social circumstances, it also poses a series of questions on the ramifications of the consumption of art and culture. Alongside the consumption and overconsumption of commodities as a symbol of power and prestige, could one also refer to an overconsumption, hence waste, of artistic-activist practices aiming at proposing alternative scenarios of living? Such initiatives –anarchist, collective, non-commercial, artistic, activist– have not been left unaffected by the much frowned upon institutionalisation and commercialisation of art. Passing through the canning appropriation by the advertising and corporate world, their format (and not their essence) becomes incorporated into mainstream, mass culture. When confronted against such models of consumption, can those practices still empower us to imagine a new reality?
Hangman
Presented at Genius Loci Exhibition Athens 2007