In the context of the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Outset Greece supports the artist Maria Papadimitriou who will represent Greece with the project AGRIMIKA – Why look at animals?.
Maria Papadimitriouís installation is a shop, a vestige of the past, that sells animal hides and leather, transferred from Volos to the central but ìruinedî landscape of Greek pavilion. The AGRIMIKA are animals that coexist with humans, but resist domestication.
We, humans, see in animals the reflection of our own features, behaviors, and manners. This awareness permits separation by contrasting the human with the animalistic. As the beast ends up as embodying the divergence from the human norm, the image of a democratic society is deconstructed, and part of it degraded: rights no longer exist for all and in the same measure.
This presentation of the relationship of humans and animals becomes a contemporary allegory of the dispossessed and the resistant and sparks concerns ranging from politics and history to economics and traditions, ethics and aesthetics, fear of the foreign and the incomprehensible.
56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale
Artist: Maria Papadimitriou
Commissioner: Hellenic Minister of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs
Curator: Gabi Scardi
Deputy Curator: Alexios Papazacharias
