Jannis Varelas: Sleep My Little Sheep Sleep

May-September 2012

Curated by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou

This exhibition is the first in a series of projects organized by guest curators from other parts of the world. We invited Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, one of the co-founders of the Athens Biennial and celebrated curator of many exhibitions world-wide to develop a show specifically for our gallery spaces. Jannis Varelas’ large scale multimedia drawings of ambiguous characters, architectural structures and symbols as well as his sculptural installations… Show more challenge human nature, time, history, language and myth. His imaginative construction of dystopias address the changing relation of the individual to the society and critically comments on various long-standing, venerable notions such as gender, sexuality, race, nation and religion.

Verelas’ solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center will employ the story-telling methods of theatre -and particularly those of the Theatre of the Absurd- in an attempt to experiment both with narrative form and the disintegration of narration. Combing different stories and artistic genres that share a common point of departure, the exhibition will act as a temporal distortion subverting basic narrative elements.

Jannis Varelas (b. 1977) lives and works in Athens and Vienna. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, University of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and The London Royal College of Arts. This work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, Prospect. 1 New Orleans Art Biennale and the Acropolis Museum. This is his firstone-person exhibition in the US.

Xenia Kalpaktsoglou is a co-director and curator of the Athens Biennale. She is also a member of the three person curatorial collective, XYZ. Previously she was the director of the DESTE Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Arts.

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