Photography Exhibition "νόστιμον ἦμαρ"

From January 28th to February 5th, 2023, we are delighted to host the photography exhibition titled "νόστιμον ἦμαρ". 

The exhibition venue will be open daily from 19:00 to 22:00.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Saturday, August 5, 2023, at 7:00 PM. We would be delighted to see you there.

For Alex's exhibition...

"Nostalgia allows us to plant flowers in the rock and in the rust of time that leaves us deserted, nourishing us with optimism and the illusion of immortality.

The photos and images captured on the negative, both in the past and present, in Alex's camera memory, are a momentary immobilization of time, which until a few years ago, was filled with endless journeys, returns, departures, and boundless expectations.

Hate and exile have tears, and as much as the habit weaves a scarf, and repetition, the separation from the familiar, the ancestral land, the hearth, and the unrealized desires are migratory birds that come and go, bleeding their wings, crashing into the stones of relentless reality and earthly routine.

Alex Papaioannou carried in his luggage photographs and images with Greek light that spurred the sea of August without a saddle. Dressed in flavors and scents, with an air of carefreeness, with clear and familiar sounds that dwelled within his being, like remnants of maternal tenderness from his childhood before he shouldered my backpack and set out as a public fugitive and adventurer, an explorer of the world and of himself.

And up close, the anticipation and nostalgia of return sought to find what it left behind, and it was no longer there, as it changed, just like the whole world changes incessantly in the delusion of immobility and the unchanging. And there came a moment when he didn't know if he was an immigrant or a local exile

Countless times, he tipped his hat, bidding farewell to life with an excess of sorrow, nostalgia, reminiscence, with the flame of the curiosity candle reflecting in the mirror of his soul the gleam of the rifle that shot loves, dreams, and the smoke of the rifle concealing flaws, weaknesses, and selfishness, the awareness of which gives us the measure of our imperfect human existence.

A talented torrent of clicks spent thousands of meters of film, imprisoning time, smiles, sorrows, nostalgia. And after completing the wanderings to the ends of the world and returning wiser like another Odysseus to Ithaca, he discovered that the photographs, images, and emotions were as much the same as they were different through time…

The trees, the same yet changed, the olive trees, the same but different, the same wild pear tree but foreign, withered in its old age. The old courtyard, both the same and different, where we used to practice balance exercises and daring feats as children, exploring our contact with the unknown world beyond our boundaries.

Even the sounds of silence are the same, and yet so different when the landscape is quiet. Photographic frames repeat, and only the dates on the negatives, now in their digital recording, testify to the chronological distance from their capture.

The nostimon hmar is, for the photographer, an endless algorithm that has been functioning all these years, filling memories and archives, so that time has the opportunity to reshape landscapes, moments, and stories from memory, redistributing and sharing the Kalos and unchanged Beauty!

This photographic endeavor is the random selection of diverse moments, a cumulative sum of a colorful range of emotional states in my long-term photographic narrative.

It is a small selection from the countless treasures of his personal photographic eloquence, which he presents in this exhibition.

Panos Niavis, Atalanti 2023

Artist

Alex Papaioannou was born in Greece in 1954.

In 1974, he went to Sweden for studies. He is an anthropologist and photographer. He worked as a specialized photographer and a photography and digital media professor since 1981 in various higher education institutions and establishments in Sweden. 

He has a history of over 17 exhibitions in Sweden, Greece, and other countries. Over the past eleven years, Alex has developed a more specialized sphere in his photography, using analog cameras, large formats, Polaroids, scanners, and a more mixed technique that attempts to depict the environment around him.

His interest in inverted beauty and repetition often becomes the subject matter in the reality of his photographs. 

Alex says that taking a photograph is a process of looking inside himself and understanding things and situations around him. The main focus is the continuity of the subject beyond difficulties and chronological entities.

The photographer adds that the present exhibition, titled "νόστιμον ἦμαρ" (nostimon emar), is part of a project that has been ongoing for years, capturing all the memories and ties to the homeland during the period he lived outside of Greece. 

Scandinavian feelings and behaviors influenced his perspective on how he would perceive the difference of light in what he sees and the concept of time and distance between expressions, "I go to another country" and the day I will return home again."

Since the summer of 2017, Alex Papaiioannou has been living permanently in Greece.