Haris Epaminoda
Friday, 5 February 2010
Work from his oeuvre.
“…deceptively intimate works of Epaminonda: collages, escoriating and beautiful. They collectively form a kind of liminal space through the imagery of a past – the mid 20th Century – yet they don’t address a period in time, perhaps so that it might be the past, again. They are composed of images or pages taken from French magazines from the 1950’s or the found images of monuments: churches and memorials from the city of Berlin, itself an archive. The monuments touch upon Bataille’s iconoclasism in relation to the edifice of architecture, “to loosen this arché from its resolution, turning it into a mere beginning which is never more than the semblance of an inauguration.”v There’s a question as to what is at stake in approaching time in the image, in this instance as the monument loses hold of its iconic nature – the
time which gave it its fullness, the ‘subject’ of the image no longer the monument itself but perhaps, what Roger Caillois, speaks of as the psychasthenic experience, “an attraction by space’ or in the case of darkness an “assimilation to space”vi: the fear of losing our distinction between ourselves and our environment. Collages produced from images of people clustered in and by domestic interiors are domesticity and time-scape combined that undermine, but cannot be released from, a semblance of place. For Elaine Scarry such rooms have a potential far past their claim to harbour and protect, “While the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturisation of the world, of civilisation….”” – Denise Robinson