Haris Epaminonda
Untitled 14, 24, 25, 27, 29, 36, 2005-2007

Haris Epaminonda, Untitled *29, 2005-2006, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Photo: Courtesy Domo Baal Gallery, London

Photo: Courtesy Domo Baal Gallery, London (detail)

Haris Epaminonda, Untitled *14, 2005-2006, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Photo: Courtesy Domo Baal Gallery, London

Haris Epaminonda, Untitled *24 and *25, 2005-2006, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Photo: Courtesy Domo Baal Gallery, London

Haris Epaminonda, Untitled *36 and *27, 2005-2006, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Photo: Courtesy Domo Baal Gallery, London

Installation view: Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2022
Photo: Roberto Ruiz

Haris Epaminonda

Collection

Abundant Futures

Untitled *14, 2007
Collage, 14.5 x 19 cm

Untitled *24, 2007
Collage, 30.2 x 20.1 cm

Untitled *25, 2007
Collage, 30.1 x 19.6 cm

Untitled *27, 2007
Collage, 25 x 16.6 cm

Untitled *29, 2007
Collage, 14.9 x 24.9 cm

Untitled *36, 2007
Collage, 26.4 x 17.1 cm

Found objects and archival images populate Haris Epaminonda’s work, often unfolding as a process of assembling, montaging, and collaging these materials through film, installations, or works on paper. Rather than a nostalgic mining of the past, Epaminonda’s practice mobilizes fragments of history within new constellations, demonstrating that the ambiguity and agency of these fragments can be tools for memorialization and history-making.

Composed of images sourced from books and magazines dating from the 1940s to the ’60s, the Untitled assemblages seem to be animating, rather than appropriating, these materials. Each piece in the series opens up multiple narratives without offering solutions or endings. The line suturing one fragment to another creates a subtle sense of discomfort and tension between different worlds. In opening up a prismatic gaze through diffraction, Epaminonda calls for ways of seeing and storytelling that embrace simultaneity. This approach to images interrupts the attention on one single element to consider multiple temporalities, localities, and subjectivities all at once. “I try to work with the essence of the image. I think some images have something unsettling to them, a turn. The power images have is that they can throw you into the desert and let you find your way. They demand something from you,” says the artist. Thus, in Epaminonda’s work, the archive represents a potential that can be sliced and reconfigured to merge different realities on a single plane.

PAST LOANS

Group exhibition: Abundant Futures
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
April 1, 2022 - March 5, 2023

"Interview between curator Roxana Marcoci and artist Haris Epaminonda," Projects 96: Haris Epaminonda, MoMa, blog, 2011

Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1980. Lives in Berlin, Germany.

Haris EpaminondaUntitled *14, *24, *25, *27, *29, *36, 2005-2007

Haris Epaminonda
Untitled 14, 24, 25, 27, 29, 36, 2005-2007