The College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University presents: Architectura Transtopica: Totems of a journeyman, a solo, expanded photography exhibition by CACE faculty Dr Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou, at the Promenade Gallery in Abu Dhabi Campus. The exhibition will be displayed from 23 January to 3 February 2023.

The title of this exhibition favors the use and interpretation of architectural structures as metaphors and symbols of expatriation, mobility, transient identity, and place un-specificity. Within these themes, Dr. Ioannis’s subjects are the built environment and architecture. Colorful structures, facades, and architectural details are his protagonists that are seemingly universal in a state of banality, and somewhat displaced in terms of geography. More like the thinking and feeling of being an expatriate, metaphorically speaking. They look like they intervene with the human condition with a cause that is not straightforward. The artist encounters them by accident in countries he resides, is from, studies and travels (i.e., Greece, France, Italy, UAE, USA, Australia), therefore they are not bound to a specific geographical territory, its politics and cultural history.

Expatriation means the decision made by an individual to leave one’s home temporarily and re-settle in another country. Expatriation is different from immigration, which implies permanence. Expatriation is a form of transience. Dr Ioannis being an expatriate for more than 15 years and feeling like a perpetual traveller, within today’s ease of global mobility, he is concerned with how autobiographic re-enactments of lived experiences with architecture, triggered by non-country specific places, illustrate one’s life journey. While passing through countries the artist frequents yearly, he captures non-identifiable, out-of-context sites and out-of-place structures, which become the personal symbols, totems or “monuments” of his expatriation, in turn pointing at his transient identity. These markers shape a personal, imaginary, heterotopic place. A home that could be any home, or better, a home within the metaphorical capacity of images.

Through the exhibition, we become acquainted with a variety of structures. From civic institutions to private buildings, these pieces of our built environment are stripped out of context through artistic license, color manipulation and a sense of individuality, which can never be grasped if one commutes from point A to B daily, from suburbs to the city and vice-versa. Walking is a lifestyle needed for an encounter with such structures. The outcome; subjective, color coded, under cognitive reconstruction, surfaces hiding their “reality” rather than revealing it, as expanded photography does best.

Cities and suburbs are cultural places belonging to anyone and no-one. Here, the public place is claimed as private. The exhibition offers an autobiographic, subjective representation of a rather becoming place in a non-architectural but perceptual order. It takes a certain type of citizen with a particular “relevant history” to these countries, cities and/or structures to be able to empathically recognize their subtle, almost mundane presence and hence their causality and importance.

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to visit.

About the Artist

Dr Ioannis Galanopoulos-Papavasileiou (aka Yiannis Galanopoulos) is an Associate Professor of Art at Zayed University, UAE and a contemporary interdisciplinary visual artist. His expanded photographic work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and institutions in UAE, Europe, the US, Australia, China and Japan. Most notably at Athens Photo Festival, the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan, the Biennale Arte Dolomiti in Italy, the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea, and the Eyes on Main Street Festival in the USA. His work has been acquired by private and public collections. His expanded photography work examines the relationship between ideated, geographic and virtual place, as well as the connections between objects, artists, media, viewers and society. Ioannis writes on photography and film and is a regular contributor to scholarly research journals and publications such as Taylor and Francis; The Journal of Visual Practice Research, CGRNet's On the Image and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

https://lefteyer.com/

https://ae.linkedin.com/in/yiannis-galanopoulos-874b702a

https://www.viewsfromexpatria.com/