The Thief / HIAP Project Space
Vassilis Vlastaras: The Thief
HIAP Project Space
Monday, 21.8.2017, 6–7 pm
Map: https://tinyurl.com/zhrtxhb
Join Greek visual artist and professor Vassilis Vlastaras’ performance The Thief on Monday, 21 August at 6–7 pm at the HIAP Project Space!
"The Thief" is a video-based performance influenced by Vlastaras’ project "The Pale Years".
It derives from a YouTube video that shows a thief being arrested in a small Greek town’s local market, while passersby shout out accusations. During the performance, Vassilis Vlastaras together with Greek visual artist Maria Glyka will use words and sounds taken from selected comments that appear below the YouTube video. By emphasising the brutality of the words, a discussion is formed between racists, homophobes, fanatics, and different religious and political parties.
"The Pale Years" is a project of research and recording, receiving and evaluating, collecting and redisplaying information and events from the internet. The project began in the summer of 2007, when a series of extensive fires, mainly in the Peloponnese region of southern Greece, left sixty dead and many injured. The fires swept through wild and cultivated areas, destroying property, housing and public services. This occurred around same time that blogs, YouTube and Facebook were beginning to establish themselves on the internet, with more and more people becoming involved through the almost universal use of personal computers, and the booming market for the then new smartphones. The project continues through the period of mass mobilisation and so-called "indignation" and reaches all the way up to the referendum meetings on "yes" or "no" today.
The collected web-based news and commentary has so far been used as the material for a blog entitled Condensation Cube. This cube, although intangible in nature, acts as a mirror of modern Greek society: concentrating moments and events, reflecting the changes that are happening, and allowing the exposure of their symptoms.
The performance starts at 6:00 pm (take 5:20 pm ferry from the Market Square). A warm welcome to everyone!
Vassilis Vlastaras has been in residency at HIAP in May–June & August 2017. Read more about him at:
www.hiap.fi/artist/vassilis-vlastaras
Vlastaras has been invited to the Resident Fellow Programme by the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki. The programme is funded by the Saastamoinen Foundation and implemented in co-operation with HIAP.
Maria Glyka (b. Athens) has studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in the Athens School of Fine Arts and at the Vakalo Art and Design College. In her work, she brings together external and internal spaces playing with the boundaries of painting, installation and structures made out of paper and cardboard. She projects images or sounds on their surface being interested on the creation of parallel actions, sounds, images, direct and indirect associations through this process.
She has exhibited her work and taken part in many residencies internationally. She is currently teaching contemporary art practice at the Slade Summer School, UCL and the Vakalo Art and Design College, Athens
