Currents and Currencies

Currents and Currencies explores the conceptual correlations between these two elements, focusing on the connections they establish between territories and populations, and the boundaries that they dissolve between discourses, emotions, and economies. Aquatic flows circulate around firm terrain, ebb, traverse space and time, carry both matter and meaning. What initially appears as an oceanic element, is later transformed into a global cultural metaphor. Drawing on references from antique cosmology, history, anthropology, and environmental studies, the exhibition approaches these different configurations of flows.

In the exhibition space these ideas are transformed into a new series of sculptural works that oscillate between connectivity and disjuncture, liquidity and “petrification”. Their formal language derives from antique maps, the shell-exchange culture of the “Kula Ring” but also global Internet diagrams. Three materialities—marble, aluminium and silicon—point towards three different temporal orders within which these dynamics unfold: from the slow-moving, archaic time, to the accelerated industrial world to the elusive information flows of the post-industrial condition. In the spatial configurations that emerge patterns of solid connections alternate with ephemeral flows. Moments of turbulence and emotional agitation arise when flows are disturbed, linkages broken, and topological structures reconfigured.

Press text from the solo exhibition at a.antonopoulou.art, Athens, 2017