The artist often uses preexisting materials, like photos taken from books as well as found objects combined with self-designed plinths and support structures, sculptures and films. Her precise arrangements and displays as well as her architectural interventions form visual riddles, evoking a multitude of meaning. Her language often points towards abstraction, meanwhile evoking mysterious and enigmatic atmospheres.

Many people remember Haris Epaminonda’s works (together with Daniel Gustav Cramer) in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof during the last dOCUMENTA(13). The exhibition set out over three floors and appeared fragmentary, dislocated and rhythmic until the very end, and there it found its own dimension. It was like walking in a house-museum where things-works were almost hidden everywhere, along the edges, in the corners, suspended... then space gradually reassembled, like the syllables of a sentence which is slowly spoken. Epaminonda’s exhibition at the Querini Stampalia in Venice is just the fourth step of her European tournée presenting an intervention inside the Scarpa area in which a version from her latest film, Chapters will be shown. The complex assemblage of details inspired from the East, the color and formal refinements, as well as the temporal and spatial arrangements inside Scarpa’s area have brought the artist to relate to the famous architect.

“In Venice, Haris Epaminonda plays again with the exhibition display: she uses space like a score –Chiara Bertola explains –where materials are similar to reassembled signs in a threedimensional painting. Epaminonda relates to Carlo Scarpa’s architecture in a refined way, enhancing, highlighting, enlarging the complexity of the architectural language.”
In Chapters, Epaminonda shows some typical elements of her artistic genius: vases, flowing water, monuments, ruins, landscapes, palms, animals. A series of objects and images that allow exploring the concept of time and the permeability of memory. In such a spiritual atmosphere, men, women, animals and objects move and interact through their actions and rituals, which are full of multiple meanings. They are often emphasized by the slowness of the execution or stop motion.

The film develops through small and choreographic movements meanwhile the narrative path remains fragmented. The concept of duality and symbolism are the leading elements through a spiritual journey characterized by the continuous interaction of dualities: emptiness and fullness, the sun and the moon, water and desert lands, black and white, inside and outside, man and woman, nature and culture. It is a journey through a physical and mental space, into a suspended temporal dimension which is melancholic and at the same time abstract, where emotions and imagination are melted together. Epaminonda’s work evokes several inspiring elements: from Beato Angelico to Sergei Parajanov and Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Greek, Roman and Byzantine architecture to Carlo Scarpa.

Text by Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice