A Rave Down Below,
(2023)
Curator Performance Programme, Publication Editor
Date & Location:
18.11.2023 - 11.02.2024
Eleusis, Greece
Participating artists:
Theodoros Giannakis, Viktor Gogas & Kostas Kostopoulos, Captain Stavros, Lito Kattou, Petros Moris, Nkisi, Katerina Papazissi, Georgia Sagri, Yorgos Sapountzis, Baratto & Mouravas, Flux Office, Greek Visions, Klaus Jurgen Schmidt, Odete, Diana Policarpo, Wu Tsang
Exhibition curation: Panos Giannikopoulos
Performance Programme / Publication: Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Architectural Design: Trail Practice
Research: Georgia Liapi
Texts: Leandros Kyriakopoulos, McKenzie Wark, Panos Giannikopoulos, Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Mystery 151 A Rave Down Below explores the political dynamics of the body in motion from a simultaneously geological and cultural underground point of departure. Alchemical wanderings from the historical past towards mythology and a post-industrial present culminate in a delirious dance. Inebriation, intoxication, revulsion, euphoria, release, vent, and ascent; a circular path from the body to the ground and back again.
The exhibition’s narrative unfolds through the myths and history of the city of Elefsina and its Mysteries, with dance serving as a means of climax, a sacred ritual, and a method for exploring concepts of death and loss. In Mystery 151 A Rave Down Below, we witness dance and its affinity with the ailing body or even itself as illness and therapy, dance in a state of crisis, as exhaustion that brings pleasure displacing social exhaustion, as escape and counteraction.
Through installations, painting, sculpture, sound, and performance, the exhibition seeks to redefine the boundaries of dance, reflecting on the (collective) body and its absence, memory, and the necessity of movement. It contemplates utopian declarations of dance subcultures, their glorification, thwarting, and commercial exploitation, hovering between desire, disappointment, and expectation. It examines the relationship between dance movements and community formation, as well as demands for social justice, portraying dance as a translinguistic activity for creating a new world: a delirious grammar that is impossible to parse, slippery in mind and unwieldy in the mouth, passing through muscle spasms, chemical compounds, machines and pixels.