In the Art Places series I examine the special character of what we would consider to be the natural place for art. In there, art as an axiom is isolated from whatever might divert attention from it and takes a life of its own. Exhibition sites express what Michel Foucault describes as “heterotopias”: empty spaces, filled up at regular intervals, juxtapose in a single real place several sites that are often incompatible with each other. Their system hides odd exclusions, even though they appear to be freely accessible.

The non-places of art are activated through multiple deductions: real life does not enter into their autonomous and staged truth, and all of its pragmatic relations are erased. Art reigns in a mystical appearance beyond time, in a space of unavoidable transitory nature. Furthermore, human presence is eliminated. Absence of the viewer in favour of his Gaze makes him a spiritual existence. He is there without really being there.

These true conditions of viewing art, as experienced by the visitor of major art events, walking among the streams of other viewers, became the starting point of my work. By removing the artworks, but by preserving the results of their presence there, my interest turned towards revealing the previously “invisible” space. It is there that I aimed to showcase not only constructed perfection but also every shortcoming, underlining the sacralized, ritual character of an imperfect, incomplete place, which, by transcendental ways of presentation, makes art into a dreamlike spectacle.

Dimitra Ermeidou