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| Adamantios Kafetzis […]What is at stake in the depiction of prayer is somehow familiar to the task of the Byzantine and Islamic icon: to depict the undepictable. In byzantine iconography the saint must enter the false world of representation without being altogether affected by it. Likewise, the pictures before you are trying to transform themselves into icons that depict the invisible and seemingly unmediated mystery of prayer. However, it is not merely the temptation of representation that brings those two attempts together (the “desire to see” that John of Damascus attributes to the Devil himself while contrasting it with the power of communion that lies within the icon). What renders those undertakings quite symmetrical is rather the isomorphism, the directness of the relationship between the medium and its object. In other words, Adamantios didn’t shoot his pictures in the Hagion Oros and post them on a gallery wall in order to bring us some mystifying moments of ascetic meditation (that would be a truly unoriginal “sin”). Instead he chose to stay here in the city, the motherland of photography, and place the pious believers near the air condition of a church, make them sit on some plastic chair inside the holy temple and catch them praying in front of some fainted wall paint.[…] Nikos Skiadopoulos  Download CV |  Untitled |
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