18 March – 03 April 2022
Korai
Korai is pleased to present Leontios Toumpouris’ solo exhibition titled Reconfiguring motions, a site-responsive installation that consists of video and sculpture. The exhibited work is the result of a research project that involves interrelations of walking and making, migration and land.
Leontios Toumpouris’ methods of gesture and contorted body action crawl into his new work in ways to be inferred by viewers through motion. In the last years, Toumpouris has built affiliations, often through engravings, with a variety of matter: clay, leather, steel, glass, and digital print on paper; for the current work, his making processes have taken an expansive reach in stretching the physical boundaries of his studio and natural space to meet in the installation presented in Korai.
In the process of making contact with this work, Toumpouris took his practice outdoors, attaching a Go-pro camera to his body, then immersing into the matter of land through his own experience of walking and feeling, where one can “forget linear thinking” and remember that “lines are made up”. Walking through fields, observing the rhythm of rivers and the limestone of mountain ranges, Toumpouris traced his pace of the landscape, making audio recordings based on a series of interactive monologues along with a selection of glyphs from previous works to finally produce a soundscape. His body’s vibrations shaped the tempo of the moving image, and although the pulses appear imperceptible, images pausing in still frames and others fluttering away from the edge of artistic intentionality coalesce. They behave like photographs whose features produce meaning unique to individual viewers, activated by the punctum effect which emerges when the viewer abandons all knowledge and through their unique emotionality and subjectivity interact with details unintended by the artist.
Entering the exhibition space, we are drawn in by delicate metal structures holding sharp pieces of glass, hanging from the ceiling by a threaded wire, and moving in synchronicity with the video projected, perceptible at moments. A discrete and subtle ceramic sculpture of vocal cords reified in between openness and soundlessness, peers at us from a wall. A slow-motion walk through the installation ensues as we discern how a minimum motion of the suspended sculptures or the cadence suggested in the wall piece is attuned with the arcadian pace of the video, sharing its title with the exhibition.
The traces on the glass pieces transpire through fusion of the
material, bringing to the surface Toumpouris’ fragmented bodily imprints of
contact with clay and his handling of glyphs in earlier works along with rocks
and ores he collected from the landscapes encountered. The artist has had
abundant studio experience with practices of welding materials, experimenting
with texture, physicality, and movement that reveal affect. Discernible in the
exhibition Reconfiguring motions,
however, is another layer to Toumpouris’ approach toward making material and
motion from veering into landscape, and exhibiting bounds of land and studio.
Text, Maria Petrides
Supported by the Cultural Services
of Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports.
Developed during the Artist residency programme at CYENS Thinker Maker Space.