Entrails
Solo exhibition by Natalia Papadopoulou
Until 27.05.2023
Text by Faidra Vasileiadou
Pictures by Eftychia Vlachou
Music by Lefteris Volanis
One Minute Space,
Marathonos 71,
Athens 10435,
Greece
The solo exhibition of Natalia Papadopoulou entitled "Entrails" is a total work of visual and sound fragments, emerging through fluid and liquid bodies of the mind. The video installation that forms the basic skeleton of the project effortlessly detaches from it and unfolds into modular narratives as it impetuously refracts on the walls of the OMS basement.
The spatial choice of a basement could not be more accurate, the part below the earth – the part underneath the skin, which Papadopoulou cuts across to reveal its interior. She pulls it out, looks it in the eye and deposits it all over the place, under soothing narratives and sounds, composed by the musician Lefteris Volanis. With the same poetic precision, she traces the title of the exhibition: the insides, the intestines, the guts.
Observing her work carefully and for a long time, I realize that I am suspended enchanted by her light-baths, forgetting the sharp emotions I experience in her timeless environment. Inside her visuals, I hear "shells breaking in the deepest part of my belly" and then I realize what is happening to me with Natalia's work: she dreamily lures me into the gentle brutality of my ugliest self and asks me to reconcile with her, to embrace the "beast that sharpens its claws at the bottom."
When I'm inside her artworks, with its characteristic red and purple colors washing over me, I feel like I'm returning to that invisible cave of myself - where I'm not seen by many. She allows me to do so, as she constructs an existential vortex, into which I am entering and perching in a fetal position. Courageously and rebelliously, she leads me to complete what she so vigorously attempts. To listen to the frequencies pulsating through her consecutive blinding visuals, to grope and touch the guts of the mind, and rush them to the surface as a personal birth – an emanation to the other side.