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The Fragile Aesthetic of Modern Athens

The most resonant moments that occur when exploring Athens come when finding a scene left in media res. Around the grounds of the city’s crumbling Olympic stadium, locals walk their dogs while plants reclaim the space, but inside this structure, paperwork and brochures cascade out of offices and pour through corridors.

Outside of the landmarks that dominate Athens, the city has a geriatric, injured beauty. The human belongings left behind when a space is deserted beg questions of stories that can only go unanswered. The empty buildings of Athens make ghosts, and it is these shadowy figures we hunt for during the whole of our trip.

In the Institutional Space of Butterfly Logic, I Feel More Alone Than Ever

Detailed and often stark, Sandwell’s work veers between the tactile and the hostile, and in some moments manages to expose the tension between the two states within the same object. One of Sandwell’s most immediate objects, Support Structures, is a wide handle of accessibility, designed to be grasped by all. Familiar in shape to anyone who has used public facilities, the handle subverts its purpose through the many spikes that protrude from it. Visually, it is enjoyable to look at, producing though association a clean, industrial aesthetic. It would not look out of place in Balenciaga. But despite its instagramability, in the context of the show, it speaks to a great and unendurable exclusion of the impermeable kind. An inbuilt exclusion, there in the design.

Even Jordi Colomer’s Exhibition Disrupts

There is nowhere in Jordi Colomer’s exhibition at Barcelona’s MACBA, Facana, Foto, Festa, Futur, where the choice for disorder isn’t made. From the mishmash of different chairs to the haphazard way exhibits are arranged, it is all too invasive, too immediate somehow. One tries to settle into watching one installation only to have their back tapped rudely by another video standing altogether too close. This exhibition is Colomer’s work in an exuberant, nose-thumbing jumble in which the deliberate juxtaposition of so many elements anarchically resists seriousness or interrogation.

In Modena Parade, the figures move their bodies in provocative extensions, a unison of skeleton-costumed agents of the absurd. In videos such as this, the striking visual element of the costumes combines with the subversion of space to the extent that the viewer’s attention is held, no longer prodded and jostled by Colomer’s competing works.