24. - 27. September 2009 / Art Forum Berlin - focus
   

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24.- 27. September 2009: section focus
Solo-Präsentation: Stefanos Tsivopoulos

Stefanos Tsivopoulos @ Art Forum Berlin 2009

Stefanos Tsivopouls, Art Forum Berlin, 2009
Lost Monument, 2009
HD CAM transferred on DVD, Color, 30 min
Premiere at art forum berlin

In the form of single episodes the film Lost Monument tells the story of an historically related statue being adopted by different people and groups to experience a new kind of staging, function and interpretation.

The artist uses the sculpture as an aesthetic as well as an iconographic motif in his research for the relevance of history and politics, reality and fiction in the current global and media culture of memory. The statue discovered by some farmers in a field, it seems not possible to identify who the man in the statue is which obviously got it thrown away. From that moment on the statue reappears in several different sceneries in Greece and Turkey where the individuals involved have no knowledge about the history of the statue. The riddle comes to an end later in the film when a couple of Iraqi refugees strolling around the monument, at its actual site downtown Athens, asking for the identity of the man.

Tsivopoulos takes upon a controversial monument, the 3 meter statue of American president Harry S. Truman that's located downtown Athens, next to the historic triangle of Acropolis, Greek Parliament and Panathinaiko Stadium. Ever since its erection in 1963 as a commemoration to the Truman Doctrine, the statue has been a favorite target of citizens wishing to express their opposition to the very idea of placing a US president’s statue in the capital city of a country whose civil war was decided thanks to that very president’s intervention.

Tsivopoulos’ interest belongs to the current cosmopolitan culture of memory as well as at the transnational pictures from its familiar cultural and national borders. This tendency goes hand in hand with a worldwide homogenization as well as with an ideological uncertainty. The film Lost Monument persuades due to its poetic and allegoric undertone and allows the recipient to construct alternative associations and paths of interpretation based on one’s own cultural process.