Kostis Velonis
Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden
If ‘The Promise of Happiness’, Kostis Velonis’s exhibition at Signal, seems oddly melancholic, it’s a bit thanks to Greece. The events that took place in the artist’s home country during recent months, along with the nation’s role in the European debt crisis, act as the backdrop for a series of new works that claim, according to the press release, to offer a ‘nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state’. With titles such as Proposal for a Monument Ready to Collapse (Welfare State) (all works 2011), the collection of sculptures, posters and slide projections on view point to the impending demise of social democratic models while at the same time alluding to the ways that their ideological underpinnings are expressed in design and architecture.
Velonis’s training as an architect is evident in both the material and scale of the sculptures, which consist mainly of wood, plywood, concrete and stone assemblages approximately the size of architectural models. Rather than supplying direct commentary on Swedish modernity, the works instead show a certain level of spontaneity and playfulness, using primary shapes and colours to form tentative and crude structures that are as allegorical as they are thrown-together. Works such as You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely You will Fall, an unfinished plywood staircase that forms a 90-degree angle as it leads from the floor to a nearby window ledge, hints at the risks of a society organized around competition and profit, while The Monument and its Break (How to Make Other People’s Failure a Part of your Social Advancement), a wood, acrylic and concrete sculpture, gives the impression of children’s building blocks that have been discarded. Other works, such as Untitled (After the Melancholy of Distance), feature crocheted objects as part of an attempt to link domestic and public spheres.
Despite their overwrought titles, Velonis’s sculptures have a sense of naïveté that downplays their significance as objects on the one hand, but which gave me a discomfiting sense of my own mastery on the other. This effect is reinforced by Earth People, a slide projection featuring an image of two cloth marionettes, one male and one female. Framed by this image, the works in the show begin to resemble props for a gloomy puppet show on the decline of Europe.
A more subtle contribution to this mise en scène is made by the gallery space itself: in order to access it, one first has to walk through an upscale restaurant and bar. This environmental dissonance, while effectively hinting at more recent shifts in ‘the Swedish model’, jarred my expectations enough to make me reflect on my own reasons for moving to Sweden from the United States last year (the promise of abundant state funding for the arts included). A diptych combining found posters by the Acceptera group and the Situationist International entitled The Individual and the Mass (ou nous irons jusuq’au bout), presented the problem as one of ‘quality and quantity’, of seeing things through to the end. In Greece, and elsewhere in Europe, the ‘solution’ has come to mean working harder and living with austerity. To put it another way, we’re encouraged to either accept what’s given, or feel the consequences. In this theatre of false alternatives, who’s pulling the strings? For Velonis, the answer seems obvious. We dance like marionettes…
Matthew Rana
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