Eugenia Raskopoulos
Sydney
2019
Displayed 2019 at Carriageworks
Eugenia Raskopoulos
Born 1959, Svitavy, Czech Republic (Greek descent). Lives and works Sydney
The conceptual parameters of Eugenia Raskopoulos’ work encompass identity, the body, gender and sexuality. Poetic and political threads of difference, language and translation weave in and out of her practice, always informed by her personal history and migrant experience (following her birth in the Czech Republic, her Greek parents moved back to Greece at the end of 1959 and in 1963 migrated to Australia). In exploring aspects of ‘otherness’, Raskopoulos situates her work at the margins of photography and video, an interdisciplinary zone that synthesises performance, transcription, neon and installation. Raskopoulos has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 30 years.
Artist text
by Kate Britton
1. Didactic text in dactylic hexameter
ORDER-(DIS)ORDER. A swinging neon flashes between chaos and control, the
pendulous keeper of an archive redolent of the waste of modern life/style –
Mobile telephone, oven, vacuum cleaner, electric kettle, fridge, toaster,
slow cooker, baby monitor, microwave, printer, external hard drive, computer.
These items pile up before us, discarded and left as a memento
mori to our throwaway culture, endlessly seeking to replenish
things that once might have seen another life, repaired and used again.
2. Old dogs
Modern English doesn’t lend itself well to the ‘heroic hexameter’ of Homer, Virgil and Ovid, the language of classical poetry, or by proxy to our surviving knowledge of the Greek and Roman myths that still haunt much western culture. In attempts, we find a failure – of old language to communicate new ideas, of our ears to attune to its meter. And so a need is created, for new languages and new myths. Poetry is dead, long live poetry!
Eugenia Raskopoulos is no stranger to this sort of task, the bending and stretching of old structures to fit new stories. Language, the body, tradition and myth all weave through her practice, made strange in the service of new purposes. In dis(order) (2019), this purpose is to prompt a reckoning of sorts – with the speed at which we obtain and discard technologies of convenience, and the risk that the things we consume will ultimately consume us.
3. New tricks
dis(order) is simultaneously archive and Tower of Babel, feminist performance and auto-destructive art. In a video within her installation, we see Raskopoulos facing off a tower of discarded electrical goods from the basket of a small cherry picker. One by one she picks up the objects and hurls them to the same ground on which they lie as we encounter them in their afterlife as contemporary art.
It is a laborious task, and we hear the artist’s grunts as she makes her way down the pile of man’s machines, so many empty promises to make life easier, especially in the feminised domestic space. This destruction of objects already broken is a protest of Sisyphean proportions, as Raskopoulos attempts to teach some old dogs – text and language, several well-trodden art historical tropes and a pile of junked appliances – some new tricks.
4. Capital myths
The result has a mythic quality. The room ghosts itself – the wall hides behind its own image; appliances bear witness to their own demise; and a swinging neon sign flicks between ORDER and DISORDER, never as far apart as we might like, especially in an age of surveillance capitalism. In the grimy tracks of Carriageworks, the impression is dank yet defiant.
dis(order) is a myth, a tale of the artist against a world in which objects no longer hold any value except in their proliferation, a warning against knockdown-rebuild culture, against the substitution of (women’s) bodies and labour for a more insidious currency, against zombie consumerism, against the default masculinity of the systems and technologies that we daily navigate.