A calm advice on difficult times

By tind.

Cut and Paste

Illustration by George Tzavaras, a friend of mine and a great illustrator! This is his blog.

Beetroot did it again

Beetroot is a multi-awarded (eg. European Design Agency of the Year for 2008) Greek design agency based in Thessaloniki. This is one of their latest projects. Read more about Naked King on Lovely Package or check out their website.

Ten Images for Ithaca 2010

Ten images for Ithaca is an international poster competition that started nine years ago. It began as a small local event but now Ten Images for Ithaca is one of the most important poster design competitions worldwide. Last week it was announced this year's theme, prizes and deadline:


Theme: Labels
1st prize 1000 €, 2nd prize 600 €, 3rd prize 500 €
Deadline: 21 May 2010

"A label is any kind of tag attached to something so as to identify the object or its content. Labeling means naming. It is human instinct to group things with what they are most similar and name them as a whole. We live in a world filled with labels antagonising each other to win our preference. There are labels associated with consumer products and fashion. People voluntarily label themselves in order to have a sense of belonging to a group, but there also labels that people use to categorize others stemming from feelings of racism and xenophobia, political and religious discrimination, etc. What is the role of these labels in your life? How can a label describe the world you live in? Can a label give the infinite set of experiences, beliefs and desires that summarise each human being? All of the above are just a few of the many ways one can approach this year’s competition theme “Labels”."

The ten best entries will be printed into banners with dimensions 200 x 60 cm and will be hung along Ithaca’s promenade for the entire summer of 2010. Their creators will have free accommodation in Ithaca on the weekend of the exhibition’s opening (July 2010).

More info here.
Poster design by the design shop.

Alexandros Vasmoulakis in L.A.

With the sarcastic title "is everybody happy?" the viewer is invited in a satirical play of chaos having the female figures as the central characters. Alexandros Vasmoulakis uses fragments from advertized models as a fundamental source in order to dismantle the "ideal" image of refinement. The collage-like women stare insistently towards the spectator, carrying these uncanny shiny smiles that express derision and irony in conjunction with confusion and anxiety. A jumble of narratives is created out of ink and acrylic, which brings into surface the relationship between the female nude and the male gaze. 

The first solo exhibition of Alexandros Vasmoulakis in the U.S, is presented at the Lebasse Projects, on Saturday the 20th of March 2010.

(text: Elli Paxinou)

Face

Illustration by Lefteris Koulonis.

Weekend dust

Rio bridge in Patras, Greece last weekend. Photo by Spyros Bouboukas.

Beauty vs. Ugliness

Beauty versus Ugliness is the title of g's exhibition for the Design Walk 2010 / Poles Apart. G is an Athens based creative studio by Michalis Georgiou and Alexandros Gavrilakis. See the work of g here or read more about the Design Walk here.

Thousands of years old

Nick Howard is an artist based in Minneapolis U.S.A. For his work he uses pens and ink, creating dark figures without a face, alien creatures with hairy tentacles, landscapes smothered in grass and portraits of ancient men. The vulnerability, darkness, beauty and humor that is entailed in being human, are the main concerns in Nick Howard’s art. The portrait Thousands of Years Old focuses on a detail of the human face, in order to comment on the importance of the passing of time and our obsession with beauty.

This work is going to be exhibited in Anarchy vs. Order, an exhibition curated by the design shop, part of the Design Walk 2010 / Poles Apart.

Design Walk 2010 / Poles Apart

Since 2007 there has been a distinctive reason to come to Athens in February and wander around the historic center of the city: the Design Walk. Each year, graphic design studios open their doors to visitors, inviting them to follow a trail that brings them closer to the most functional and everyday applied art.

The walk takes place in the most vibrant area of the city next to the Acropolis, leading the visitors between cult shops and hip bars to discover works by award-winning graphic designers. For the 2010 walk, double-decker, the London-based curating agency, is challenging 13 Graphic Design Studios to create a piece of work inspired by the contradictions / oppositions with which every designer has to deal, and which arise from fundamental questions in design methodology. The resulting exhibition, POLES APART, will give a unique visual insight into the creative process – as well as its curious contradictions.

Participants: 3 in a Box, Bios, The Design Shop, Designpark, G, Geometry, I AM Design etc., Indyvisuals, Mums Design, Pi6, Poor Designers, Sereal Designers, The Switch Place Identity.

For more information visit the official Design Walk site of the Facebook Design Walk group.

Picture by Alexandros Gavrilakis during the press conference in Bios.

Konsept83

Cd cover for the music of Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk, a play directed by Martha Frintzila. Designed by the Greek design studio Konsept83.

Diary 2010

The Athens based design agency "the design shop" has just released a diary for 2010 with the title "Journeys in Time". For every month, a different destination is suggested. From Turkey to New Zealand and from Brazil to Cape Verde. The diary is designed by "the design shop" in collaboration with Konstantinos Trichas. Design wise, the diary is purely typographic. The typeface used is called Neutraface in its Greek edition by Cannibal Fonts. If you want to order the diary you can send an email here.

myN.Y.

"The parade of the Poles on 5th Avenue. The school band on 6th. The Sunday bazaar in front of Grand Central. Countless patrol cars, police officers, ‘yellow’ cabs and American flags (I think I stopped counting from the first day). Employees, homeless people, tourists and ‘fabulous’ ladies in front of expensive shops. Reporters and panic in Wall Street and a huge flag trying to ‘hold’ and prevent the ‘collapse’ of an entire edifice. The clamour on Times Square and the silence on Top of the Rock. The beautiful Subway and street signs. The old water reservoirs at the rooftops in Brooklyn. Manhattan seen from Tzina’s apartment in Queens and the feeling of living on the 20th floor of a building. myN.Y. is a small book of impressions from New York. A reminder assembled out of photographs. Out of instinctively captured images of one’s ‘return’ to a city so alien and strange that in the end it seems familiar."
MyN.Y. by George Triantafyllakos and Cannot Not Design publications.

Nowhere

Dimitris Papaioannou has achieved something really special. He managed to bring a really broad audience into Greek contemporary dance. He has a long cv that includes successful productions such as Medea (1993), Dracula (1997) and Human Thirst (1999) that established him as the main figure in the Greek dance world, but it was in 2004 when he became a sort of a national hero when he directed the opening and the closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympic Games. Since then he presented the sold-out productions 2 (2006) and Medea-2 (2008). "Nowhere" is Papaioannou's new work at the National Theatre of Greece.

"Nowhere is a work about the physical space of the theatrical stage. Constantly changing and defined by the men and women that inhabit it, it can be countless different places while designed to be nowhere at all.
For the inaugural production of the new Ziller Building (National Theatre of Greece in Athens), Dimitris Papaioannou has enlisted the help of Coti K., Zafos Xagoraris, Alekos Giannaros and Thanos Papastergiou to create a work that exploits the new equipment of the Main Stage by stripping it bare. Twenty-six performers measure the space - and measure themselves against its capabilities – in a specially designed work that can be performed nowhere else."

Unfortunately Dimitris Papaioannou website is made in flash. That makes it stylish but not so easy to use...

Samantha Sotos

Samantha Sotos is a Greek-Australian fashion designer. Last Friday she participated at the Athens Fashion Week where she presented her fabulous new collection for Summer 2010. (This picture is from a previous collection). See all her collections at www.samanthasotos.com

Istanbul as felt by... (revisited)

Back in 2007, I participated in a poster exhibition in Istanbul in which the theme was the city itself. The poster I had created then intended to show the warm feeling I had in Istanbul and the overlapping of different cultures and different time periods, all apparent in modern Istanbul.Because of the sharp triangles I had used the poster had a hostile feeling... Next week I'm going back to Istanbul for another exhibition and I want to fix this mistake. This is the new version of the poster.The exhibition is part of Grafist, the annual International Design Week of Istanbul, organised by Mimar Sinan University.

Last days in Heaven

The 2nd Athens Biennale 2009 HEAVEN closes on Sunday 4 October. The Athens Biennale consists of six exhibitions with more than 150 artists from all over the world. The picture above is from an installation by Miltos Manetas.

Let the dog out!

Eva Temponera is a young Greek designer, trying to find her way somewhere between Helsinki and Berlin. It seems she's in a good track.

Spyros Simotas @ I See You

Spyros Simotas is another photographer that takes part at I See You, the portrait exhibition that is opening tonight together with Ten Images for Ithaca in Athens (Melina - Cultural Center). Spyros takes fresh and vibrant pictures of people dancing or drinking or generally having fun indoors and outdoors. You can see more of his work at flickr where he has posted more than 5.700 pictures. He also has a blog.

Keywords

Commercial or public display signs, are meant to sign collectively. In Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio area (ΚΜ), new and old signages, functional and derelict, hand crafted or guerrilla like, all blend in various languages.

Neither meaningful nor meaningless, they appear like keywords. Revealing an internal structure, sometimes a rhetoric or a reasoning, they stand out as autonomous clusters of aesthetics, cultures and personal trajectories, signposting a fragile diversity in transit.

The installation by design agency busybuilding presents over 600 different images of signages as found in the KM area during ReMap 2.

KEYWORDS is part of Remap 2, an international art programme parallel to the Athens Biennale.