The exhibition “Thick Blood”, which took place at the “Dimitris Hatzis” Cultural Multipurpose Space (Old Slaughterhouses) in Ioannina, attempts to create a framework in which the two contrasting uses/natures of the building can have a conversation. Blood is not visible to us until the moment it comes out of the skin, when it ‘blooms’… In other words, “the blossom of the blood”. While these two words are having different meanings, they sound familiar. They both draw their meaning from the moment the blood/blossom becomes visible to us. Same with the building that has passed from a more “introverted” period where it played the role of a slaughterhouse, contributing to the city’s food chain, to an era of externalizing its use, playing the role of a cultural space.
Fragments of memories constructed from photographic material which was taken during the period when the building was operating as a slaughterhouse, provided a stigma of representation where its visual information was painted with blood on butchers’ paper, exploiting the vital force and symbolisms of blood. These abstract blood stains, together with sketches drawn from memory, imagination and observation through a butcher’s shop, where presented in this particular space. They compose a timeless sequence of real or imaginary images, situations and landscapes where life and death, violence and the divine, purification and corruption, aggression and cowardice, primitive and civilization coexist.
From the invocation of Lady Macbeth to the hero of Ludemi’s “Ecstasy” (1943) who abandons his art, blood beyond its conventional function where it crosses the body under our skin, simultaneously regulates/connects with consciousness by mirroring our inner world.
Thick Blood. Solo exhibition. 1-10 April 2022, at “Dim. Hatzis” Cultural Centre (Old Slaughterhouses), Ioannina, Greece. Curated by Arurkokk.