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"Interior" Vlassis Caniaris Vlassis Caniaris created “Interior” in the context of his group of works titled “Guest Workers – Foreign Workers” and an exhibition series of the same name from the mid 1970’s. That exhibition was one of the earliest interventions in the art domain against the German model of “guest labour” and, attaching thereto, the migrants’ living conditions. In the 1974 catalogue, the group “Realismusstudio” of the “Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst” (Berlin) one of the many exhibition spaces, writes: “Vlassis Caniaris presents the lives of the foreign workers as not recognizable, not comprehensible. In the eyes of their hosts, the guest workers seem to be waste.” However, Caniaris also adds elements of dreaming or yearning; as found in “Interior”, a picture from a child’s perspective. With its wallpaper, the newspapers, the pieces of carpet, the suitcases or a single tire, “Interior” does not realistically re-duplicate a room. On the contrary, Caniaris’s arrangement transforms the several elements into marks of a provisional life, concentrating them to the image of a standard of living which is shared by many. Since the end of the 1950s, Caniaris, who had lived in Rome, Paris, Berlin and repeatedly in Athens for a period of time, has been working with plaster, clothes, figures made of wire and all kinds of remainders, which he always relates to political conditions. His subjects range from the dictatorship in Greece to the consumer-system of the “economic miracle”. For “Guest Workers – Foreign Workers”, Caniaris, who was living in Berlin for a year as a DAAD scholarship holder in 1973, spoke to a large number of people, visited homes or festivities and interviewed union members or economists. In 1991, in a retrospective view, he describes the difficulties he had to face when working on such a subject at that time. Many of those he addressed, that is the “guest workers” themselves, would have preferred the work to be more activist. However, at that time, Caniaris hoped to show, and draw public attention to, a social problem that had been displaced until then. Artist, born 1928, lives and works in Athens. |
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