Lito Kattou + Petros Moris at Room E-10 27

 

Lito Kattou + Petros Moris

Siren Daylight

Curated by Thomas Butler

Room E-10 27, Berlin

June 14 – July 21, 2018 Room E-10 27 at Center is pleased to present Siren Daylight, a two-person exhibition by Lito Kattou and Petros Moris. Kattou and Moris, who both live between Athens and London, present a series of new works, which include free-hanging sculptures of cloud landscapes on photographic gelatin, and wall sculptures created from a mixture of resin, metals, and bauxite powder. These wall sculptures are indexical 3D recordings of the spaces inside and around server computers found in datacentres. By becoming material positives, these negative spaces bearing the imprints of wires and components transform into strange hybrid exoskeletons and speculatively fossilized technowaste. In a lecture titled How Better to Register the Agency of Things, Bruno Latour shows the audience a photograph taken from the seat of an airliner. The window of the plane frames a partial view of the wing and front section of the jet engine. Thousands of meters below the engine is a view of a patch of the north Atlantic filled with scattered pieces of ice. Latour tells the audience: “In earlier times I would have seen the ice and the reactor as two separate things. But now when I look at the ice and the reactor of the Boeing itself, you feel that they are related so that the distinction between foreground and background is finally gone. It’s very difficult to see the ice just as a spectacle in the new/old idea of a landscape. There is no landscape anymore, we are in it.” This distinction between interior and exterior, foreground and background, is echoed by the way the objects on display frame a prospective viewer. Instead of the classic conception of the viewer as a disinterested subject in relation to autonomous works of art, these objects propose the viewer as an active subject who completes the Mobius strip of landscape-object-subject. By extension, these works were made specifically for the Berlin space, which doubles as a vitrine with large floor-to-ceiling windows. These windows frame the works inside, while the transparency of the sheet glass partly eliminates the boundaries between inside and out. We find ourselves amidst an interplay of material and semiotic tools attempting to describe the cloud and the mass and polluting infrastructure it renders abstract. Latour’s example of the ice and jet engine reminds us that language fails to describe the interwoven relationships these distinct elements have, and continue to have, far into the future. — Thomas Butler Lito Kattou, (born in Nicosia, Cyprus 1990) lives and works in London and Athens. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Sculpture. Kattou is the recipient of the New Positions Award for Art Cologne 2018 and she was the invited artist for the 89plus Google Residency curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, 2017. Selected recent shows include: San at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (solo); District 17 Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Gallery, Berlin; Night Fight, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (solo); And if I left of dreaming about you? Foothold, Bari; It looks like up to me Eleni Koroneou, Athens; *bang!, Daily Lazy Projects, Athens; Fighting with the Sun, Clearview.ltd, London (solo); Solar love for the Rapid Felines, Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux (solo); The Equilibrists, New Museum, NY in collaboration with DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens. Her works are included in private collections, in the collection of the National Bank of Greece and the collection of Deutsche Telekom. Petros Moris, (born in Lamia, Greece 1986) has studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and has received an MFA in Curating from the Goldsmiths University of London. He is currently undergoing PhD research at the Architectural Department of the University of Thessaly with scholarship from the Onassis Foundation. He has been nominated for the Deste Prize 2015 and has been awarded First by the Spyropoulos Prize, 2012. He has presented his personal and collective work in solo shows at the Embassy of Cyprus in Athens, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, DUVE Berlin, Union Pacific, Project Native Informant and SPACE and in group shows at art spaces and museums including the New Museum NY, Benaki Museum, the Cycladic Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, the House of Cyprus, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Ontario College of Art & Design University, Centre Cívic Can Felipa, Mestrovic Pavilion and Aarhus Art Building. He has curated exhibitions and events for the Athens Biennial, Circuits and Currents, the Chisenhale Gallery and the Whitechapel Gallery and delivered presentations on his work work at the ICA London, Jupiter Woods, the National and Kapodistrian University, KAM Workshops and the National Hellenic Research Foundation.