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Artist statement

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Kostis Argyriadis: A Balkan Pray (AI project)

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In a world that every day hopes tomorrow will be better, in a world that remembers, perhaps mistakenly, that the past was better, in a world that is speeding every second now, hope is the only thing that is lasting. 

I grew up and live in a city of the Balkans, Thessaloniki, Greece, and I see everywhere a nostalgia for the unknown past.

For the past of others. In "Balkan Pray", I’m trying to capture that. Any actions that seek something more than the givens of the time lose their meaning. 

The resource to a past we did not live in but imagined, the anticipation of a dystopian future. "Balkan Pray" seeks and recalls human's lost love with life. 

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Kostis Argyriadis

 

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"I just wanted a backpack full of everything necessary for sleeping, shelter, food, cooking, basically a full kitchen and bedroom, right on my back, and to go somewhere, find absolute solitude, study the absolute blank mind, to be completely neutral to any or any ideas. I intended to have, in fact, prayer as my only activity, to pray for all living creatures I saw that this was the only decent activity left in the world.'' 

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Jack Kerouac, from the book ''The Dharma Bums''

 

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"The transformation of Nature from a divine creation into a performance, into a simple content of the senses, into a passive and amorphous material destined to be questioned and submitted to the plastic will of the Spirit, into a spectacle and image, - Heidegger characteristically defines the modern era as the The 'age of the image of the world' leads us to the decidedly modern experience of the gradual stripping of the world of all divine presence.'' 

 

Kostas Papaioannou, The man and his shadow, Alternative Editions publications. 

  

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Biography

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Kostis Argyriadis is a photographer born in 1981 in Thessaloniki, Greece. He attended ESP Photography with scholarship. He studied under Stratos Kalafatis. He makes his living from photography.

He published his first book "Every Day, Every City"; with Agra publications and his second "DD-MM-YYYY" is self-published. He participated in several published books and photo festivals like ''Thessaloniki: Looking at time through moments: photographs 1900-2017" Museum of European Culture's, Berlin, Festival Circulation(s),in Paris, Balkans Today, The present of a wounded landscape in Athens, Estate Fotografia SiracUS Festival in Italy , Projet 102 in Paris.

He has held solo exhibitions inside and outside Greece. His photography vision currently lies within the triviality of everyday urban and life patterns, alongside with the absurd  and inconsequential of reality and the tranformations of it.

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www.kostisargyriadis.com

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