Artist dreams of glass cages

As one exhibition ends at eins gallery another opens. Glass Cage Dream is the first solo exhibition by Stelios Kallinikou at the Limassol gallery and features a new series of photographs and prints. This new series of works captures – not only – the exotic animals as the theme of the work itself, more importantly, it comments on the future of photography in an increasing age of digitisation. Opening on April 8, Glass Cage Dream aims to dissect the direction photography is heading in.

Commenting on Kallinikou’s work is Haris Pellapaisiotis: “The printed still-image, long thought of as the outcome of an encounter between the person behind the camera and something that materially exists in the world, is now overtaken by the production of images that are configured through a range of new reproductive digital and technological practices. This technological shift does not simply indicate the obsolescence of an older technology by another more expedient way of making photographs but also signals the disappearance of a way of thinking about photography.

“Looking at the range of prints with exotic animals,” he wrote, “which at first glance indicate the theme of Kallinikou’s work, it occurs to me that hidden beneath their striking presence lurks a larger concern that expresses the fragility of the photographic image, but also the negation of the photographic experience. In the age of digitalisation, what is fast disappearing is the space generated between photographer and object and subsequently the space for thinking that is created between image and viewer. No longer having the need to be physically situated in relation to the object, the photographer becomes dislocated in space and time as the photographer’s own sense of somatic awareness, in relation to the object, disappears from experience.

“Kallinikou continues to seek the element of surprise, of wonder, and revelation, however not in the depiction of extraordinary new encounters with his outside environment, but in the digital production of images. For this body of work, he is thinking about his relation to photography as it makes the transition from one technology to another and in that process, he is inviting the viewer to step back, to find the space to hold dialogue with the work and to rethink with him the possible disappearance of things.”

Glass Cage Dream

Solo exhibition by Stelios Kallinikou. April 8-May 25. Eins gallery, Limassol. Opening night: 6pm-11pm. Wednesday – Friday: 4pm-8pm. Saturdays: 11am-2pm or by appointment. Tel: 99-522977