Process of mourning put in focus

Screenings of Grief-Work, straight from the Venice Biennale, are coming up at ARTos House reports ELENI PHILIPPOU

Grief-Work, a three-screen video installation currently being shown at the European Cultural Centre, Venice in parallel with the 59th Venice Biennale, is coming to Cyprus for screening at The ARTos House, Nicosia. From December 6 to 8, the venue will host Helen Kirwan’s films alongside parallel events which include several talks.

Through her work, Kirwan explores concepts of mourning and memory, fragment and trace and journeying as the poetic and metaphorical construction of memory. Generally, these are expressed through her quiet, meditative performances and multi-channel video installations such as in her Memory Theatre series.

For Grief-Work, Kirwan has taken inspiration from some of the mourning traditions of ancient Greece and the Middle East. It features the artist as a character on a metaphorical journey, encountering performances of ancient funerary rituals as illustrated on white-ground Lêkythoi vases which were popular grave gifts in Athens in the 5th century BCE. She swings between existences and experiences, seemingly teetering on the edges of two spheres as if enacting her own transition from life to death.

Although apparently on a chronological journey, the character’s simultaneous encounters are boundless, endlessly taking place, unfettered by time and space. The paintings on Lêkythoi vases depict various funerary rituals and activities for nourishing the deceased and their memory, including the sadness of the mourners but also changing Greek attitudes towards dualistic notions of time, the mourners epitomising the empirical and tangible nature of kairos, informed by human experience and subjectivity.

The outdoor scenes filmed in Cyprus blend with other material into a fragmented but interwoven repetitive structure. A sense of infinite motion is echoed by the inclusion of a chant sung by the Byzantine choir of the Bishopric of Limassol ‘Romanos the Melodist’. The chant, with its continuous rhythmic flow, has been integrated by the composer Tom Lane into the overall soundscape to accentuate the sense of poetic gravity of Grief-Work.

Grief-Work will begin on December 6 at ARTos House with the screening of the 40-minute film. The following day, a talk by the scholar, poet and music maker Dr Marilena Zackheos will take place at 7pm, followed again by another screening. Events continue and conclude on December 8 with a talk by photographer and visual artist Constantinos S. Constantinou on the work of photographer and publisher Menelaos Pittas who passed away recently, followed by a final viewing of Grief-Work.

Grief-Work

Film screening by Helen Kirwan and talks by professionals. December 6-8. ARTos House, Nicosia. 7pm. Free. Reservations required via www.helenkirwan.com/grief-work-nicosia/