Urban forest prologue

Olga Alexopoulou/ Christos Efstathiou/ Stamatina Palmou/ Yasemin Nur Toksoy

Curator: Ourania Panoutsou 

Opening: May 30 @ Booze Cooperativa (57 Kolokotroni Street, Athens)

Duration of the Exhibition: May 30 – June 10 2009

With the term urban forest we are referring to the sum of the natural element that is developing in the fiber of a city. Specifically the urban forest is constituted by the parks, the trees along the pavements, the gardens of the houses, the green terraces, the pots on the balconies…

Four artists have been called forth to respond artistically and their work will be presented on the 30^th of May at Booze Cooperstiva. Stamatina, the main initiator, has a history of activism but also of intense artistic presence, from the representation of Greece in the Mediterranean Biennial of Tunis to the many contemporary exhibitions, she introduces a plateau of thought and action seeing to highlight its necessity. Yasemin Nur Toksoy is well known for her work at the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul, but also for her political demonstration and exhibitions in New York among many. Olga Alexopoulou was introduced to the artistic scene of London with exhibitions in Cubitt and other galleries and has been exhibiting since then from Berlin to Beijing, will bring forth a more alchemical side of the urban forest. Christos Efstathiou with mixed media works, places human figures in an uncertain natural landscape, sometimes grim and sometimes optimistic, declaring human despair or hope for the future in an already disturbed environment. 

In the field of art, pioneers like Josef Beuys and Allan Sonfist, have laid the foundations of environmental action in the contemporary scene. Beuys with his theory of the Social Sculpture (1973) installed a very radical precondition for the investigation of the definition of art, in order to restore its status as a power of evolution for the human society and reversal of its catastrophic orbit. Using plant material as a medium and the degraded and polluted area of Kassel as his canvas, he created for Documenta 7 in 1982 the famous work 7000 Oaks. The work – a landmark – pricked the ecological problem, giving in this way a tangible example of his theory. The conservation and enrichment of the plant element inside and outside of the city is a matter of sensitivity but also of essential action for all of us.