Frequencies (and atmospheres) is the second exhibition in a series of four, organized in different cities by Andreas Melas (Melas Martinos) and Helena Papadopoulos (Radio Athènes) around and about the work of Greek artists Bia Davou (1932-1996) and Pantelis Xagoraris (1929-2000). It considers marks, fuzzy boundaries, cracks, atmospheres, thresholds, codes, oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, voices, projections, subtractions, prostheses and extensions, electric charges, rituals, evacuations, text fragments, repetitions, sunrises, and sunsets. The series are linked to the archive, to collecting information, preserving, tending the objects, questioning their recording, but they are mostly about how historical works may act, in the present. Except for Christos Tzivelos (1949-1995), all other artists responded to this invitation with new or recent works. Imperfect in historical detail, and a result of intermittent conversations, e-mail exchanges and telephone calls, Frequencies (and atmospheres) seemed like one of those skies under which one could only imagine eclipses and returns.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed by Julie Peeters. It includes research material, texts by Maya Tounta, Helena Papadopoulos, and Alex Waterman, as well as his new score, composed on the occasion of Frequencies (and atmospheres). Published by Galerie Eva Presenhuber, in colour, in an edition of 400.

Rey Akdogan’s work engages the materiality of atmospheres and how these can be taken apart. The materials evoke fleeting memories of other spaces, ranging from industrial warehouses, aircraft hangers, factories, supermarkets, and perhaps even the cinema, but with a destabilizing difference.

Aristide Antonas is an architect, writer, and visual artist. Since 2021, he has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Antonas has published books, short stories, essays, and screenplays, including The Pulp of Things / O poltos ton pragmaton (2020); The Archipelago of Protocols (2016), and Urban Planning for Murder (2015).

Patricia L. Boyd’s practice encompasses sculpture, photography, writing, and video. She was born in 1980 in London. Boyd lives and works in New York and London. She had institutional solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna (2022) and Kunstverein Munich (2021).

Bia Davou studied painting in the 1950s in the studio of Kostas Iliadis, where she later taught as his assistant. Her early work is gestural, lyrical, and fierce. Progressively, and through conversations with her husband Pantelis Xagoraris, she moved to another direction informed by mathematical models and cybernetics and their translation to art. Her interest in the poetics of systems of communication is visible in her Diagram series (1974) and Sequential Structures series (1978). Several of her works on paper produced between 1975-1978 depict circuit boards, though without any intention to create an applicable model. The form of her precise free-hand design is imbued with expressive qualities, echoing musical notations. In the 1980s it looks like her early interest in materiality and movement collided with her fascination with language and the structural parameters she had imposed to her art making process. She produced a series of works based on triangular expansions in various materials that culminate in the Sails, creating environments meant to be installed both indoors and outdoors. In this body of work, Davou combined the metric system of Homeric language in the Odyssey, with the structure of the Fibonacci sequence, painting directly on cloth and sewing verses with thread. Bia Davou had several solo exhibitions with legendary gallery DESMOS, in Athens, Greece. She was a founding member of the Processes-Systems art group.

Dora Economou is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Art and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work is mostly sculptural, hand-made, process-based and material-oriented. It is also representational and veers toward a narrative. She approaches art making from a story-telling angle. Economou treats materials as characters: the process is the grammar rendering them into words, the rhythm between forms and pauses is the syntax, the titles – which are an integral part of the work – are the punctuation marks.

Kitty Kraus’ works are characterized by extreme reduction, following the formal language of minimalism, and resisting an (over-)abundance of material and narration. Despite this absolute reduction, they occupy and incorporate the entire space, making it part of the works. They unite hardness, even aggressiveness, with a fragility that frequently reveals itself as a moment of threat to the viewers, but also to the works themselves.

Often in response to a specific context Iris Touliatou works across various disciplines that are necessary for each intervention. Manifesting in sculpture, drawing, sound, scent and language, her work creates transient forms and shared experiences, to comment on labour, affective economies and states of being. Examining infrastructures and function, attachment and desires, the public and private, Touliatou raises questions on the conditions of artistic production and the institutional frames within which, it exists.

Christos Tzivelos was an artist and set designer active in Athens and Paris from 1972 until his untimely death. He graduated in interior design from the Athens Technological Group, commonly known as Doxiadis School, in 1971; in fine art from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1976; and in architectural engineering from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Vilette in 1990. He worked as an artist assistant for Costas Tsoclis and later Takis. He has created theatre sets for directors Gilberte Tsai and Leonidas Strapatsakis for productions in Marseilles, Strasbourg, and Nice.

Alex Waterman is a composer, performer, scholar, and archivist, exploring how social bodies can interact with one another in more musical ways. He has created a diverse body of works including sound installations, television operas, film and video works, exhibitions, amateur choral works, radio and film scores, and solo performances as a cellist, electronic musician, and storyteller.

Although Pantelis Xagoraris begun studying painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1948, he concurrently attended Mathematics at the University of Athens from which he graduated. He became professor at the Athens School of Architecture, where he also obtained his PhD. His doctoral thesis “Geometric Transformations and Form” gives insight to his thought process and provides detailed information on the production of his work. His practice involved computer aided drawing, painting, kinetic works, sculpture, photography, drawing and research at the intersection of art and science. He was advocating for an art that wouldn’t set boundaries between the aesthetic observations of mathematicians, engineers, biologists, and artists. During a fellowship at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1974 where he accessed the computing equipment of Nicholas Negreponte’s Architecture Machine Group and by using the hardware available at the computer center of the Athens Center of Ekistics, he started investigating the computer’s potential for visual art through the utilization of antique geometric principles in the implementation of cybernetic ideas. Xagoraris lectured widely and exhibited several times with the historic DESMOS gallery in Athens.

Spanning found objects, kinetic sculptures, light installations, digital and analogue avatars, writing and film, Marina Xenofontos’ practice captures methods for recovering the fantastical, imaginary aspects of culture obscured through historical/ideological recording.