Photographic collage installation series
Dimensions variable

Exercises in Speaking Out is an ongoing series of photographic collage installations that rewrites the history of photography according to eight topologies – nude, architecture, botanical, portraiture, interiors, wildlife, landscape and product – through exposing the patriarchal mechanics behind the material, chemical and technological processes of image production. The project is laid out as a complex web of conversations between photographic technology manuals and the artist’s personal photographic archive. Against an instructional understanding of knowledge and experience, Exercises in Speaking Out weaves a visual narrative of cultural references, projected as an emancipatory act of learning to speak, of finding own’s voice against the cultural frameworks that capitalism imposes.

Exercises in Speaking Out, Volume 1 (Nude), 2020 is set up as a conversation between nude images in 90s Greek lifestyle magazines and East German erotica. It explores the role of photography in representing the naked body and sexuality as signs of progress.

Exercises in Speaking Out, Volume 2 (Architecture), 2021 deals with relationships between utopic representations of modernist architecture drawn from Soviet and East German sources and photographs exposing the realities of social struggles in Greece during the 1990s.

Exercises in Speaking Out, Volume 3 (Flowers) 2021 is based on images of flowers out of focus, colour diagrams from analogue photography manuals, and colour graphics from 90s Greek magazines. It questions photography’s role in the construction and perception of colour.