15.02-03.03
DOC! Paris
Kosmas Nikolaou with the body of work, that is presented in the exhibiton Mental Radio studies and Interprets a trace of the long and absurd history of parapsychology in Greece.
In doing so, he has to tackle the history of various institutes, associations and clubs, where researchers sharing an interest for paranormal and psychic phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis...) tried, for the first time, to explain them using formal scientific approaches. Neither spiritualists nor psychotherapists, these scientists tried to prove the existence of invisible phenomena while distancing themselves from religion, magic, and other such beliefs and interpretations. Inspired in part by personal motives (his great-grandfather, a founding member of the Greek Society for Psychical Research (SPR) took part in the movement). Kosmas Nikolaou attempts to investigate the non-fulfilment of these experiments and the collapse of the Greek SPR in the 1960s. The exhibition explores the inability of the movement to realize its avant-garde potential, and exposes its failure to reconcile the primitive and intangible concepts it addresses with its practical aspirations to social and institutional recognition and, in fact, its inclination towards status quo. Through archive materials and the echo of the exhibition space at the DOC, Kosmas Nikolaou is rewriting the story of these interactions.
Text by Eva Vaslamatzi
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