ATHENAS PLAYGROUND

Name: ATHENAS PLAYGROUND
Start: 2024-12-11T18:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-12-11T21:00:00+02:00
Location: Φιλολογικός Σύλλογος Παρνασσός

Schedule

Wed Dec 11 2024 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Φιλολογικός Σύλλογος Παρνασσός | Athens, AT

Athenas’ Playground
Salli Yule -Tsingas
Curated by Christina Mitrentse
Opening Tuesday 3rd December 6-9pm
Duration: 3 to 15 December 2024
Parnassos Literary Society Athens
Pl. Agiou Georgiou Karitsi 8, Athina 105 61
Athenas’ Playground is the title of the first solo exhibition in Athens by Glasgow-based artist Salli Yule -Tsingas, presented at the Parnassos Literary Society. A haptic, nomadic project, this exhibition is part of a decade-long series of evolving installations that began in Nafplio, traveling to the UK and Germany. Through painting, collage, video, installation, and sculptural appropriation, Yule-Tsingas uses the concept of ‘home’ to examine spaces where fragments of identity and history collide, questioning notions of care, control, and belonging. Informed by Griselda Pollock’s theories of exile, her work explores the liminal, framing ‘home’ as an in-between space suspended between belonging and displacement.
Yule-Tsingas engages with discarded and neglected objects, rescuing these fragments from the edge, between life and death and treating them as orphans separated from their ‘families.’ Positioned within sculptural configurations, these objects form new, dynamic narratives that explore the forces of capitalism, consumerism, memory, and identity. Influenced by John Berger’s notion of the orphaned image and Walter Benjamin’s concept of constellations, Yule Tsingas’ work resists linearity, and instead it creates shifting meanings through viewer interaction. Her approach parallels artists such as Isa Genzken, Paul Thek, and Vlassis Kaniaris.
A central work entitled Shotgun Playroom, examines control and weaponry through the repurposed photograph of her grandfather’s shotgun mechanism, laid on a mattress within a wooden bedframe, suggesting a bed or a psychoanalytic couch. This duality, like much of her work, plays with themes of power, violence, and gender, drawing from psychoanalytic and feminist theories of Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger to question subjectivity within consumer culture.
In the two-channel video installation, entitled Horse Work surrealism meets reality, blending small observed moments from Athens and her travels. The playful piece features objects like a toy horse in repetitive, mechanical motion, illustrating how consumerist tenderness has overshadowed human connection. Another significant work entitled Athena’s Papi, combines a gentleman’s clothes rack found in Athens with a sculpted Akrotirion inspired by Athena’s temple. Feminine, curved columns and floral motifs crowned the Acropolis, yet stood atop phallic architecture embodying a duality. This work merges historical and domestic fragments, inviting reflection on the masculine and feminine tensions in classical and contemporary spaces. The ‘Flat pack spirit’ is an oil painting depicting a subversive portrait where the human head is replaced by a packaging box much like a vessel which brings us our desires, representing the spirit of Capitalism.
Reflecting on Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Yule Tsingas questions Western history which gives emphasis on tools of violence over vessels of life—asking, what if we reimagine tools as containers of connection rather than instruments of dominance? Raised as a child of American immigrants in Canada, with life spanning Greece, Saudi Arabia, and the UK, the artist creates a space for examining the liminal tension between the masculine and the feminine, proposing that a shift toward the ‘carrier bag’ may redefine the way we perceive and interact with our world.
Salli Yule-Tsingas is a British / Canadian artist born in Louisiana, awarded an MA from The School of Art, Architecture and Design, London (2014). Selected solo exhibitions include : Wander-full, Wonder-fool, The Deep End ,Glasgow (2024), Decoys + , South Block, Glasgow (2023), Gesture Survival, Mt. Florida, Glasgow (2021), Hito’s Forest ‘ A Thing like You and Me’ ,101 Gallery, Edinburgh Art Festival ( 2018), Circus of Events, Ex Parliament of Modern Greece, Nafplio, ( 2017), Two person exhibition : Co-Lack-Ting, Briggait Galleries, Glasgow (2024), Group exhibitions : 1876, Last Fish Supper, Briggait , Glasgow (2023), Your safety Our Concern, Morley Gallery, London, (2022), gefühlt-gesehen-gefunden, The Orangerie, Munich, (2020), Retour , Hortensia Gallery, London (2019), We Could Not Agree , Frieze Satellite Exhibition, Cavendish Square, London (2014) Infinite Traces, MA Exhibition , Disused Bank , Whitechapel, London (2014)
https://www.syule-tsingas.com/