June 8, 2023
A natural year has thirteen moons - thirteen lunar months. In my version of the story, the thirteenth month represents Dionysus, the god who was excluded from the twelve of Mount Olympus. Dismembered by his siblings, he was sacrificed and shared as a holy sacrament.
Dionysus transcends into the body of Orpheus, Zagreus, Christ, Krishna, and Prometheus.
Mankind condemned the thirteenth month along with its benevolent and sensual god. Having turned against Nature,
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Feb. 9, 2023
OPENING GALLERY
PRESENTS
A / TYPICAL NOW
A GROUP EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY
ELENA BAJO
LENA CHRISTAKIS
RONAN DAY-LEWIS
MARIA LOUIS
LOANNA PANTAZOPOULOU
COSTAS PICADAS
YULI ALONI PRIMOR
ANNA SAMARA
SUNDARAM SAGARIKA
LYDIA VENIERI
IRIA VRETTOU
WOOZY
AGNI ZOTIS
CURATED BY SOZITA GOUDOUNA
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Nov. 26, 2022
The Thirteenth Month is based on the Luna month of twenty-eight days. Multiplying this by twelve months of the calendar gives three hundred and thirty-six days. Subtracting this from three hundred and sixty-five leaves twenty-nine extra days that belong to the Thirteen Month.
In mythology, the twelve months correspond to the twelve gods and goddesses of the Olympic Pantheon. The missing thirteenth month is the god of celebration, Dionysus. This fallen god was exiled because he symbolized the opposition to the principle of authority.
Celebration disrupts order, dissolves fear, and reverses logic through the dimension of intoxication. It breaks down borders, awakening a common consciousness.
Dionysus declares Freedom a higher good than any material gain or hierarchy. He paces the Ego at the center of the world with human rights as law, honoring animals and nature.
His army mainly comprises women and Kineids, and he has a hermaphrodite nature.
The binary (dio) reference of his name to the dual nature of the god that unites the female with the male and has the duality, a siamese-twin of one god of monotheism with the countering Prometheus the Zeus.
In his "Dionysiaca," Nonnos mentions that Dionysos had twins from the nymph Aura. Iacchos, who is Dionysos of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Zagreus Dionysus was saved by his father from the flaming fire that consumed his mother, Semele. In Euripides' Bacchae, his cousin Pentheus was devoured by his mother, Hecuba. Maia also gave birth to twin Orphic Dionysus, one of whom she swallowed. May is the month that honors this hidden-eaten baby and is named after Maia.
The Thirteenth Month was shared and devoured by the twelve remaining months, gods or apostles. This is the meaning of the Last Supper, the sacrifice and impregnation through the Holy Communion.
This common guilt is the acceptance of the secret cult that mourns its dead, that it cannot protect from death and eats them to be reborn.
This cannibalism is an act of love. It is also Eve's original sin, who ate the dead Abel. The repetition of the Resurrection (Anastasis) every year carries the meaning of the Revolution (Epanastasis). With this symbolic ritual, people mourn happily and with ideals, maintaining the instinct of defiance with the universal consciousness. Easter is a floating feast based on the year's first moon cycle, and the number Thirteen is considered the Unlucky number.
Lydia Venieri
Maroussi, 2022
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April 11, 2022
Curated by Katerina Koskina, art historian & curator of exhibitions and activities at OPANDA
At the beginning of the last decade, Lydia Venieri began creating a series of paintings on paper on the life of Lor George Gordon Byron (1788-1824). This series captivated her so much that by 2017, she had created more than 720 works. She studied historical sources, revisited facts, searched for clues and figures directly or indirectly related to the life and work of the central figure of her research, and devoted herself to expressing the story in her way. Venieri's numerous works composed a narrative and an original visual biography of the important poet, writer, and symbol of European Romanticism, who loved Greece and breathed his last breath in Messolonghi in 1824. This project was named Byronic Codex by the artist, and in essence, they are her version of elements and conditions that are key in approaching life, work, position, struggle, and Byron's end. This large body of work, a complete artistic proposal of its creator, creates a mosaic that constitutes a painting narrative so dense that it could lead to a comic book or a film of this personality of the world of intellect and literature that by his choice was fatally connected with Greece.
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