The young artist Loukia Alavanou, a leading international art figure, makes impressive use of 360°immersive video in her works to poignantly address contemporary sociopolitical issues.
Alavanou grew up in 1980s post-dictatorial Greece under the influence of Soviet communism. Her works combine parody of the Soviet propaganda that influenced her early education and criticism of capitalistic Western societies. Alavanou, who studied at London's Royal College of Art, won the prestigious Greek DESTE Prize for young artists for her early works. She has been living and working in Athens since 2018. Her works, which revolve around political, feminist, and psychoanalytic issues, have been widely exhibited in Europe and Asia. In 2021-2022 she was a fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
The exhibition and talks with the artist have been made possible by support from the OUI Office for Gender Equity, headed by Prof. Varda Wasserman, the President's Advisor for Gender Equity.
New Horizons Pilot is a ten-minute 180° video work in which the artist makes ironic use of the soundtrack of the modernist utopic film To New Horizons. The film was released in 1940 following the roaring success of the 1939 General Motors New York Futurama exhibition, which displayed a miniature utopic model of the giant car manufacturer's vision of a city of the future. Against the backdrop of the enthusiastic 1940 soundtrack envisaging a bright future for the human race, Alavanou
draws with stinging irony the shattered industrial-capitalistic dream. In the artist's own words, it is "an absurd futuristic journey down the rabbit hole into a post-capitalistic junkyard where animals live in the wrong places, and caged birds of prey conduct Stalin-like showcase trials."
The Green Room is a five-minute 3D video work. In the artist's words, a "green room" or "green studio" is an undefined intermediate space, a kind of “no-place." In the video, a weird situation takes place: a figure filmed against a green background peeps into a Victorian house whose style is borrowed from 1950s British cinema. The film analogizes the perspective of an alien, watching from the outside and
attempting to settle into a house not their own, with the threat of "foreign invasion" looming over Europe, as it attempts to suppress its colonial past.