Alexandra Koumantaki shines a weird light on the ruins of a lost world.
The work of Greek artist Alexandra Koumantaki is characterised by built interstices inbetween both the natural and the technological and the present and the past. Site particular setups in unoccupied natural areas see the Hyperlink manager illustration together artificial product and geological phenomena, reaching back to the ancient cultures of Greece and Egypt that have shaped her native Crete and her existing base of Athens, while gesturing towards speculative futures with sci-fi sculpture and synthetic light. In Gaze, Koumantaki workstogether with Simon Kounovsky, likewise understood as CGI artist, carver and filmmaker Axonbody, in a hybrid work influenced by ancient Hellenic tablets, video videogame aestheticappeal and J.G. Ballard’s fundamental work of environment fiction, The Drowned World.
Conceiving of a world in which humankind is long gone, yet their enduring mark stays in scraps of deserted innovation, Koumantaki and Axonbody reckon with the immediate truth of environment disaster utilizing the signifiers of lost and virtual worlds, reconfiguring innovation as modern folklore. Installed near the ancient sanctuary of Hera in the Corinthian Gulf, the artists flatten the freak weathercondition and international warming of the present into ancient misconception, illuminating the delicate scale of human history with orange alien light. “What divine trace of this universal innovation stays amongst the sparkling ash of metropolitan debris, the worldwide desert of networked ruins, and the abandoned wreckage of the cloud’s ambient hyper-architectural facilities?” asked Deptford gallery Gossamer Fog in their text accompanying Koumantaki’s current London reveal, Shimmering Ashes Whispered Twilight Tears.
“What orphaned antiques of divine calculation continue like midnight sun? What numinous drone idles in immersed temples?” Flecked with salt spray, showed in the whitewine dark waters of Corinth and refracted through squalls of spooky sound, courtesy of Morgan Hall and Koumantaki herself, the weird light of ‘Gaze’ shines as the recurring essence of the god in the maker of commercial society, a technologically-mediated encounter with a brand-new numinous, dripping through the fractures left behind by disaster. “The light setup symbolises calculation and human development,” notes Kou