let´s_make_it_compact®02

The sceneries in the videos of Vassiliea Stylanidou are oddly surreal. Sober urban situations or monumental arenas in nature are irritating: their atmosphere is curiously calm.
The rhythm of the protagonists is slow – be they human bodies that in their ever-recurring movements are released from the linear course path of causal contexts; or pulsating geometric bodies and amorphous entities whose artificial surfaces betray their digital provenance. Vassiliea Stylanidou links these two worlds. The apparently “normal” reality that we navigate on a daily basis comes together with her own fiction, expressed in animated bodies whose presence and being can be fathomed somewhere between the threatening and the magical. It is a sensational journey that eludes precise definition: the situation remains open for individual interpretations. What is real? What becomes part of the scenery?
In a keen choreography of rhythm, silence and light, the artist stages her playfully ironic view of the world, which begins as curious observation of her surroundings, and which she then extends to the borders of the imaginary.
In her videos, sequences often continue for minutes without apparent movement. The boundary between the media film and photography is probed; the montage of frames becomes a film sequence. The meditative movement occurs through digital animation of the objects, whose ambivalent essence can be a surface of self-reflexive projection on the one hand, and a sensual repository for nature on the other. Vassiliea Stylanidou questions reality at this critical juncture. She highlights particular constellations in her photos and film stills that play with the sceneries, where evasion and ambiguity are inherent to the game. The encounter among persons, strange forms, and surfaces are captured associatively in aphorisms, which in turn develop a life of their own, both visually and conceptually.

©2005 Carolin Haecker
(translated by Alisa Anh Kotmair)