The desire for consciousness
These images have no titles and no captions to guide you about what to see or how to perceive their content. There is no text to recreate the missing context.
In these images it’s impossible to determine the time, the place or the circumstances under which the photo was taken as the black background deprives us from any other information that would help us locate its subject in the real world.
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
In this way, relocated in a virtual space, the depicted object somehow loses its “realness” and tends to represent the meaning of it, it becomes an idea and it is transformed into a symbol.
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
Although the operation and the meaning of a symbol are predetermined in this series I create new symbols and invite the viewer to give them meaning by reading them literally or metaphorically. In my mind these images work in coherence, like a deck of cards that tells a different story every time it’s shuffled, raising questions about how differently each one of us interprets the same stimulus and therefore how diverse interpretations can occur when meanings are not fixed but depending on the ever changing context and every individual viewer.
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
© Maria Mavropoulou
BIO
Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989 and she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is an Athens School of Fine Arts graduate (2014) having attended courses of painting, sculpture and photography. Currently she is getting her Master in Fine Arts. (Athens School of Fine Arts) Her work has been presented in exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including Culturescapes festival, (Basel, Switzerland, 2017)Athens Photo Festival 2016, Krakow Photomonth 2016, Athens Biennale 5to6, 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, Mois de la photo (Paris, France,2014), European month of photography (Budapest, Hungary,2014), Fotoistanbul (Istanbul, Turkey,2014), Benaki museum (Athens, Greece,2014).
She is member of the collective of artists Depression Era that inhabit the urban and social landscapes of the crisis in Greece. (www.depressionera.gr )