Engrams of Oblivion

"Engrams of Oblivion" are the stalagmites of memory: unique, solitary testimonies of the remote past, marked sequences and fragmentary images, chips of time which kindle fantastic projections for the future. Effie Halivopoulou and Andreas Voussouras resurrect these rough imprints, these traces which have been impressed on human consciousness. Their artworks, charged with personal history, recount our intangible passage on earth through the Heraclitean unity and harmony of opposites.

Halivopoulou describes the transmutation from being to nothingness and vice versa, thereby proposing timeless ideas on alteration, transformation, and the eternal motion of cosmogonic energy. Using the human as a unit of the universe she emphasizes the mechanisms of sense and perception, indirectly invoking the gnoseological issue which pertains to external reality and the precise recognition of visual representation. Experiences convert into images which erase from memory only to reemerge unexpectedly as engrams of oblivion which chart their own independent course as they are etched and re-sketched on the human brain. In Halivopoulou's artworks primordial generative forces define the unification of beginning and end, thereby bearing the connection and convergence of opposites.

Voussouras guides the spectator through an intellectual futuristic voyage which addresses notions of birth, multiplicity and homogeneity. His artworks become crystallized allegorical snapshots of cloning, the artificial reproduction of a singular being. Indelibly stigmatized by the total absence of a past, this scientific product of the times will bring in its wake the extinction of family, history, inheritance and tradition.

The artist leads his visitor into a delusional progression from before to after, from earthly to otherworldly realms, from actual experience to the fearful unknown. Swaying us through time, he animates the sacred rituals of vision and oblivion, of memory, imagination and dreams. Using daily human history as an axis, he basically defines the eternal cosmic cycle: universal perpetuity, the continuous motion of time and succession through isolated imprints, private palimpsests of the mind.

Engrams of Oblivion

Bia Papadopoulou