The Paris-based, young Greek artist to watch Iris Touliatou has a Palais de Tokyo Modules solo show opening on Thursday 9 September. Her fascinating practice crosshatches a physical urban construct over an architectural landscape yet to be realised; a hanging state of cognitive dissonance in which fiction and reality exist simultaneously. Iris’s work across various media displays a unique and specialised depth of research making it equal parts visually stunning and highly sophisticated.

Xenia Hotel Nafplio, 1961. Photographic archives Benaki museum

From the exhibition text: The Xenia hotel chain, built in the 1960s, was central to a plan to modernize the Greek tourist infrastructure to convey a new image of the country. These holiday resorts built in idyllic landscapes by Greek architects influenced by Le Corbusier were the symbol of the postwar era at the time. The
architecture was then seen as a real marketing tool, passed on by the film industry that chose these new leisure places as shooting locations, as in the film “Apollo Goes on Holiday”. Filmed in 1968, partly at the Xenia Hotel in Nafplio, this musical comedy playfully conveys a new way of living.

ECLIPSE 1/ Eclipse, Collage, 45x 53 Cm, 2010

Basing her ideas on this evidence, Iris Touliatou embarks on a dialogue between different historical facts. While the American Marshall Plan was supporting the recovery of postwar Europe, NASA was developing the Apollo moon program.
The exhibition, its title alluding to the aforementioned film, presents two new works. A replica of the shade screens that were present on the façades of the Xenia hotels, “ECLIPSE II (Parasol Set)”, at the center of the space looks like the setting for a scene to be acted out: the metaphor of the human dream. The artist weaves a mesh of references. Thus the collage series “ECLIPSE I” associates the official photographs of the Xenia hotels with cuttings from 1960s architecture magazines, advertisements for new materials such as concrete, and publications recounting celestial phenomena. Through a work involving collage, cutting-out, associations or overlaying, new images appear, operating along the lines of an unconscious language, and laden with mysticism.

ECLIPSE 2/Eclipse, Collage, 45x 53 cm , 2010

With the support of the Onassis Foundation

http://iristouliatou.com/

Palais de Tokyo / Module 1 / Iris Touliatou / Apollo Goes On Holiday