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

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

RoxanneLola MovementMachine presents the premiere of Anne Zuerner’s first evening length work, NEAR THE FAR, a site-specific contemporary dance work for CPR’s brand new performance space. This emotionally intense, cinematic work, features remarkable dancing by Emma Desjardins (Merce Cunningham Dance Company), Ellie Kusner (Pam Tanowitz Dance), Adele Nickel (Sara Michelson’s Dover Beach, Liz Gerring Dance, CorbinDan…ces), and Anne Zuerner, as well as a haunting, original score for keyboard and synthesizer composed and performed live by Porcelain Skyline. Painter David Pappaceno contributes his visionary designs to CPR’s large white walls.

Performances will take place:

Wednesday and Thursday at 8:00pm,
Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm and 9:00pm.

Tickets are $17 and available online at smarttix.com, (212) 868-4444, and at the door.

Only 30 audience members may attend each performance, so reservations are recommended!

More infos: Center for Performance Research

Photographer Corrine Day passed away on Friday

As possibly the first, and certainly the most obvious, canvas upon which human differences can be written and read, skin has been a topic of continuous interest in anthropology and related disciplines from the earliest descriptions of exotic people to postmodern theorizing about the body in contemporary society.
Skin, as a visible way of defining individual identity and cultural difference, is not only a highly elaborated preoccupation in many cultures; it is also the subject of wide ranging and evolving scholarly discourse in the humanities and social sciences.
Although my focus is mainly on the anthropological literature, it is impossible to ignore work in other fields. Today, archaeologists and historians are rewriting the history of the body using evidence from newly discovered ancient bodies, artworks, and texts.
Discussions of contemporary “body work” merge the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, philosophy, and gender studies… each discipline mapping onto the body its shifting theoretical preoccupations.

Check out this silent film from 1926 that takes us “through the basic physiology of the human skin, combining anatomical education and basic healthcare advice. We see the epidermis and its replacement, the structure of the underlying dermis, nails, sweat glands and hair follicles.”

The ‘Skin’ exhibition was discovered by our editor Adeena Mey.

Watching MESRINE a few months ago in Switzerland, I intuitively thought: This film is indisputably driving from the French cinema, however its core is definitely built with American tools. Pretty bad movie, but entertaining and featuring a great cast of actors. For those who are tired of the French “Nouvelle Vague” legacy, go for the French “Nouvelle Hollywood”! Opening on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Jean-François Richet; written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, based on the novel “L’Instinct de Mort” by Jacques Mesrine; director of photography, Robert Gantz; edited by Bill Pankow; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, Émile Ghigo; costumes by Virginie Montel; produced by Thomas Langmann; released by Music Box Films.

as a free association to the doppelgänger thing (which is not really what the article is about anyway), I thought I’d bring back the classic Guy de Maupassant short story Le Horla.