File Note 148: Marina Xenofontos

In Public Domain, Xenofontos eyes the science of progress and possibility. Each object included feels familiar but can be sussed out as copy, cognate, mirror, or twin—precisely for what it reveals in its difference. The origin points are all atmosphere: lost, but within their own sense of returning (to the wrong place?). Xenofontos drives an idea of homecoming as an ambiguous ideology. A proposition to repair the alienated past in the present. Everything here has a dual meaning: as if you could read each object twice, from different perspectives, from different ideological ends. On one hand, there is the push forward: breaking through and beyond. On the other, there is the option to remain in the mirror, the dream, the other, and inch towards what (upon first glance) seems to be an imaginary place: the fantasy, its disavowal, and the suspension of disbelief. The trick is to realise that ‘tomorrow’ promises the wrong thing. The future leads to nothing but the end of the game. Xenofontos reveals fantasy to be an agent of the reactive present, its reiterated myths holding, taking place in the now.

Often, Xenofontos’ doubled virtues serve to dismantle a held belief in the hierarchical structuring power of the image. It is seen, instead, as a matter of volume. Her works treat common images, tropes, tales and structures as spaces—to dwell inside, work within, reflect on and revert to. She leads us through works as a series of whispered theories—theories on class, cultures and language—while struggling with the question of difference at the core. Her works look into the spaces formed between objects, ideas, and moments in time, with the suspicion that the goal is not newness, but intimacy.

Consider how King, oh King, with your 12 swords! What work do you have for us today? Laziness, the King demands, and the children all reply, Let’s get to work! (2023) entices doubt and instability as possible virtue. Metal poles, slightly crooked, operate in the realm of anxious familiarity. Reminiscent of canes that her grandfather would use, they enter into the domain of sentiment. But the sense of familiarity is dented and bent in Xenofontos’ version, drawing attention towards itself as a special object. In other words, the sentiment becomes more and more visible in the fact of the doubt—in the double, twin, somehow wrong, but pointing to the right.

Mark Lussier’s book Romantic Dynamics (2000) begins with the line, ‘Make efforts in ways then to perceive interdependence’.

Two things departing from the same core, separating for the pleasure of rediscovery. There is an erotics implied, maybe. Is the erotic anthropomorphism of the image a matter of shifting, skewing perspective? Like Holbein making the gaze weird, Xenofontos is ambassador to an idea that stretches from home into exile. She wants to catch things looking back: seeing things, seeing themselves, being seen. At that, she is generating motion around an object, an idea. Nothing is stagnant.

Everything that has been trapped and corralled in a signifier must be both recalled and held onto, whilst simultaneously embracing every other possibility it professes: what it could be, what it was, will be—or is fated to be.

In Evacuation Plan (2023), Xenofontos overlays her own image, and in doing so mines virtual selves, moon phases and mistakes with abstracted routes for escape.

Like ellipses, one thing becomes or leads to another, slowly, hesitantly, for pure revision. She measures the minutes between idea and object, origin and end-point, in order to point to the process as meaningful. (Not the process of making, but the distance from original meaning to the received meaning). Eternal return returns hardcore. The idea of the contemporary is intercalated in the impossible present as it marches onward. This has to do with progress, not stagnation. Peak VFX instead of appropriation.

In Class Memorial (2023) the lights are turned on. A simple door re-installed from the family’s home in Cyprus to the gallery space. This light flashes on familiars: the twin cognates, the whole gamut of revision is about looking twice, looking again, to realise that you understand nothing. Life appears as a sequence of repetitions. Think about Proust writing on how the ‘beloved object keeps moving’ (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower – In Search of Lost Time Vol. 2, 1918). The face of someone you love that never settles in the mind. The beloved escapes the mental snapshot.

The mind could be moved to what is colloquially called Prisoner’s Cinema: the moving images that appear on the retina after prolonged periods spent in darkness. Like the unclear contours of memories, these streaks of light take on form but have no clear appearance.

The beloved model in the mind’s eye turns into a dance of ideas, impressions, projections. Reality sediments in front of you into something ultra-real. But all virtual. Tricks of light and game-feel.

‘Twice’ then as denomination: not mere measure of self, but self-inhabiting the other. Twice is a relation. Xenofontos is asking us to look inside the unreal in space to see the ‘me’ as a matter formed in cognates, kinships, and affinities. She has us traverse points of connection as if through ellipses, elisions, commas. The works move in the paratactic pace of fairy tales, as if things made were always told: once, twice, as a matter of seeking reflection. Knowledge arises in the arbitrariness of ambling, overdetermination. One choice overriding the other, leading to variation. Each choice leads us to notice something else, something new, as nothing more or less than a series of elisions, misunderstandings, happy accidents. Gaps in logic alter meaning. Entering the mind of another courts confusion, but also the pleasure of discourse.