In August 2020, after a period of haziness, the Greek government announced the suspension of litanies and seasonal fests. The global pandemic necessitated the termination of those, traditional and modern, spheres that uphold the spiritual economies of large populations. The ongoing shrinking of communal spheres of cultural exercise, such as nightlife, religion, and popular sections of the culture industry (sports, tourism), subserved the surge of new, vernacular, and private practices of esoteric escapade, meditation, healing, and salvation. Recent research suggests that the digital diffusion of religion and spirituality reached new heights during the covid-19 pandemic. The temporal withdrawal of traditional authority, in combination with the fast digitization of time and space and the transformation of sensorial and corporeal experiences, benefits the more alternative and syncretic currents of contemporary spirituality.

This show offers visibility to the premonitions, anxieties, and clandenstine yearnings haunting the, monitored yet abandoned, quarantined self. In Shana Moulton’s The Pink Tower, domestic life becomes a sacred riddle. In this prophetic work, produced a few months prior to the lockdown, isolation takes the form of a vicious circle of self-healing, impending failure and dismemberment. In Shana Moulton’s work, “home” is a sacrificial tower. Her post-digital canvas rethinks techniques of early illusionist cinema, designing an imaginarium that caters for the materialization of ulterior agonies.

Delving into the visual sphere of online evangelical subcultures, the Berlin-based collective of NEOZOON produce READY TO FLY, an alerting mash-up of current “Rapture dreams”, i.e. narrated experiences of people having overwhelming dreams of the day of reckoning and the ascent to the sky. By superimposing different successions of found footage, NEOZOON assort the materials of apocalyptic fantasy, post-earthly hope, and radical flee flooding our digital kingdom. Their work is commissioned by ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture.

With Google Yrself Clean, also commissioned by ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture, Yvette Granata develops a visual essay on the softness of deadly things, such as the softness of virus protein coats. By paying attention to the material culture behind this battle of biological entities, Granata reveals the fragile, bubbly limit of viruses, of the soaps that kill them, and of digital life itself. At this level, everything floats. As the artist suggests: ‘It is not a war; it is a whisper that breathes death. The social world recedes from a soft supple tiny enemy.’

The show is part of the Public Hazards program, initiated by ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture. The program investigates recent transformations of the idea of the public in the post-social media era of generalized alert, sanitary policies, and fear of contagion.

ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture is an initiative of Athens School of Fine Art’s Labs 11 & 12, powered by Onassis Foundation and the City of Athens Development and Destination Management Agency.