Marietta Mavrokordatou at Brunette Coleman
It's horror season in more ways than one. Sometimes a news story can be so profoundly pervasive and affecting that we not only pay full attention, but it continues to seep into our subconscious and everyday lives, even where we're neither inviting nor expecting it. Depending on how your mind and spirit receive news stories or political events, this can lead to an anger, or an increased desire to mobilise. You might see this particular story or event replicated in daily life, in small ways, or even start seeing the systematic issue anew. For me, I have not been able to look away from the Cornell 7 story that is unfolding in New York state and reverberating around the world.
Several actors beyond the (alleged) perpetrators are entering the public imaginary and the unfolding of the case: the criminal justice system; management at Cornell University; a spew of social media users mocking and making frankly embarrassing attempts to decry the victim's account; rape culture writ large, and the media reporting. I want to take this space to say that if the story and the subsequent reporting is making you, either as a reader or a survivor, feel insane with either rage or incredulity, I stand with you and say that everything about this story makes both perfect and no sense. Why? We can understand this because thousands of other people, many of whom will be women, can vouch for this degree of abuse, within a malfunctioning system that produces and reproduces violence again and again. Simultaneously, we know that this should not make sense, despite the fact that we see it repeated. We can all ask, wonder, and plead, "why is this still happening? Why is this allowed to happen?"
It is with this in my mind that I approached Athens-based artist Marietta Mavrokordatou's work at Brunette Coleman in London. It feels important to preface this text with an acknowledgment that the artist is not working within the explicit themes of sexual or gendered violence, and the following reading of her work is my own.
The gallery itself is located in a chic part of Bloomsbury, and its layout feels like it might have been a cosy apartment in another life. In this somewhat sentimental environment, the highly fractured works of the artist burst into life. Taking the form of hand-printed Chromogenic prints, the body of work takes a 1955 photographic work by Bill Brandt, Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place, London, as a starting point. The lack of context as to why the girl is lying on the ground looking up in an otherwise empty domestic space is ominous. The viewer might want to step in and protect her; it's a scary world out there for a girl on her own.
But then in comes the contemporary reworking, whereby similar colour palettes are used but it looks as if a knife has been taken to it. Evidence of slashing, crashing and cracking break up the canvas, and knowing that Mavrokordatou made the works entirely by hand is a real celebration of the ways in which analogue work will once again be thriving, once the increased use of artificial intelligence renders a question of legitimacy over all creative outputs. By essentially disfiguring the image, a sense of dissatisfaction is evoked, a protest. While these works don't have an explicit storytelling narrative, their fractured aesthetic implies a story of frustration, anger, rage, and a world that does not make sense.
