THE THREE GRACES
a site-specific installation by Elias Karniaris
curated by Wanda Vrasti
for the back room of Gelegenheiten Berlin
on display: 13.10.2017 till 01.12.2017
There was a time when television gave the majority meaning, a time when only a handful of television stations and a TV set in every living room could fuse the national, the familial and the personal with a symbolic force neither technology nor democracy have been able to accomplish since. Elias Karniaris grew up during that time.
In 1990, MEGA CHANNEL, Greece’s first private channel, launched the nationally acclaimed sitcom, Oi Trei Harites (“The Three Graces”), a lighthearted comedy of morals whose object of ridicule were a peculiar class of people — women. Three sisters (the three graces) are reunited in midlife under the roof of their childhood home searching, once more, for their luck in love and in life.
To the foreign eye, ignorant of the narrative on screen, it is the peripheral semi-archeological details that demand attention — gaudy interiors, scripted outfits, and the catalogue of the graces' highly studied gestures and expressions. The latter, in particular, compose a score of female-connoted affectations one is invited to both laugh at and with. Ridiculous, extravagant and frivolous, such are the demi-goddesses of Greek retro-camp. Karniaris’ full-room installation in Gelegenheiten is, at once, homage and phantasm, an archaeology of a place that no longer exists as such and the fantastic projection of a drag imaginary that would last a lifetime. The piece is part of a larger preoccupation the artist has been pursuing over the past few years on the archaeology of television and projected femininities.
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