DIPART

On Friday night I went to a DIPART art show. It's pronounced "Depart" and the connecting thread between the art was departing from the self and from reality. It was a dynamic mix of art, technologic, aesthetics, philosophy and culture. I went with Julianna, Colleen, Karen, Jackie, Alex, Emily, and a few others. It was held at an abandoned building that is an former army camp. We were at the show from 9:30-11 pm and it was creepy out there. Creepy, but really cool.

All of the art was very avant-garde, both progressive and experimental. I felt that it was rooted in Dadaism and also in post-modern art as well. At the show there was traditional medium such as sculptures, paintings, and drawings.

But they also had a musical performance that was simply noises pounding and thrumming through surround-sound. The sounds made you feel as if you were being surrounded by disaster and chaos. There was a room full of projections of people singing a dark compilations of notes. My favorite display was a small room that was completely dark except for a handful of lasers shining through the room. Every time you touched a laser, it would emit a sound at a specific frequency. When you touched multiple lasers, you could create a kind of haunting melody. It was incredible to be "playing" lasers like you would a piano. Surrounded by darkness, thin beams of light give way to a melody. I could write a poem about that room.

After we explored the different floors and gallery spaces we headed down to the main floor and grabbed a beer and waited for the performance art to occur. When it started, we were led into a big room where a man dressed in all white moved stiffly while words were projected onto his body. Around the corner, a woman was trapped inside a cloth box, around the next corner a man searched the ground for letters to form words on his chest. Above, high up on steps a man dressed in all white was spinning a wheel of words and acting out whichever word he landed on. Around the next corner, a woman dressed in all white and a woman dressed in all black moved together as one. A human and it's shadow. It was a sort of dance where they could never separate but desperately wanted to. This all would have been much easier to comprehend had it been in English, but there is something foreign and mystical created when you don't understand a language completely and when it's used in dark-art.

Overall, the art show was incredible. I'm so happy I went! I loved how progressive the art was and that it wasn't simply paintings and installations. I liked that the art was interactive and unique. It was unlike any art show I've been to before. Another reason to love the art scene in Greece!

Here's an amazing article in the New York Times about How great Greece's art scene is. Check it out!

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/travel/salonika-greeces-cultural-capital.html?pagewanted=all