As a trained archaeologist, Stelios Kallinikou seeks to make visible narratives about places that settle beyond words; in an introspective, almost meditative way, he creates worlds that function like speculative scenarios exploring the intersections of territorial and ideological concepts of landscape.
In the exhibition rcsaerh, Kallinikou focuses on different places of ‘in-between’ and the politics of action within them. His video work Trailer, which is shown in the Künstlerhaus as a loop on four monitors, is a collage of found video material about the area around Akrotiri, a British overseas territory with a military base in Cyprus, which coincides with a unique biosphere landscape of supra-regional importance as it is the military base for observing developments in the Middle East. Kallinikou has documented flying fighter jets as well as resting flamingos and combined the pictures with YouTube material of celebrating participants of a youth camp on the military grounds in images that often seem picturesque. The result is an abstract, poetic film, carried by a specially composed sound piece by Panagiotis Mina: an artistic attempt at the complex relationships and contradictions of this landscape with its many nuances and interstitions.
Kallinikou’s new series rcsaerh which he developed in Berlin, continues his interest in the pictorial representation of landscape under new aspects: he first photographed paintings in the Alte Nationalgalerie in which relationships between man and nature are thematized in different ways. Later, he searched online for these very images and took screenshots of the image matrices of the search engines, precisely at the moment of the delayed upload in which the image is seen as a monochrome square block. In a further step, Kallinikou brought the “momentary” and the actual image together in a digital collage; playing with surface and meta-surface, he thus created new, enigmatic images in painting format, located in the intersection between tradition, painting, photography, and the era of metadata. Kallinikou’s approach interrupts the process of a painting becoming a picture and makes it visible at the same time – the viewers are offered a fragmentary narrative which they can then complete for themselves.