Threads
Kythnos - Ukraine, a contemporary photographic dialogue
Maps
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Photographer Michael Pappas explores the faith and community of the unusual aspects of culture in peripheral areas of Greece. In 2022 he was designated as a SPOTLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHER by VOGUE for Mitos Project. The project focuses on the long-established women's costumes throughout Greece, while it premiered at the Fragonard Museum in the world's perfume capital of Grasse, France. Mitos Project is a variation of "Ethos" exhibition, which was successfully completed at the Benaki Museum.
His images are published internationally, including in the New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, VICE US and others. He is a contributor to KATHIMERINI newspaper and Gastronomos magazine. His love for anthropocentric images, as well as rural Greece, prompted him to create the work "Mitos", a more experiential work. His goal is to communicate his personal pursuits and the corresponding conclusions to the general public through the art of photography. The thread takes symbolic dimensions and seeks to highlight popular culture in a modern context. The natural and cultural environment is the background associated with the "costumes" while the protagonists are always the people.
The specificity of this photographic work lies in its contemporary aspect, through the people who kept their clothes as heirlooms and hand them over to the next generation, renewing the mechanisms of tradition as a process.
More info:
www.pappasmichael.com
Michael Pappas
Vangelis Ioakimidis – curator
What is behind traditional costumes? Stories of a place, people, customs. Those who wear them become one with time and with those who wore them before. The threads of costume also act as threads that transcend linear narratives, unfolding smaller events, those that unite people, that create memories and heirlooms. Following Michael Pappas' forty works in eighteen places in Chora and Dryopida, the viewer encounters portraits of Thermians and Ukrainians, men and women staring him/her in the eye, suspended in an almost timeless way, while in present time the two worlds are so far apart.
How the threads are woven between war-torn Ukraine and summery Kythnos? The story begins two centuries ago, when in the 18th century the now canonised cleric Ignatius from Kythnos founded Mariupol in Ukraine. In 2016 part of his holy relics were returned to the island and since then the two places, the municipality of Mariupol, including the town of Sartana, and the municipality of Kythnos have been twinned.
This relationship is commemorated by the modular installation "Threads", following an initiative of kythniale - Bridges of Culture, commissioning photographer Michalis Pappas to include Kythnos in his ongoing work of Mitos. Citizens of the island and the Ukrainian community of Athens are photographed together for this original work in progress, illuminating this, unknown to many outside Kythnos, "thread" that connects the Aegean and the Black Sea in yet another way.
A relationship woven through time. Now the fabric is darker. But the costumes are waiting to be worn again. The sunflowers that adorn a Ukrainian woman's head turn to the light of the Aegean. Through the paths the viewer encounters and even on this occasion remembers, or rather does not forget.
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