Ciara Phillips: Yours and Mine is Ours

The exhibition Yours and Mine is Ours by Glasgow-based artist Ciara Phillips is the fifth edition of our Artists in Dialogue series, a collaboration with the Βenaki Museum, which started in 2011 and aims to support and strengthen the production of site-specific and context-specific works in relation to the Museum’s collection by artists from Greece and the UK.

In response to an invitation to explore the Benaki Museum’s collection, Phillips has chosen to work with the museum’s Photographic Archive in the context of her project Workshop (2010–ongoing), in which she will transform the Museum gallery into a place of discussion, exchange, collaborative production and display.

Phillips is an artist who works primarily with the process of screen-printing and regularly employs her own photographs within her work. Images of women at work or at sites of education are recurring subjects, as are photographs of everyday objects that occupy her every day. Research into the Benaki’s collection, and particularly into the comprehensive collection of Nelly’s photographs, prompted her to revisit her own bank of images and especially those that she took in New York shortly after 11 September 2001 into early 2002, where she was then living.

For this iteration of Workshop (2010–ongoing), Phillips will be setting up a temporary darkroom and inviting other artists (Margarita Myrogianni and Antonakis), photographers from the Photography Circle, Museum staff and children to join her in exploring materials from the Benaki Museum’s Photographic Archives. Collaborators will be invited to share aspects of their own personal photographic archives and the public will be free to enter the gallery at all times encountering either the artist working alone or in collaboration with others. Images selected from the Benaki’s Archives and others selected from the personal archives of the participants will be presented in the space in a display that accumulates as the exhibition progresses.

In the spirit of the Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum programme, the exhibition Yours and Mine is Ours reflects on the role of the museum and proposes alternate models of engaging with the Museum’s collection but also with the institution and its visitors. By activating both the historical public archive and the private hidden memories of Phillips’s collaborators, Workshop urges a reflection on the very processes of making art. The exhibition also functions as a platform of communication not only by means of language and conversation but also through working together. Phillips foregrounds skill-sharing and collaborative production as forms of meaningful encounter with others, and her work draws our attention to things, relations and mediums that are often considered ‘secondary’ and that hold a ‘supporting’ role to the ‘main act’: printing, photography, personal images, women’s labour, etc.

Exhibition collaborators: Antonakis, Margarita Myrogianni

Information

For further information, please contact Maria Papaioannou:

With the support of Athens Culture Net