Stones and red thread
Approx. 30 x 30 x 800cm
Gaza Strip is a simple work. A set of rounded and lined stones on which a red line is drawn. One could say that the Gaza Strip is a drawing on stone. But the title, the (military?) arrangement of the stones, the circular shape of the drawing, and the very height at which it is done on the stones, suggests an arrangement. It simulates the mark left by a red liquid (blood?) on the surface of the stone. As the title indicates, the work refers to the violence and the historical war between Palestinians and Israelis in this small region of the Middle East. Like the memory of historical facts and the conflict itself, the red line drawn in the stone, exposed to the weather and the passage of time, gradually fades, becomes almost imperceptible, but never completely disappears. It periodically resurfaces, just like the conflict that never seems to end... It reappears strong and forceful to remind us above all that the marks of violence are always indelible.
Geórgia Kyriakakis
Ilheús, Bahia, 1961
She currently lives and works in São Paulo
www.georgiakyriakakis.com.br
Georgia Kyriakakis is a teacher and artist, with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from FAAP, master’s and Doctorate in Visual Poetics from the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo. She has taught at Unicamp, Centro Universitário Belas Artes, and, since 1997, at the undergraduate and graduate levels of Centro Universitário FAAP.
Since the 1990s, she has exhibited her work in collective and individual exhibitions, in Brazil and abroad, and has received important awards since then. She has works in important private collections and public collections and has published two books about her work: Georgia Kyriakakis, by the Spanish publishing house Dardo-DS and Empena o Amparo, by Martins Fontes Editora.
In her work, Georgia seeks to explore situations of strength and fragility, balance, and instability, which are present in nature, politics, social relations, and in the world in general. Such relationships arise from poetic-visual approximations with Geography - an area of broad and comprehensive knowledge that drives the artist’s creative impulse and determines the choice and variety of media and materials used in her works. Objects, materials, words, spaces, and the meticulous articulation between the elements of the work are ways to highlight the relationships between the virtuality of the image and the concreteness of the world.
