Eleni Kamma

The Selfie-Junkie, The Fool, The Animal, The Glossary, The Angry, The Collector of Proverbs, and so on
Solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels, March 2018

Referring both to local art history and to a rapidly pervading social media culture, the allegorical personifications that form the parading core of Kamma’s research are given their first public appearance here. As allegories are metaphorical structures where the singular meets the universal, parades are social occasions where the subjective individual meets the unifying collective. The spontaneity that characterizes the freedom of these festive, almost pan-emotional events is enveloped by an organizing element of theatricality, of staging. A parade is a moving collection of units temporarily connected in an infinite loop: as a moebius ring both inside and outside of a group, and inside and outside of a larger social context. When people step inside a parade and contexts collide, the potential of the parade as a locus for exchange become all the more apparent. The exhibition’s title describes a selection of the allegories that Kamma has developed at this point in her research. The allegories’ attributes are featured as well: props to show who they are, but also to be what they are.
Jesse van Winden