Valanti Athanasiou

Valanti is a Multidisciplinary Visual Artist and printmaker, living in Northern Ireland.

In her practice, Valanti questions, explores and investigates how space, either natural or manmade, affects human perception and emotions. She is interested in the unseen world of everyday unnoticed places and in the invisible world of the cosmos.

Valanti uses different media such as photography, video, printmaking, painting and installations to express the subliminal emotions experienced in terrestrial and extra-terrestrial spaces and places. Through her artwork she tries to provoke and materialise a sense of loss, challenge interpretations and explore the consequence this has to the essence of ideas, beyond the meaning or interpretation linked with everyday words. She believes beauty can be found not in perfection but also in everything surrounding us, she focuses on the unpresentable, the transcendent and the uncanny.

Website: www.valanti.art

Project's dedicated Instagram: @treeinthefield

Tree in the Field

Burned Negatives Detail

Video Still from "Gaia" Video work

Tree in the Field

Detail

Valanti’s work "Anagenesis" (rebirth, regeneration, renaissance) investigates the profound world of symbols, time, change, death and rebirth. Through a journey of repetition, she challenges the viewer to explore and grasp the ideas of time and change while she tries to provoke a Platonic anamnesis, a journey to uncover knowledge that is deep buried inside archetypes and can be recollected through repetition and awareness of universal constants. The labour-intensive techniques used for this work (analogue camera, manual development of films, manipulation of negatives, minimal digital media intervention, etc.) enhance this journey as through this artistic iterative process, a personal catharsis is achieved along with a realisation of inner forms.

For her final MFA work she uses photography and video to create a laconic dialogue between the old (analogue photography) and the new (digital video recorder).

She visited two places one is located outside Bangor, Co. Down and the other one is National Trust’s Murlough National Nature Reserve, Co. Down.

The text below illustrates the intangible nature of her work:

“The two dancing together on the stage of life and death, searching in eternity for something to hold on, moments of absence, moments that have already been gone.

And if you want to take part in this dialogue of the old and new, be an observer, be a wanderer of time and change, that lead you away, journey to unpresentable unknowns, ask questions about the true nature of the phenomenal world, of their Form and Idea, that sometimes anchoring us to the illusion of anachronistic symbols”

Installation Photographs