“Waltzing Matilda”: Alice Palaska’s new exhibition addresses a comment on overconsumption

A comment on overconsumption, on the consumer passion that accumulates garbage on our exhausted planet.

Zoumboulakis Gallery presents the exhibition of Aliki Palaska entitled “Waltzing Matilda” from 10th October. The exhibition will be curated by Apostolis Artinos.

Apostolis Artinos reports: “In her new solo exhibition entitled Waltzing Matilda*, Aliki Palaska creates a painted environment that frames a new series of sculptural works. Improvised skeletons dressed in thousands of rags. Anthropomorphic figures, some from art history, such as the damsel waiting for the young princess from Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, and others from pop culture, such as the clone hero from Star Wars, or this figure of a geisha, a constant symbol of resistant exoticism.

Palaska’s paintings, like her sculptures, reveal a tone of delight. A delirium of passion that stimulates the creative gesture and tests it in the infinity of its manifestations. There is a fixation, a stupefying moment that opens up in time.

The slow time of these works and the gesture of handiwork. The rags of Palaska embody the kind of labour that reveals its agent in a slow, almost stilled time; a time beyond the crisis that our current age has proved to be. In the way they are articulated, tied to one another in the shelter of the studio, they become part of a recently emerged culture that attempts to taste the secret import of traditional handicraft through a contemporary experience—a trying yet highly resilient experience. These sculptures look like heaps of fabrics, like Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags; ephemeral, changeable patterns. Their humble origin is second-hand clothing that Palaska obsessively collected during lockdown and then improvised with their heaps in her studio. A comment on overconsumption, on the consumer passion that accumulates garbage on our exhausted planet. Fabrics and colours kept shifting place and giving shape to the very life of the studio and its unbridled changes».

*Waltzing Matilda, from a Tom Waits lyric, means travelling with your life on your back. Alice Palaska’s rags, too, refer to this improvised life and its constant transformations.

On the opening night, at 8 pm, Dimitris Ameladiotis will give a performance entitled ‘Grid’ in the exhibition space, in which he will attempt to enter into a conversation with Aliki Palaska’s sculptural works through the recitation of texts and ritual movements.

Short Bio: Aliki Palaska lives and works in Athens She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts – BA Painting, Sculpture (George A. Lappas studio) and at the Concordia University, Montreal, Sculpture, Ceramics and Fibres. She started exhibiting in 1993.