Haris Epaminonda

Untitled #20 t/f, 2014

Epaminonda’s installations can be read as memory images in which moments out of history are laid down like sediment, and come together in associative fashion to form narrative threads. In Untitled #20 t/f, 2014, she uses a minimalist language of forms: close to a corner of the room, two rectangular panels lean against the wall. The smaller of the two is covered with gold leaf (in transverse format). It is almost entirely overlaid by a black panel resting on its short edge. In front of these monochrome color surfaces, a small gold‑covered pyramid is placed. Epaminonda combines these geometrical forms with an archaeological image. The framed black-and-white image hung in the corner shows the plaster impression of a couple from Pompeii, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. In its interplay of a vocabulary of sober, abstract-geometrical forms and charged content, this installation moves between memory and its dissolution. The forms and colors can be read as abstractions of natural catastrophes: the golden pyramid can be seen as a glowing Vesuvius, the monochrome panels can be seen as layers of glowing lava and of black ash. The radical subtraction involved, however, means that these possibilities for meanings remain intentionally fragmentary, unstable and imaginary. Instead, this very precise presentation transports the story far into the realms of the imagination.