Good Taste
Forks, fabric, wooden vitrine.
Golden Dental Elements
Chickpeas painted with gold color, fabric, wooden vitrine.
Wall Top
Slices of bread, dough, allen screws.
Puff
Cage bird, base for cage, inflated plastic globe.
Pinching sensation
Barbed wire, feathers
Reconstruction
Construction wheelbarrow, leucoplast, wheat.
Education
Wood, church wax, shelf.
Eleanna Balesi’s exhibition, Golden Aid involves a series of works influenced by daily life issues that take place in our immediate environment. These issues are connected – but not entirely –to the unequal distribution of wealth, and to the overall crisis, which beyond economic, is mainly moral. For the artist, quest for a better future , and values such as freedom and equality are seen throught heprism of contemporary culture. She engages in these values through an anthropocentric-based approach, reflecting on the division between the materiality of things and its absence. Eleanna Balesi’s artistic practice derives from the overall relationship of her artwork to the general instability associated to social change and structure . This ephemeral reality serves as a stimulus and a cause for her choice of materials used in a series of experimental work, in which she combines organic, inorganic, processed and unprocessed elements. The artist’s work, formulated within the recent years of the crisis, serves as an outcry in the vast, subversive sociopolitical and economic surrounding from which it originated. The word Golden derived from the title of the show, refers to the Golden Age of Athens (of Pericles) - a period of cultural outburst, intellectual and spiritual flowering, and establishment of democracy . The second word in the title -aid, spontaneously reminds us of first aid – of immediate assistance to human need as nowadays people desperately seek self-rescue; a distant utopia in itself, a gold-coated pill of temporary relief . Golden Aid exhibition raises questions about real meaning of value and the ” valuable ”, as interpreted by various social classes . How do these different, contradictory interpretations, meet and integrate with the imminent conditions of life? In any case, egocentrism and personal gain are clearly visible, as Luxury and Need, two conflicting meanings , bind in dialogue. Eleanna Balesi’s Golden Aid is part of the Offspring Young Artists for the cultivation and facilitation of new generation artistic practice.