Pfui – Pish, Pshaw / Prr shown in Paratoxic Paradoxes, Benaki Museum Athens

Αn exhibition organized by Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative (PCAI) in collaboration with the Benaki Museum

The exhibition Paratoxic Paradoxes presents new works of moving image (film, video, animation, digital imaging, etc.) that explore this critical question through the contemporary viewpoint of political ecology and eco-criticism, as the latter is currently shaped at the point of intersection among arts, politics, socioeconomic demands, pedagogy and activism, beyond naive classifications, univocal readings and outdated strategies.
The exhibition is the first public presentation of a capsule of eleven original artworks created through commissions to artists around the world by the cultural non-profit platform Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative (PCAI) and curator Nadja Argyropoulou. The project, which began two years ago and is now presented through this exhibition, should be viewed, to a certain extent, as part of the global response and mobilization of artists, theorists, curators, scientists, activists, creative practitioners and social media initiatives in the face of climate-change tipping points and their connection to every aspect of contemporary life.
Being the first of a series of such experimental ventures pursued by the PCAI platform (in the context of its collection formed on the basis of hazardous waste management), this capsule begins with a study of the physical parameters and effects, the symbolic, psychological and socioeconomic implications of two – seemingly simple yet quite vague and ambiguous – terms and the multifaceted reality they reflect: ‘toxic’ and ‘waste’.
It explores the parallel readings of the redundant and the rejected, of that which is manageable yet elusive, of the amorphous and the anarchic, the abundant and the dwindling, the repulsive and the repressed, the excessive and the grotesque, the viral and the virulent, the processed and the possessed.