Guest Speakers: Ruth Fainlight (poet), Mick Williamson (photographer), Saeida Rouass (author) and Richard Hamilton (author).
‘The Desert Behind’ is a collaborative project between photographer Yiannis Katsaris and poet Natalie Katsou, based on material from their joint journey to Morocco. As a response to their experience and to the ways it imprinted itself in them, they developed a bilingual multi-visual book that combines Photography and Poetry. The photographs by default document the people and the place unmistakably and vividly. The poems, both as stand-alone and in dialogue with the pictures, de-construct and re-construct that visual reality, while challenging memory.
The creative conversation reflects the artists’ impressions within an awareness of being constantly present and simultaneously alien in a mystical story where the exotic merges with the familiar, the unknown with the longed for. Moroccan culture and identity function here as a reflection of an oasis to be reached and inhabited from afar, in a perpetual transit. Born in a Mediterranean country, living in a multi-ethnic yet western metropolis, visiting a new yet very old land of myths and tales and fears, the whole ‘being here now’ takes the two artists by surprise. The negotiation between stereotypes, archetypes, routine, fact, fiction and meta-analysis shapes a new reality that emerges from ‘The Desert Behind’.
The exhibition at the Hellenic Centre establishes the project as a three-dimensional conversation between the two mediums in the space by presenting photographic prints of both Photography and Poetry. Searching for a common ground between written words, symbols and colourful shapes, the artists opt for an enriched creative language; re-figuring communication and context reveals a very different understanding of the world around us. The two artists now invite the visitor and the reader to an immersive experience of a re-imagined landscape with acquired meanings and over-lapping impressions of an original that still evades us.
Order your copy of the book here:
ORDER HERE
Promotion: Get one of the first 40 copies for the promotional price of £16 (regular price: £20) and collect your numbered and signed copy at the Book Launch!
With the support of The Hellenic Centre
16-18 Paddington St, Marylebone, London W1U 5AS
Phone: 020 7487 5060
Free Entry
Special thanks to @TheBritishMoroccanSociety and @MagicDrinksBarnet for the help and support in organising the Private View and Book Launch event.
