Mary Christea – ‘Without Sound’

The exhibition’s title, ‘Without Sound,’ is itself a paradox – since the works are ‘read’ through the sounds and spoken narration of the eponymous video. In essence, it is a female monologue, a spontaneous erotic outpouring that captures the loneliness of human existence experienced during the quarantine.

In this auditory confession, the artist’s voice takes centre stage while an almost imaginary lover receives her hidden desires and emotions. This unknown man, embodying a dual nature – ‘hard as stone and soft as a feather’ – both freezes and transports her. The heroine’s rhythmic voice ‘dresses’ the cinematic work, which unites three different videos into one cohesive piece.

The parallel projections unfold in horizontal bands, covering much of the screen. By deconstructing the visual narrative into three moving frames, the work prevents a unified perception of its individual representations. The flow becomes fragmentary, and the visual perception occurs in snippets, depending on where the viewer’s gaze falls. At one point, the appearance and sound of television static reinforce the ideas of rupture and discontinuity, symbolically suggesting a state of disorder and waiting.

Movement is generally slow, yet it is fleetingly interrupted by images that race by at dizzying speed – evoking memories drawn from a life brimming with experiences. The video is enriched with captures of fragments from the artist’s everyday domestic environment, adding an extra autobiographical quality.

The cinematic frames consist of paintings and drawings by Christea – primarily portraits and depictions of the female body, both her own and that of other women – as well as photographs (mostly taken by her) featuring landscapes of seas, mountains, and sunsets. The images are often ambiguous. The iconographic affinity between the curves of the female form and the organic contours of Mother Earth – a recurring element in her work – lays the foundation for an eco-feminist commentary while also serving as an underlying philosophical reference to cosmic becoming, life, death, and rebirth.

The conception, collection, and composition of the material took place during the pandemic, when human communication had become a rare privilege. The shared title of the exhibition and the video, ‘Without Sound,’ aims to evoke the prevailing atmosphere of isolation and silence while also hinting at Christea’s precarious psychological state and the uncanny loneliness of the times.

During the period of involuntary confinement, femicides and violence against women surged dramatically in Greece. Meanwhile, a severe personal health crisis – caused by fractures in her spinal column – confined the artist to the already imposed ‘prison’ of her home. Her suffering body became the impetus for a series of works based on her personal medical examinations; through free associations, these pieces allude to the abused bodies of other women.

Christea transforms the X-rays taken before and after her spinal surgery into precious raw material. Laden with symbolism, these images guide the viewer beneath the surface. The images capture her body – suffocatingly confined in its brace/splint before surgery, and also liberated, postoperatively. The artist digitally processes these images in Photoshop, effectively repainting the monochrome corporeal substrate to capture different phases of an evolving therapeutic process. With her visual interventions, the already abstracted image of the tormented body gradually dissolves as darkness gives way to light. A similar approach recurs in the trilogy featuring the naked female form in rhythmic repetition. These works – idiosyncratic diary entries – serve as small, everyday acts of allegorical documentation of shifting moods; incantations against misfortune.

The linear gestures found in the digital prints sometimes evoke spontaneous pencil sketches, threads, and idiosyncratic capillaries. Similar gestures pervade Christea’s large-scale drawings, rendered in pastels in hues reminiscent of blood and passion. These, too, evoke the female form – partially hidden, fragmented, and cracked – like traces of memory.

In this exhibition, Christea weaves together memories and experiences, dreams and hopes, desires and fears in a timeless space where past, present, and future merge into one.

Excerpt from the text of art historian Bia Papadopoulou.

Bia Papadopoulou
Art historian, exhibition curator

Translated by Dimitris Saltabassis