ATHENS.- Nikos Alexiou will present the installation, The End, curated by commissioner Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, in the Greek Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition in Venice. The work is a modular installation inspired by the floor mosaic in the Catholicon of the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos (10th-11th c. AD). The Venice Biennale 2007 Vernissage days are 7th, 8th, 9th June, and the Greek pavilion will hold a launch event on 8th June, 5-7pm.

Yorgos Tzirtzilakis comments: "The Greek participation in the 52nd Biennale of Venice focuses on the possibilities of diversity, and the critical re-negotiation of the concepts of identity. Further, through the sensory materiality and multiplicity of artistic practices and the repetition of the same revealing and constructing the different a new condition of handicraft will be described and depicted.

A close relationship has always existed in non-Western and Eastern cultures in terms the affiliation of aesthetic and religious techniques and practices of repetition for the achievement of ecstasy. Nikos Alexiou's digital and material appropriation of the monastery mosaic sketches a visual path that suggests a broader change in the way that many have tried to describe and employ these practices in recent years. Alexiou's installation is a four-piece modular work that consists of a interchangeable projection onto a large screen, paper cut-outs, the prints and a table that with elaborated paper rests; all as separate elements that will carry the traces of this work's makings and marked with the memory of previous works. It is inspired by the cosmology of the floor mosaic of Iviron monastery at Mt Athos. Through the precision and intricacy of this work, Alexiou attempts to examine the aura of emotions that surround the mysteries of the mosaic.

Nikos Alexiou comments: "The work for the Biennale, which I've called The End, carries everything I've worked on all these years, from the '80s and a little earlier to this day. All references in my work, from rainbows, lights and galaxies to marble, prisms and the psychedelic stuff, are all in it."

Situated as it is, at the Orient-West Borders, the "Greek cultural case" is not characterised by the high standards of western technology nor by the exotic aspect of Oriental culture. Greek artistic production is about the marriage of high and low culture, of urban with traditional aesthetics, of the rational and the irrational, of the instinctive with the procedural and the flirtation with the various 'borders'. This distinctive trend produces the creative fusions of Greek art. The future of civilization as a whole can be traced in such borderlines The famous Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis once described this situation as “dihofroneousa” (schizoid).