Eirene Efstathiou: Customer/Value/Service

The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, is presenting, from October 13 to November 21, 2010, a new work by Eirini Efstathiou entitled Customer/Value/Servicein the framework of the series EMST Commissions 2010. This series of works is commissioned by the museum for the Project Room and it is realized with the kind support of Bombay Sapphire gin. With lithographs, wood engravings, drawings, and paintings, Efstathiou continues a developing investigation of collective memory and the way in which we perceive history, as well as contemporary events, through images and the media. Composed of four sections, the exhibition Customer/Value/Service takes an in-depth look at certain politically charged public events and endeavors to shed some light on the social space created by collective unrest.

The first section, titled Anniversary, deals with the events of the Athens Polytechnic uprising that took place in 1973. It is made up of 36 lithographs, each based on a newspaper photograph from the demonstration that takes place each year on the anniversary of November 17, the day the uprising ended. The section titled Works to be Occupied deals with the rioting that occurred on the streets of Athens in December 2008. Fifteen wood engravings depict scenes of violence, burning buildings, etc. Efstathiou's sources are again images taken from the media. The fifteen drawings of the third section, based on photographs taken by the artist, present details from inside government buildings in Athens. In this section, given the humorous and self-referencing title Field Dispatch from the Earnest Cartographer, Efstathiou goes "into the field" and investigates the institutions that have become the targets of recent protests.

The project finishes with five paintings, titled Agony is Our Triumph. The pieces are based on images from the image archive organized by the artist for this exhibition and they function as a summary of the entire project. In this exhibition, Efstathiou deals with the post-dictatorship period, as well as contemporary events in order to examine recent Greek history and to explore, among other things, the ideas of resistance, collective life, and personal consciousness.

Eirene Efstathiou was born in Athens in 1980. She studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University, where she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2003, and was awarded the Albert Henry Whiten Traveling Scholars Grant from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2010 she received a Masters of Fine Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Efstathiou has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Greece and the United States. Most recently, Perpetual Dialogue at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Paint-id Contemporary Painting in Greece, as part of, Biennale: 2, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, the Portland Biennial at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, the exhibition Selective Knowledge in collaboration with ITYS Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought in Athens. Her work is represented in public and private collections in Greece and the United States. In 2009 she was the recipient of the Deste Prize, Deste Foundation, Athens Greece. Efstathiou lives and works in Athens.

Eirene Efstathiou
Customer/Value/Service
Kurator: Daphne Vitali