Antigone Kourakou: The Shadow Of Things | MONOVISIONS - Black & White Photography Magazine

MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2024

Looking at Antigone Kourakou’s photographs, one fully perceives the suggestive range of photographic abstraction. Although there is scarce visual information that connects the pictures with the real scenes, the situations, and the events they were born out of, the photographs imperatively call for our interpretation. They expect us to bring the ghosts back to reality, to rationalize the impossibilities they depict. The challenge is unrelenting, recurring and invariably leading to a dead end. And it is exactly this inability to explain them which lends them the poetic dimension that marks Kourakou’s work. In her photographs, even when depiction is complete, the intention to photograph this or the other subject remains unfathomable. Nevertheless, details of faces, remote figures, landscapes or indoor spaces shot from different angles are assimilated into a concrete form of photographic approach. Kourakou entered the field of photography totally unprepared, without having studied it, her only weapon being her unquenchable curiosity about the shadow of things, about ‘something other than reality’ that lurks in her subjects, and seems to be hiding behind the surface of their photographic representation. Without predefined rules or specific pursuits, the process of photographing things yields unanticipated aspects, which guide the photographer to an incessant quest of the unseen. – Costis Antoniadis

Antigone Kourakou was born in November 1979. She lives and works in Athens as an art conservator-restorer. At the same time, she is professionally occupied in making mosaics and she has participated in international exhibitions and events (12th International AIMC 2010, 1st International Festival of Contemporary Mosaics, Ravenna, Italy 2011). Her relationship with photography starts in 1998, while still studying art conservation. This experience motivates her to engage further in the medium, both on a theoretical and on a technical level, and reinforces her love of it. She begins systematic work on photography in 2010, by which time it serves as a means of seeking and expressing a personal aesthetic sense.

Website: www.antigonekourakou.com