Vangelis Vlahos and Zbynek Baladrán
What History Do They Represent?
Opening: Thursday, February 21st, 2008, 6 to 8:30 PM
The exhibition will remain open until March 29th, 2008
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM

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Blow de la Barra is pleased to present What History Do They Represent? the first exhibition in London by Vangelis Vlahos and Zbynek Baladrán.

What History Do They Represent? brings together the work of Vangelis Vlahos (Athens) and Zbynek Baladrán (Prague), two artists who explore the experience of transition and change in contemporary Greek and Czech Republic societies. Focusing on different fragments of recent history and using archival material from various sources, Vlahos and Baladrán question the relevance of this material as a tool to rethink historical concepts that still seem to influence and shape the way we understand our present.

For the exhibition at Blow de la Barra, Vlahos presents two different projects. The first one, 1981 (Allagi) (2007) examines the first nine months of the Greek Socialist Party’s administration in the early 1980s through found material from the archive of a right wing Greek political newspaper, Eleftheros Kosmos (Free World), considered to be the mouthpiece of the Greek junta - a right wing military government that ruled the country between 1967 and 1974. The work consists of a series of photographs and magazine cuts displayed in chronological order from October 1981 to June 1982 and attempts to portray the multifaceted notion of change (Allagi) promoted by the rhetoric of the governing socialist party during those years.

Central to Vlahos’ body of work lays a long-standing interest in comparing and confronting the language of architecture with that of politics and economic power. The second project presented here Athens Tower (Tenants Lists 1974 – 2004) (2004) involves the highest building in Greece, the Athens Tower. The piece consists of seven lists recording the tenants of the building from seven different years between 1974 and 2004. During the first years after its construction, the building was occupied by big state owned Greek and American companies while after the fall of the Junta these companies were replaced by smaller, mostly Greek private firms.

Baladrán is exhibiting a selection from the archive of Will Najvar, an amateur photographer from Brno. Baladrán’s work explores family and private photographic and film archives, and many of his investigations are part of the on-going project Monument to Transformation (2007 to present) a long-term interdisciplinary project aspiring to reflect the political, cultural, social and individual changes stimulated by the transformation of Czech society during the last twenty years. This project started at the beginning of 2007, when Baladrán published an advert in the press, calling on anyone who might be interested to send him photographs from their family archives connected thematically with an unspecific concept of transformation. Baladrán’s interest rests on two key questions: why and, even more important, how such an archive should be exhibited publicly. In analysing those two questions, he creates a series of diagrams and textual constructions that justify his own system of classification.

Finally, Socio-fiction (2007) is a 6:42 min. long video based on text and mostly found footage. Rethinking the Communist Manifesto today, Baladrán uses film material from Socialistic Czechoslovakia describing the urban politics of the state. This material is confronted with documents about a planned attack to Free Europe forged in Munich in the second half of the 1970s, and utopian books by communist architect Karel Honzík. In this video, the artist asks whether the Communist Manifesto could be an instrument to rethink the idea of revolution today.

Vangelis Vlahos was born in 1971 in Athens, Greece, where he lives and works.
Vlahos’ recent exhibitions include Monument to transformation- fragment #4 at INDEX Foundation in Stockholm, 3rd. Prague Biennale, A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam in 2007, the 27th Sao Paulo Biennale, Behind Closed Doors at Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts in Scotland in 2005, Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain and 3rd Berlin Biennial in 2004.

Zbynek Baladrán was born in 1973 in Prague, Czech Republic, where he lives and works.
Baladrán’s recent exhibitions include Glossary, Secession Vitrine, Vienna, Monument to transformation- fragment #4 at INDEX Foundation in Stockholm, Stalking with Stories at apexart, New York, Invisible Things at trafo gallery, Budapest, 3rd. Prague Biennale in 2007, The Need to Document at Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, in 2005 and Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian in 2004.