Follow the Yellow
Stella Ν. Christou
Opening: December 20, 2022 | 19:30
Duration: 21 December 2022 – 27 January 2023 (except Christmas holidays)
Opening Hours: Tuesday- Saturday: 17:00-20:00
Garage Art Space: Ammochostou 16, 1016 Nicosia
On December 20, 2022, Lefteris Economou Cultural Foundation presents the exhibition Follow the Yellow, by the intersectional composer Stella N. Christou, at Garage Art Space.
The exhibition Follow the Yellow consists of sound portraits, sculptures, paintings —unconventional musical scores as well as written works, which result from extensive research and observation of social groups, as well as Christou’s collaborations. Her practice is driven by the counter-narrative and all that it entails.
The written works are more stream-of-consciousness than complete paragraphs or flowing texts. Negotiating puns in the style of a dictionary, they end as poetry. She negotiates existence, seeking but also offering fleeting answers, often switching between English and Greek and Cypriot dialect in the same sentence. Questions quo vadis, such as “Who are you / How are you / Why / Where do you come from / Where are you going / What is Time / What is Life”, come to claim answers through her complex works.
Christou’s sonic portraits and complex sculptures originate and extend from the logic of music and composition. Within their metallic shells, sound mechanisms and sounds make the works more experiential than simply visual, where the work is never the same for two viewers.
In contemporary everyday life where we all “consume” history through the same prism, the artist searches for the true subject and/or object – in an achievable reality.
The title of the exhibition, Follow the Yellow, is taken from The Wizard of Oz (follow the yellow brick road). This road, however, branches off into multiple options. So, the instruction “follow the yellow brick road”, which seems simple, turns out to be rather complex. As she states “I follow the yellow / The color of time / The light of being”.
The exhibition has been realised with the support of the Deputy Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Services.
Short CV:
Stella N. Christou is a composer of temporal things / music – performance – research – audiovisual media. She was born in 1979 in the village of Askas and lives in Athens. She studied Music at the Department of Music Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, majoring in Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology and Visual Arts at the Postgraduate School of Fine Arts of the Athens School of Fine Arts. She has collaborated with Cultural Research Institutions, Galleries, Art Spaces and Festivals, participating in research projects and group exhibitions with sound sculptures and installations, experimental music performances, live concerts as a singer and songwriter. She composes music for theatre performances, short films and everything she loves and researches. She designed OuterStella ProductionTeam, with whom she recorded and released the avant-garde album NI-KO. She is a founding member of Space of Tapes (Artist Run NonProfit Field of interdisciplinary creation and research, based between Cyprus and Greece), a member of (video/sound) ‘KINS’ and a member of (Digital/Robotics/AI/Sound) ‘Field-Effect Transistors’.
