Paris Petridis
The Void and the Country
July 1–August 2, 2015
The Void and the Country is a visual travelogue of Egypt as seen through the lens of Greek photographer Paris Petridis. Completed a week after former President Hosni Mubarak's fall in 2011, the artist’s desolate color images reveal the absence of a human presence in various public spaces, which is not only telling of an oppressive regime but, as Petridis asserts, the debasement of human life in favor of an aggressive, globalized economy. With the January 25 revolution of that year, Egyptians finally returned to these public spaces to remove Mubarak from power, using this reclamation as an initial step toward taking back the nation for its citizens.
“The work takes a stroll among signs of downright destruction and of uneven progress—both of which are symptomatic of all Middle Eastern countries (with the exception of Israel). Traversing a variety of photographic genres (still life, landscape, architecture, portrait) and operational modes (snapshots or tripod-based views), I compose images which relate the marks left by existence, by movement and by conflict, to a present that is anything but complete.”
Paris Petridis (b. 1960) is a photographer based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds an MA in Economics from New York University and a PhD in Photography from the University of Sunderland in the U.K. Petridis has exhibited widely, including such venues as the Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, Mois de la Photo in Paris, the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. He is the author of numerous books including Here: Sites of Violence in Thessaloniki (2012); The Rum-Orthodox Schools of Istanbul (2007); and Notes at the Edge of the Road (2006). His work is included in many private and public collections.