Leda Papaconstantinou
YES+NO
Leda Papaconstantinou, throughout her artistic career, has dealt in various ways with collective and autobiographical memory, gender identity with its inborn and acquired traits, the female-male dialectics, body language and the dynamics of the relationship between artwork and space.
Her work at the Bathhouse of the Winds, the only surviving hammam in Athens, –a multi-level installation featuring objects, video projections, sound recordings, fragments of conversations and interviews, as well as men’s and women’s military uniforms from the Wardrobe Department of the National Theatre of Greece, everyday items of clothing, shoes, laces, a women’s undergarment from the collections of the Museum of Greek Folk Art– proposes a bold, multi-level reading of this transcultural monument with its visible and invisible history.
The artist organically incorporates in her narrative the constitutive elements of the monument and its functions. The reading of the Bathhouse of the Winds, as staged by Leda Papaconstantinou, subverts age-old cultural and social stereotypes about the perception of gender identity and its depiction, undermines traditional viewpoints, established behaviours, and meets forward-thinking problematics, theories and interpretations in the disciplines of Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Anthropology, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies.
The book is a result of two bound parts joined together back to back. Each part can only be opened from one side of the book. This way, english is separated from greek, women are separated from men.
The book is published on the occasion of Leda Papaconstantinou’s exhibition YES+NO at the Bathhouse of the Winds, presented in October 2011.
Cube Art Editions have also published Leda Papaconstantinou’s following books:
Three Papaconstantinou – Theodore, Litsa, Leda, 2016
For Ever, 2009
Performance, Film, Video 1969-2004, 2005
All Books