Karoliina Kagovere is a young artist who graduated from the Ioannina University, Department of Plastic Arts and Art Sciences in Northern Greece in 2010. During her studies, Kagovere focused mainly in photography and graphic arts. Her final thesis „Sewn Together“ can be seen at the Hop gallery during the next weeks.
The exhibition focuses on family photos. Exposing old negatives from her childhood, photographed by her father, she understood that for her thesis she would need new pictures, of her own family and new stories to tell. After realizing her idea as black and white family photos, she began to re-stage them. By printing and embroidering. Preferring handicraft over computer in order to maintain the „emotional warmth“.
This could be compared to the icons in the Orthodox Churches, where the saints are sometimes so covered with silver that only the painted body is seen – not that I would raise my family as high as saints, but what is comparable is respect and love on one hand, witch makes people to wrap the pictures of saints into silver and my simple love towards my family on the other hand which makes me to sew them over with soft fabric.
With photography I have always been most attracted of the fact that a photo always documents, even when my pictures are often theatrically staged – the status of people (or other), their attitude towards each other may be artificial on a photo, but the emotion that stands out from a photo, is genuine: loneliness or caring is recognizable even when the situation pictured is obviously not from “real life”. With these family photos I held myself back with the camera, I tried to take the pictures as simple as possible, to stay in the frames of the so-called traditional family album. I left the „re-staging“ phase for later.
In Estonia the craft skill of younger people is probably not so unusual yet, but in Greece however, it already is – the more my work progressed, the more it seemed, based on reactions of the others, that in Greece handicraft was a practical necessity for the “grandmothers generation”, a hobby for “mothers” and by the time of us “the children”, it had become an art. In fact, I printed my final selection of black and white family photos on a fabric and then began to “correct” them with colourful threads and fabrics – it is a sort of “twisted”-photoshop with needle and thread.
Let’s return to documentary nature of photos, family photos are usually considered to be as very documentary. Mostly they are so “common” that no-one even doubts that the situations they see on them are reality, from real life. However, family photos (and especially the collections of them, the family albums) are strongly manipulating with our memories – the camera is brought out on special or happy occasions and later looking at the happy people on those photos, both the people pictured there and the guests, “the others”, are convinced the this group of people consists of really special and happy people.
Similarly I too wished to transform my family photos into golden and colourful, hoping that maybe in the future those family photos are documented in our memory and we too believe how our time was once as golden and colourful as it appears on the photos.
I don’t think that these family photos are for a narrow, specific family circle only – every picture tells besides its own small story, also a universal story and maybe a person standing a bit further, can see more in this one family story, sewn together for this exhibition.
/Karoliina Kagovere/
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Exhibitions at the Hop gallery are supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture.
Press notice by:
Maria Valdma
HOP gallery
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