Delalis [Τown Crier]
2014
Audiovisual Media
Video installation
Video installation
Colour, with sound, looped
Edition 1/100
Donated by the artist, 2016
Inv. No. 1066/16
Since the 1970s, Eleni Mylonas (1944, Athens, Greece) has utilised photographs, videos, paintings, and installations in her multi-dimensional practice. Her creations, anthropocentric in their essence and bearing an interest in political and historical circumstances, combine diverse cultural references that draw both from scholarly sources and various folk cultures. In recent years, initially inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings and the protestors’ makeshift means of protection, she has forged a series of self-fictional photographs in which she wears unexpected outfits made out of handy and, to a large extent, mundane objects. The photographs remind us that identity, the body, and gender are constructions that reside in an anthropological tradition and to which the human subject subscribes daily, balancing between compliance and rupture with normality. In addition, the manner in which Mylonas treats her facial characteristics brings to the fore one of the most systematic discrimination mechanisms: age. In her late work, the artist, uses the notion of play, subversion and animal drive, to challenge the conventions of age, especially those related to gender and pleasure.
In the video Delalis (2014), Mylonas reproduces the call of the crier (delalis in Modern Greek < tellâl in Turkish) from the shadow-puppet theatre work “Karagiozis and the Accursed Snake"". According to her testimony, the monologue was imprinted in her memory from her adolescence, when she first saw the performance at the Rallou Manou Dance Theatre School, with music by celebrated Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. The voice of the crier turns into a full-blown public call to rise against the “Snake”, a metonym for any danger that threatens the well-being of a community. Karagiozis emerges as the defeater of the monster and saviour, encapsulating the anti-heroic individual who defies any authority. Mylonas stands in front of a detail of a work by Frida Kahlo, in which apes can be seen emerging from the thickets. The choice of Frida Kahlo is not accidental; the Mexican painter is being introduced as a self-mythologising artist par excellence, as developed in a break with the constraints of gender and the life and limb condition. In the video, Mylonas wears the uniform of her great-grandfather, Panagiotis Danglis, a notable figure in Greek military history. It is an instance of a double de-sanctification of personal and national memory, which occurred in 2014 at the height of turmoil around the Greek crisis.
Eleni Mylonas was born in Athens, in 1944. She lives and works in New York and Aegina, Greece. She is a Fulbright Scholar and holds an MA from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London. She worked as a journalist in magazines and other media, but from 1972 on, her interest shifted to the visual arts. Her recent work focuses on video and performance. Her first solo exhibition of photographic works was held in 1982 at the Zoumboulakis Gallery in Athens. She has presented her works in solo exhibitions in Athens and New York and in many group exhibitions internationally. Her works can be found in public and private collections in Greece and abroad.