The exhibition Disappearing act / second life brings together practices that experiment with the materiality of the analog image, still or moving, and with the processes that it is intertwined. By testing the limits of their medium, the participating artists investigate process and performativity as essential components of their production. Whether the material is found or documented by the artists themselves, the exhibition balances between the gradual appearance and disappearance of the image, focusing on the “second life” it acquires as a material entity penetrating our digital era.
At the center of the exhibition lies a fragile looping system for super8 film, which stands as a promise of continuity while depending on a delicate balance, turning the system itself into an exhibit. Its content presents us with a montage of super8 film fragments shot over the last two decades by Constantinos Hadzinikolaou that have been previously “rejected” by the artist or served as tests before the official shooting: fragments that found no place in his work either because they did not integrate into the whole or were not considered technically sufficient. The work Here’s a scene (2025), emerging from the random arrangement of this repressed diary-like material, becomes formalized through each repetition, while at the same time it’s being pushed toward deterioration through its continuous use.
On the opposite wall, Isabelle Ha Eav Ruiz’s Looking for the spirit of the river (2025) stages the emergence of a hidden urban river through a 19th-century printing technique that uses a natural material—the arabic gum (gum bichromate printing). By reviving this forgotten method used in Pictorialism, part of which unfolds in water, the artist captures her imaginary vision of the Ilissos river, searching for its traces in watery areas around the city of Athens. The enlarged negatives she uses for this process become artworks themselves, as in the one presented in the show (found in the Greek Literary and Historical Archive, Courtesy of Melas Family Archive, Photographic Archive ELIA/MIET) depicting two figures believed to be by the Ilissos river. Both works stand as a symbolic ritual for the gradual reappearance and fading out of a vanished place.
In Stavros Kassis’s work, found photography functions not only as an image but also as archive, gesture and intervention. For his piece Turista Desaparecido (2024), the artist uses found photographs taken during a trip where we follow the protagonist around different streets and monuments of a city. The figure was carefully erased, in a way that removes the personal features of the depicted individual, though accentuating its presence within the image. Revisiting memories and shifting parts of it is also what the artist practices through his research and collage process, as a way to examine the distortions applied in urban and historical space through the touristic gaze. This research extends into three dimensions, with works that incorporate materials from public space, such as fragments of furniture, construction materials etc. – granting them a second chance—like the photographs—to coexist through new relationships and dynamics.
Finally, in both exhibition halls and in a way that they face each other, are placed the works of Philip Fleischman, titled One Meter of White (2025), two “self-referential” photograms made from 16mm film. In Fleischman’s practice, the processing of film as a medium overcomes the information it carries, often leading him toward minimalist results. By removing the film’s perforation, he deprives it of its ability to function as a means of image reproduction. Placing the film directly onto the photosensitive surface in different ways, he treats it as a material freed from its identity as a source of stable and repeatable information. This performative approach connects to the reclaiming of the material for a fluid identity that offers it more possibilities for existing in space than its original use allowed.
With works by Philipp Fleischmann, Isabelle Ha Eav Ruiz, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou and Stavros Kassis; curated by Eva Vaslamatzi
Sina 9
106 80 Athens
Greece
02 October – 15 November 2025
*Eva Vaslamatzi is a curatorial SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2019)
