Thanatos - a group show 2023

Photographers Effy Alexakis and Yannis Dramitinos join with artist George Michelakakis to individually provide their personal introspective, interpretive visual offerings - Alexakis and Dramitinos through the controlled iris diaphragm aperture of their lenses, Michelakakis through the considered interaction of paint, brush and canvas.

All three capture the known to meditate upon the unknown and arguably the unknowable. Some aspects may shock, some may entice deep engagement, faith, and re-evaluation, others may enforce disillusionment or an intimate foreboding of what may await. What is it to be alive, knowing Thanatos awaits us all? What is it to have been alive, but no more?

The exhibition will feature a number of discussions and lecture events throughout its display with individuals who engage with death daily on either a spiritual or physical level.

'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2

Life is not possible without death. Human kind is mortal. But is it a cycle of birth, death and rebirth? Or does death annihilate life, totally - does it lead to nothingness? Plato and Aristotle theorised about the immortality of the soul, and religious traditions consider that life does exist beyond death. But since the Enlightenment, rationalism has cast God and religion into the abyss of the irrational. Yet, the mystery of a 'life' beyond clinical death remains.

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