Aphrodisiac Intelligence Solo Exhibition

In her artistic practice, Irini Karayannopoulou uses media such as painting, animation, collage, drawing and publications. She often finds her raw material in outdated magazines and newspapers. She paints directly on the printed pages, creates collages, photographs and reprints the images of her choice, in a constant negotiation with matter, with image, with boundaries and with mixed media. Often her images return in the form of a magazine, as in the peculiar case of Janus femzine. In the 1970s there were two magazines named Janus. One focused on poetry and science fiction and was published in Madison, Wisconsin by a group of feminists. The other Janus was London based and had erotic content. Irini Karayannopoulou was inspired by both of these publications to create her own Janus, as a self-published edition in 150 copies, challenging and commenting on the stereotypical notions surrounding femininity and its roles. Each issue of Janus results from the collaboration of the artist and a guest writer. Janus femzine no3 will be presented in Hydra and contains images resulting from the painter’s experiments with artificial intelligence systems. On the occasion of these images, the journalist Efi Falida invents a scenario around the new reality of digital presence. The combination of image and speech results in an issue dedicated to the invasion of machines and to the excitement but also the concern it causes us. This charming game between words, imagination, but also machine training, is only one of two sides of the same coin. As Efi Falida writes, “You have to create the conditions for the surprise and then accept the consequences.”