Catalogue > At random

"Colour restoration of the Olympic torch lighting ceremony, during the Greek military Junta (1967)" is a video piece based on a found footage of the event described in the title "the Olympic torch lighting ceremony of the 1968 Olympics, filmed in Athens during the Greek dictatorship of 1967/74. The footage, initially black and white, has been painstakingly colourised, by hand-colouring each of its frames one by one. The result is a somewhat crude, awkward and ultimately less realistic documentation of the event. Even more so, when viewed as a restoration of a restoration, since the regime's own nationalistic aesthetic and propaganda iconography were based upon a grotesque revitalisation of the country's ancient past.

Anastasis Stratakis (b. 1985, Greek) lives and works between Thessaloniki and Athens. His work has been included in a number of international group exhibitions, including: "At the Beginning Was the Word", National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing, in collaboration with National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2018); "Abracadabra", 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (2018); "Epilogue", Kunstverein Herdecke, curated by Apostolos Palavrakis (2017); "The Equilibrists", organised by the New Museum, New York and DESTE Foundation, Athens, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Athens, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Helga Christoffersen with Massimiliano Gioni (2016); 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2014); "Afresh: A New Generation of Greek Artists", National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2013) and has been exhibited at institutions such as Musée d`art contemporain de Lyon (2016), Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (2015) and MMCA : Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2014). Works by Anastasis Stratakis are included in prominent private and institutional collections among which are the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) Collection in Athens, the State Museum of Contemporary Art Collection in Thessaloniki, the Borusan Contemporary Collection in Istanbul and the Michael Haas Collection in Berlin.