Christos Venetis: Operation mincemeat asides

Christos Venetis presents his installation entitled “Operation mincemeat asides” at the Cultural Centre of MIET in Thessaloniki, from October 30 to November 28, 2015. The installation draws on the occasion of the disinformation plan against the Nazis by the British Secret Service MI 5 during the Second World War, called Operation Mincemeat. Christos Venetis blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction with the insertion of a personal narrative. The collective and objective nature of the file is approached through a personal reading and interpretation. The imaginary component of the project is exacerbated by the transfer of pictures into pencil drawings and the fragmented narrative with the different sources of these images (mass media, cinema, personal photos, etc.).

Christos Venetis was born in Ioannina in 1967 and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University. He has presented his work in several European cities such as Athens, Cologne, Limassol, London, Nice, Zurich, and has participated in international art fairs such as Art Projects/Art London, Drawing Now in Paris, Amsterdam Drawing, Art Athina and Volta in Basel. He lives and works in Thessaloniki, working as a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.

…In his work, Christos Venetis draws by playing a game between the motion and writing of the images, their reading and interpretation. Lined up in a a row, his ‘animated’ drawings, albeit fragmented create a lively narrative. The act of recording these drawings gives Veneti’s “anemic documents” a more precise and monumental dimension. Both the subjects of ‘bare life’ he chooses to draw and the bare backs of books, ie the point where the content is violently removed for the sake of flow and
union of the “film”, intensify the cognitive lawlessness of Veneti’s images and add drama to his narration…*

* Extract from the text by C. Marinos for the catalogue of the exhibition Conversation Piece (21 Οctober – 27 November 2010), TinT gallery, Thessaloniki