Pangrams and Slogans was a project originally intended to be shown alongside the impressive collection of inscriptions from the eighth century BC to the Late Roman period, mostly in Greece, of the Epigraphic Museum in Athens.
Dora Economou, though she identifies herself as a sculptor, has made several detailed, large-scale drawings, is an avid photographer still enjoying analogue processes, and is a gifted writer, in both English and Greek.
In this exhibition, she presented drawings of pangrams, in the two languages she has an excellent command of, Greek and English as well as French with a little help from Google Translate. She also designated original typefaces for each language.
As she was working on the drawings she started playing around with catchy phrases from tv commercials. Some were from the eighties - not a single person in Greece who lived in a household with a television receiver would fail to recognise them. These ads' legacy survived in the following decades.
Dora Economou's Slogans idea somehow sprung from her long-standing fascination with Ingebord Bachmann's The Good God of Manhattan (1958), a radio play about the impossibility of love in the social order, conflicting discourses at the apex of the Cold War, and the constant bombardment of indoctrinating slogans through the mass media. To keep it symmetrical, Dora used slogans from ad campaigns in Greek, French and English to create what you might call concrete poetry, or Dadaist poetry, or a form of linguistic conceptualism with a sense of humour, and inscribed them on the Radio Athènes walls using her customised typefaces.
PREVIEW: Wednesday 12th February, 6:00–9:00 pm
ON VIEW: 12th February–14th March, 2020
OPENING HOURS: Wednesday 4-8pm, Saturday 12-4 pm and by appointment.
