Short bio
 
Andreas Papadopoulos is a photographer and video artist who graduated with a Master of Arts in Photography degree from the University of the Arts in London in 2005. He has participated in video and photography exhibitions at various venues around the world, including File Festival, Art Video Koeln, Matt Roberts Arts and Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, among others. He lives and works in Athens.
 
 
About my work
 
My photographic and video work focuses on the ordinary and everyday, exploring themes inspired by the complexity of human condition and the contemporary landscape. The dialogue between history and the notion of everyday is at the heart of my artistic process. The surface and the signs of present are not treated as accidental and elusive elements but as a cohesive whole, involving the accumulated blends of natural and manufactured over time. 
 
A source of inspiration, among other influences, has been the work of French historian Fernard Braudel who deals with the study of history not as a linear narrative of significant events but as a continuous development which consists mainly of three time layers that interact with each other. At the first layer we come across the geographical time which has a slow, almost imperceptible speed and which marks the relation between people and the environment, then the social time which contains the forms of collective life over the years and finally the individual time which brings to the forefront the recurring, commonplace characteristics of the present as a key part of the uninterrupted evolution of history. 
 
Such an understanding of the historical structure brings the significant role of the ordinary and everyday to central stage, embracing at the same time with equal respect the panoramic and the detail. Thus, the ongoing projects Common place and Point of departure which attempt to understand and describe the troubled landscape of Greece, a country which has been in a deep economic crisis for over a decade, perceive this matter as an integral part of the worldwide situation. A condition which includes the cyclical recession-development model (always cynical, disproportionate and unequal) with intermediate rearrangements.
 
The discreet representation of sociopolitical issues is an essential part of my work, from Involuntary memory to the ongoing project Self-contained, which includes places across Europe with different evolution in the course of time, such as central areas in big cities, suburban locations and images of the countryside, in an effort to accentuate the interrelationship between the various features embedded within the landscape of our time. My work, in line with this approach, deliberately avoids direct messages and sensational events, preferring instead to examine both mediums' intrinsic possibilities to create visual narratives which carefully re-evaluate aspects of these familiar, everyday scenes.


Contact
 
e-mail: papadopoulosandreas@yahoo.co.uk
 
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