Maro Michalakakos, TILL IT’S GONE

The most beautiful days we haven’t seen yet

Nazim Hikmet

“TILL IT’S GONE”, the exhibition opening on January 12 at Istanbul Modern, curated by Çelenk Bafra and Paolo Colombo, presents a selection of artists who undertake conceptual research on nature and focus on ecological issues in their artistic practices, exploring the interaction between human beings and the ecosystem. The exhibition features twenty artists and art collectives from Turkey and elsewhere. Maro Michalakakos is a key to the exhibition and the curators chose one of her uncanny watercolors to promote TILL IT’S GONE.

©Maro Michalakakos

Maro Michalakakos’ work essentially consists of installations and drawings. She has created, over the years, what Paolo Colombo calls “an archive of mythological animals, most often birds” seem engaged in “interspecies mating, mostly with snakes and insects”, and become the chimeras of our times, a “parallel universe” very finely painted but somehow terrifying. We seem to enter an oxymoron somewhere between delight and mutation, children’s dreams and adult nightmares, beauty and violence (the title that art historian Paul Ardenne gave to one of Maro Michalakakos’ catalogues is indeed Violent Beauty), art and science. The artist’s birds indeed could as well have flown out of some ancient scientific book illustrating the multiplicity of existing species. May be in the near future, the only ways to preserve biodiversity will be through imagination on the one hand, and replicants on the other. In the meantime, let’s enjoy nature’s and art’s beauty – TILL IT’S GONE.

To view the invitation, click here.

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