Ilias Georgiadis
Over.State
curated by Michele Corleone
Opening: november 14th at 7 pm @Officine Fotografiche Roma
Time Zones:
“For me, photography is the missing dot that connects what is deep inside us and we cannot understand or describe, with the world. A connection that transcends and moves through space-time, in unpredictable, mysterious and non-linear ways. A link between reality and love. I believe we take pictures because our inner self wants to reconnect with the cosmos. We want to feel close to people, places, objects and as time goes by, we recognize in them a part of ourselves. With photography, we reveal ourselves to the unknown, while preserving a link to the real. My work depicts my innermost states of fear, desire, affection. Standing in the middle between life and death. In particular, “Over.State” depicts the story of a young and lost person trying to feel free and find love. An emotional exploration of the human condition. An effort to understand how we express freedom, intimacy, closeness; how we seek true connection with the inner self and the other. But also here, for the very first time, I am presenting works that were born before “Over.State”(“Archives”) and works that were born very recently(“Vialattea”). What interests me here is to question coherence and to explore those pivotal moments of <<change>> during the artistic and creative process. And by creating a setting of different <<zones>> I am trying to express and visualize this experience, morphing it into something illusionary linear and diverse which is how we prefer to perceive change over time.
-I.G.
Over.State by Grzegorz Kosmala(publisher, Blow Up Press)
There are many books that discuss the lives of their authors. Thanks to them we can hear the voice of the whole generation, learn about its fears and hopes, worries and joy. But none of these books talks about it in such a visually sophisticated manner as Ilias Georgiadis does in his book debut…
Over.State does not contain any information about the time and place, that makes the book even more universal. We can think, we know its characters, we have met them somewhere on the way. Also, lack of any introduction to the story, an attempt to explain it, gives this book a special dimension: the reader must go through it alone, page by page, must try to understand the meaning of words chaotically written here and there to realise at the end: “This is about me…”
No matter what they depict, the photographs taken by Ilias are magnetic. They absorb you completely, remain in memory for hours after seeing them. And every time you come back to them, they do it again and again, and again…
When looking at the pictures from Over.State, one can get an impression of balancing on the border between reality and dream, life and death, something permanent and ephemeral. These images are like a love poem and Ilias Georgiadis becomes a poet of photography…
Biography
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Born in northern Greece, Ilias started experimenting with the photographic medium at the age of 19.
After extensive travels in 2011, he stops his university studies and starts making pictures in an obsessive way.
Ηis main interest focuses on the basis of the current social and interpersonal issues about human nature. An approach based on Europe which started in 2012 in Greece and continues until now.
He is always questioning the body and the mind, always trying to reach and express the limits of oneself within all possible ways.
Ilias’s debut series of work named “Over.State” has been shown in various international festivals, solo and group shows across the world and has been featured in on-line and printed publications.
In 2019, “Over.State” published as a monograph by Blow Up Press(Warsaw). Currently, Ilias is working on his new book titled “Vialattea”.
