The Recording Angel is a symbolic determine in numerous spiritual and literary traditions, believed to doc each particular person’s deeds, ideas, and phrases for judgment or remembrance. Typically depicted as a celestial scribe, the determine serves as a metaphor for conscience, divine reminiscence, or the inescapable report of 1’s life.
Danae Io’s movie Recording Angel, proven for the primary time on this exhibition, unfolds by way of the peculiar mirrors of a automobile driving by way of Thebes and the encompassing countryside, capturing views not head-on however sidelong—fragmented and fleeting, seen solely by way of passing reflections. Because the car strikes, a radio present performs within the background, introducing the topographical watercolors and journey writings of James Skene, the Nineteenth-century Scottish painter, explorer, and chronicler of Greece because it emerged from Ottoman rule. Skene’s works quietly parallel the movie’s personal cadenced act of statement, every providing a partial, mediated report of a panorama on the fringe of transformation. Thebes, as soon as the setting for myths of prophecy, insanity, and divine intervention—the place Oedipus met his destiny, Dionysus prompted frenzy, and Cadmus sowed dragon’s tooth—now presents a contemporary life the place agricultural fields give technique to industrial decline. Because the city passes by, the movie evokes a present-day recording angel: not celestial, however mechanical—driving, listening, observing—whereas the panorama itself turns into an alternate recorder, inscribing histories by way of its collected marks, transformations, and absences.
The act of recording within the movie extends right into a collection of sculptural works within the exhibition, every partaking with out of date recording gadgets and optical illusions.
Within the first room, Dial II (2025) reanimates a collection of phone playing cards produced in 2003 by OTE (Hellenic Telecommunications Group) and the Nationwide Historic Museum of Greece, which characteristic Skene’s panoramic watercolors of Nineteenth-century Greece. Mounted inside a hand-assembled, motorized praxinoscope—an early optical system invented in 1877 that used rotating mirrors to create the phantasm of movement—the playing cards type a looping sequence. The praxinoscope’s round motion echoes cinematic mechanics and digicam pans, providing a low-tech meditation on visible sequencing and equipment, whereas suggesting that it’s motion itself, relatively than the act of recording, that animates historical past.
Inside the vertical shaft of the Thirties lightwell within the hall, Untitled (hours) (2025)—a periscope—is put in, its mirrored inside angled towards the constructing’s uppermost window. A periscope, an optical instrument designed to see over obstacles, directs the viewer’s gaze upward, bypassing the constraints of the encompassing structure. Referencing each the Renaissance E book of Hours, with its structured meditations on time and light-weight, and the polemoscope—a Seventeenth- century variant of the periscope initially utilized in navy and theatrical settings to watch discreetly from hid positions—the work transforms a utilitarian aperture right into a contemplative system. In the principle room, Dial I (2025) assembles 5 of the identical commemorative phone playing cards, organized diagonally in order that their mirrored reflections create the impression of a steady, unfolding panorama.
Collectively, these works animate the processes of recording—not as impartial acts of preservation, however as gestures formed by the fabric instruments, optical gadgets, and atmospheric circumstances by way of which histories are filtered. The exhibition proposes that each report can be a hypothesis, imbued with the intangible components of the recorder’s internal panorama and topic to limitless reinterpretation. Inside this recursive cycle, the recording angel—whether or not celestial, mechanical, or embedded throughout the panorama itself—begins to lose its definition, dematerializing into environment.
at Akwa Ibom, Athens
till June 26, 2025
