The Disappearance Of Knowledge

The influential Uruguayan artist and academic Luis Camnitzer (b.1937) conceived an entirely new work for Athens, this is the first time his work has been exhibited in Greece.

The specific location was a glass fronted office space previously empty for many years and situated on a street corner of a residential neighbourhood currently subject to the forces of gentrification, the site once formed part of the western city wall of classical Athens near the Hills of the Muses and the Nymphs.

 Camnitzer employed the technique of anamorphic illusion famously used in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Anamorphosis is a type of optical illusion involving an extreme form of perspective, the text depicted appears distorted and incomprehensible when seen from most perspectives except when viewed from a specific narrow vantage point. The phrase Potemkin Village written in the artist’s hand-writing was transferred onto the walls and floor of the empty glass-fronted office space and could be seen from the street, it was lit in the evenings to be viewed by passersby.

 Potemkin Village refers to a portable fake village constructed by the Russian statesman Gregory Potemkin for Empress Catherine the Great for her to admire while touring Crimea in 1787. More generally the phrase refers to any facade with nothing behind it designed only to impress, in politics a Potemkin village is a literal or figurative construction created solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is.

Camnitzer’s spatial visual illusion is reflected in the reference to the array of current deceptive but impressive falsities in art, media, politics and economics.