ESMERALDA KOSMATOPOULOS

Dates of residency: January till February 2017
Born: 1982
Nationality: Greek
Lives and works: New York, US
Recent shows
2020 Si Le Nez De Cleopatre…, Darb 1718,  Cairo
2019  Cookbook 2019 , La Panacee , Center for Contemporary Art, Montepellier
2019  24|7 , Somerset House,  London
2019 Material Insanity, MACAAL, Museum of African Contemporary Art,  Marrakesh

 
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The Artist 
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist. Her work investigates the definition and construction of identities, personal memories, culture and collective histories in the post-Internet age. Her work was exhibited in galleries, institutions and public spaces in North America, Europe and Latin America including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Künstlerhaus Wien, AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, and Kunsthal Aarhus. Kosmatopoulos also worked alongside socially charged entities such as the Organization of American States and the Museum Louis Braille to create large-scale installations that raise awareness on social issues.

The Residency 
L’amour de loin explores the concepts of home, identity and memory through the lens of exile.
The project is built around the concept of νόστος (homecoming). She worked with NGOs based in the refugee camps close to the Syrian border, creating various art-related activities with children that addressed the concepts of memory of home, nostalgia and desire to return. She then appropriated raw factual pieces of these daily interactions that she combined with mythological elements from Homer’s Odyssey and literary references from the poetry of exile arisen from the Lebanese civil war to create a multi-disciplinary body of works that looks at exile through time and space as a fundamental element of our human nature.
“L’amour de loin” looks at the multiple layers of the rift of exile that is both geographical and temporal – between homeland and present location but also between past and present - and explores the ways in which exiles frame their ideas of homeland and how they relate to their former lives, through memory, speech and possessions.