PARIS PETRIDIS

Dates of residency:  November till December  2018 
Born: 1960
Nationality: Greek
Lives and works: Thessaloniki, Greece
Education: 
2010 PhD in Photography, University of Sunderland
1985 MA in Economics, New York University
Selected shows:
2018 Beyond Borders, Villa Empain, Foundation Boghossian, Brussels
2017 Shared Sacred Sites, Thessaloniki Photography Museum, Thessaloniki
2015 The Void and the Country, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland
2014 Souvenir de Salonique, Page Gallery, Birkbeck College, London

THE ARTIST
Traversing a variety of photographic genres and operational modes, photographer Paris Petridis follows an essayistic logic composing images which reflect the marks left by existence, by movement and by conflict, to a present that is anything but resolved. Petridis has exhibited widely including the Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, Mois de la Photo in Paris, Istanbul Modern and Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. He is author of numerous books including Notes at the Edge of the Road, The Rum-Orthodox Schools in Istanbul, and The Void and the Country. His work is included in many private and public international collections.

THE RESIDENCY
After Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Cyprus, Lebanon was the next stop in Petridis’ Grand Tour in the Eastern Mediterranean set off in 2007. Informed by political History and stimulated by travel, his six-week residency gave him the opportunity to delve into the realities of the post-civil war in Lebanon.  During his residency at BAR, Petridis traveled around the country capturing street portraits, constructed landscapes, vernacular architecture, sites of memory and sites of amnesia, the coexistence of religious identities and conspicuous materialism. His photographs recall a genealogy of urban views, usually free of people but full of their traces and deeds.