OPPRESSED SENSES STAGNANT BLOOD Petra Hudcova and Panayiotis Delilabros 16 April 2007 – 5 May 2007 Private View: Wednesday 18 April – B Store, Savile Row 7 pm Showcasing work to be exhibited at MADAME LILLIES from 9 May 2007

Petra Hudcova’s and Panayiotis Delilabros’s video installations in the B Store sprung out of the work that both artists created during the times of ‘lapsing’. They introduce pieces that represent numbed and obsessive activities that have been mobilized by fake and deluded beliefs. It is a work that is conceived in the moments of ‘in between’ when a focus is lost and work is created as an empty impulse that floats aimlessly and exists for the sake of existing. Work made in an effort to convince the artist of his/her own artistic identity. They display the outcomes of vacuous and hollow acts that are the only remains and the only building material. Deformed by jaded hope for a more meaningful tomorrow they continue despite the fact that genuine search has turned into vanity. They generate an analogy of the times that we inhabit and perform our everyday monotonous tasks in waiting for futures to enter and envelope us in sparkling enchantment. They reflect on society obsessed by encasing desires into dazzling voids and the present climate advocating prayers in forms of shopping mall tunes paralyzing all subversion or movement. Caught in a spider web of fabricated dreams Panayiotis Delilabros and Petra Hudcova suggest that we are currently stuck in aestheticized lifelessness. They present us with awkward products that have been made in an attempt to escape regions of stillness that might dangerously no longer be just a part of a working process but a working process in itself.

Panayiotis Delilabros chooses the world of music as his metaphor for expressing the manufactured desires of the art world. He occasionally turns into a pop star. In his bedroom he is a self-satisfied and striving individual as his tunes enter his ears delightfully. With the technology available and self-promotion tools he creates his own world of fame and glamour. His work is a satire mixing various styles referencing and always subverting by adding yet another element that turns everything upside down making things seem ridiculous, contemptible but touching at the same time. His world is full of unfulfilled dreams that became hallucinations generating similar feelings in a viewer.

Petra Hudcova focuses on areas where shouting desperate mantras of any kind becomes the only activity possible. She uses cliché superstitions and transforms them by changing their context and form. She is interested in contemporary prayers, the idea of romance as religion, fake beliefs and self-deception. In her animations drawings of men forever repeat the same sentences as she remembered them. Passion is said to make one think in a circling obsessive manner. She plays with the aesthetics of longing and its reflection in the idea of moving and journeys that she believes might serve as an alternative to stillness and an impetus for change.