Publication Title: Entre imagen y texto
Editor: Renato González Mello
Publisher: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas
Language: English
Date: 2023
Location: Mexico City
Conference proceedings from XLI Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, Puebla, 2017
This text was presented at the XLI International Colloquium on Art History, held under the theme Between Image and Text. The relationship between images and texts has long been one of the central questions in art history, as it touches directly on the plurality of meaning and the ways works of art communicate significance. For this reason, it has engaged artists, theorists, and critics of both art and literature since classical antiquity.
In my presentation, and in the paper later published in the conference proceedings, I examined how the Greek artist Bia Davou, working in the politically charged atmosphere of post-dictatorship Greece in the 1970s, developed an experimental visual language that brought together conceptual art, feminism, mathematics, cybernetics, and philosophy. Her coded systems of lines, grids, and text explored binary oppositions such as self and other, emptiness and fullness, and life and death, while also inviting the viewer into an open-ended process of interpretation.
Through works such as Flowcharts and Circuits, Serial Structures I, and Serial Structures 2–Odyssey, I argued that Davou connected computer logic and mathematical progression with poetic, historical, and mythological references, particularly through her encoding of Homer’s Odyssey. Ultimately, the paper proposed that although her practice emerged from rational systems and analytical structures, it gradually moved toward ritual, repetition, and transcendence, enabling her to confront questions of mortality, longing, and existential time.
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