Mum dressing, NYC, 2002 “In response to an invitation to explore the Benaki Museum’s collection, Phillips has chosen to work with the museum’s Photographic Archive in the context of her project Workshop (2010–ongoing) , in which she will transform the Museum gallery into a place of discussion, exchange, collaborative production and display.
Phillips is an artist who works primarily with the process of screen-printing and regularly employs her own photographs within her work. Images of women at work or at sites of education are recurring subjects, as are photographs of everyday objects that occupy her every day. Research into the Benaki’s collection, and particularly into the comprehensive collection of Nelly’s photographs, prompted her to revisit her own bank of images and especially those that she took in New York shortly after 11 September 2001 into early 2002, where she was then living.
For this iteration of Workshop (2010–ongoing), Phillips will be setting up a temporary darkroom and inviting other artists (Margarita Myrogianni and Antonakis), photographers from the Photography Circle, Museum staff and children to join her in exploring materials from the Benaki Museum’s Photographic Archives. Collaborators will be invited to share aspects of their own personal photographic archives and the public will be free to enter the gallery at all times encountering either the artist working alone or in collaboration with others. Images selected from the Benaki’s Archives and others selected from the personal archives of the participants will be presented in the space in a display that accumulates as the exhibition progresses.
In the spirit of the Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum programme, the exhibition Yours and Mine is Ours reflects on the role of the museum and proposes alternate models of engaging with the Museum’s collection but also with the institution and its visitors. By activating both the historical public archive and the private hidden memories of Phillips’s collaborators, Workshop urges a reflection on the very processes of making art. The exhibition also functions as a platform of communication not only by means of language and conversation but also through working together. Phillips foregrounds skill-sharing and collaborative production as forms of meaningful encounter with others, and her work draws our attention to things, relations and mediums that are often considered ‘secondary’ and that hold a ‘supporting’ role to the ‘main act’: printing, photography, personal images, women’s labour, etc.”
Polina Kosmadaki
Dimitris Harissiadis from Benaki Museum Archive
photographed with Margarita Myrogianni Voula Papaioannou from Benaki Museum Archive
photographed with Margarita Myrogianni Dimitris Harissiadis from Benaki Museum Archive
photographed with Margarita Myrogianni Nelly’s from Benaki Museum Archive
photographed with Margarita Myrogianni Panagiotis Iliopoulos from Benaki Museum Archive
photographed with Margarita Myrogianni Collaborators: Antonakis, Margarita Myrogianni, Members of the Photography Circle, Benaki Museum Staff
Curator: Polina Kosmadaki Coordination for the British Council: Maria Papaioannou Photographic Archives: Aliki Tsirgialou, Leonidas Kourgiantakis Educational Programmers: Maria-Christina Yannoulatou, Maria Zamenopoulou