A conversation with Christos Venetis in FUKT Magazine #15
The World is a book

Can you tell me about the choice of using the inside cover of ripped books?

“I usually use surfaces of objects that a had past life or a different use. The “symbolism” of the book is more or less familiar, while the torn pages convey a sense of loss, a wound. This series of drawings could be titled Liber Mundi / Imago Mundi. The term “Liber mundi” (the world as a book) suggests the idea of wholeness or, at least, the desire, the craving for wholeness. It is a medieval idea that continued with the Enlightenment Encyclopedia and the full use of written speech. However, it is a known fact that our time is defined by the domination of the image. It is a whole comprised of fragments of two different communication systems.”

How important is the narration in your work?

“Reality itself is a product of narration. The dominant discourse conceals its ficitonal nature and artists acting in this field, either deconstruct this “construct” or reality or narrate alternative stories. However, it is the viewer who completes the narration. So the stories exist within other stories. I believe there is no such thing as an original experience, which is why I use found images to create my own narration.”…

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Portrait
Helena Parada Kim

Helena Parada Kim was born in Cologne in 1982 to a Spanish father and a Korean mother.
A master student of Peter Doig, she has been exploring her multi-ethnic background in her figurative paintings since her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The Korean traditional costume, the so-called Hanbok, plays a special role in her painting as a recurring, varied motif. Brought to Germany by Korean guest workers as an identity-forming piece of clothing, Parada Kim also questions her own cultural origins in the repeated depiction of this costume.

In her painting, Parada Kim entered into a dialogue with the European tradition of painting early on, both in the “classic” genres of still life, portraits and, in recent years, increasingly in large-format plant paintings. The fact that she also draws on East Asian pictorial traditions opens up multi-faceted narratives and new pictorial aesthetics, which the painter constantly explores anew.