Ausstellung Vasso Tzouti - Straight Legs + Black Socks

Ausstellung der Athener Malerin Vasso Tzouti in der Galerie LADØNS

Eröffnung am Donnerstag, 21.08. um 19 Uhr

geöffnet Mittwoch - Freitag 17-20 Uhr & Samstag-Sonntag 14-18 Uhr

Performance Sara Ezzell am 22.08. um 19 Uhr und am 23.08. um 17 Uhr

In Straight Legs and Black Socks, Vasso Tzouti returns to the affective landscape of origin — not to locate a pure, untainted past, but to unearth the unresolved, the sedimented, the embodied traces of collective grief. Taking as its starting point the Epirus song Halassia mou, sung in the artist’s ancestral village during the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, the exhibition inhabits the overlapping space between mourning and memory, choreography and kinship, vulnerability and resistance.
Here, the body is again central — not as the site of idealised performance, but as the holder of ritual, pain, and ancestral codes. The slow dance — performed till dawn by dozens of villagers in interlinked grip — becomes a political gesture: a refusal of individualism, a ritualised return to the commons. Tzouti traces this somatic memory, the choreography of mourning, through figures that are at once spectral and grounded, tender and fierce. Through painting, video, and installation, Tzouti’s work interrogates how bodies remember — not only cognitively, but through gesture, repetition, and transmission. The figures are marked by fragility: legs that remember how to stand despite grief; feet that carry loss as inherited weight; faces that are erased or obscured, insisting on opacity.
The lament (mirologi) functions as both form and method: a collective expression of grief that holds space for what cannot be articulated. It is gendered, oral, intergenerational — a site where feminine-coded knowledge and affect are transmitted outside hegemonic historical archives. In Straight Legs and Black Socks, this mourning becomes insurgent, embodied, and alive. Tzouti mobilises the lament not as nostalgia, but as defiant persistence — a way of refusing erasure by making visible the continuum between past and present pain. Tzouti’s work continues to challenge normative framings of the body. Here, vulnerability becomes a radical force. These bodies do not perform for the gaze — they mourn, persist, and belong.