Faculty News
Marina Kassianidou, Assistant Professor, Painting & Drawing
Mother Tongue, a virtual group exhibition that forms part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial: Here, Together!
October 16 – December 18, 2020
Curated by Mary Annunziata, Allison Cannella, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Katya Grokhovsky
Kassianidou is participating in the biennial with the work A Partial History, an ongoing project she began in 2016 and which involves recreating books from the collection of the artist’s late grandmother, Koralia. Most of these volumes are 19th and early 20th-century Greek school books that belonged to the artist’s grandmother, grandfather, great-uncle, and great-grandfather. Kassianidou “re-reads” each book as a material object rather than a text, focusing on marks of use and time: folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and wormholes. For each book, the artist meticulously traces around these marks by hand, one page at a time, and then scans, prints, and binds the drawings into a new book containing only the excavated marks.