Pow, Blop, Wizz

Of course, the reference is  "Comic Strip", the legendary song and video clip by Serge Gainsbourg featuring Brigitte Bardot as a super-heroine. Antonitsis explains: "The challenges of the everyday demand from us unconventional action but with conventional attributes — like courage and morality. The line between super- and anti- hero has become a blur. We don't always act for the right reasons. Our actions are not always noble." 

Their common denominator is that they have more issues than answers; perhaps more thoughts than emotions.

Duration: 19/06/21 - 19/09/21

Location: Merchant Marine Academy, Hydra, Greece

Curator: Dimitrios Antonitsis

Artists: Mark Bradford (USA) // Mike Kelley (USA) // Richard Woods (England), Erwin Wurm (Austria) // Danny Pallilo (Finland) // Thomas Diotis (Greece) // Versaweiss (Greece) // Dimitris Papaionannou (Greece) // Euripides Laskaridis (Greece)

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Stavros Kavalaris wrote about the works:

Barbarella, the fictional heroine of Jean Claude Forest’s French science~ fiction comic book, has been reworked as an iconic sex kitten in Roger Vadim’s titular space camp biopic (1968), saturated in the 1960s culture of free love and pop art.

As a shagadellic space age heroine, Barbarella (a.k.a. Jane Fonda) is a galaxy~hopping adventuress ready to make love and war with equal fervor, in an odyssey which mixes Flash Gordon and Marquis de Sade with psychedelic fantasy and campy innocence, as well as a wide~eyed naiveté.

It is the same wide~eyed naiveté which Versaweiss approach Vadim’s softcore porn exploitation with as the inspiration for these new works of theirs. The real point of Versaweiss watching Barbarella nowadays is to, perhaps, catch a whiff of what it kind of really was like back in the ‘60s, the delightful over~the~top characteristics as ideal expression in excess of that era , so applicable on ours too. Should “naughty” be the name of the movie’s game,”naughtier” becomes symbolic for Versaweiss’ renditions. Like Barbarella, they revel in the implied, the inferred and the not~quite overt, pushing the suggestive overtones as far as they will go without actually blurting anything out. They accentuate and, simultaneously, conceal the psychedelic features to a post~pop landscape which spring fully formed from the most Freudian hallucinations ever conceived.