Etienne Audrey Bruce’s debut photography exhibition with Johnny McMullan based on her book Xenitia
TAF (The Art Foundation)
Normanou 5, Athina 105 55
19-25 June 2023
12.00midday to 21.00
Xenitia is an archive, centered on displacement to Greece. It is framed by two motifs: “nostos” (Classical Greek; to return home, homecoming) and “algos” (Classical Greek; pain, grief). Together, these affect-laden words form the root of “nostalgia”. “Xenitia” itself is a Greek term that encompasses the state of being a foreigner, otherness, estrangement, loss, distance, and a profound yearning for home soil.
The collection produces a complex mosaic of movement and feeling within Greece. In 1923, a treaty was drawn up between the governments of Greece and Turkey which forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes. Today, ongoing economic hardship in Greece has produced a fresh wave of emigration. At the same time, hundreds of people fleeing war and persecution at home arrive on Greek shores every day. Xenitia elicits comparison between the local and the universal, conjuring similarities amongst diverse experiences.
Xenitia: Etienne Audrey Bruce
Published: ZONE6
Sequence / Edit: Johnny McMullan
Text design: Daniel Garcia
Essay: Sophie Sheera
Text part 1: Zakariia Sabbagh, Ahmed Rashid Yoonso, Mohammed Abu Marasa,
Amer Alhaj & selected interviews
Text part 2: traditional polyphonic songs of Epirus & selected interviews
Etienne Bruce (b. 1988, UK) is an Anglo-French artist and photographer currently based in London, UK. Her project-based work constitutes a form of documentation that is driven by an engagement with the nature of the photographic image, and which often includes an element of recording oral histories.
Etienne’s fascination with the relationship between form and content has led her to embrace different modes of expression including text, movement, sound, space, sequence and literary forms as portals through which to re-examine documentary image-making practice and to embrace its inherent ambiguity. Through her work, Etienne seeks to challenge her own perceptions and reinterpret things as she understands them while always striving to engage respectfully and collaboratively with the people and stories that are central to her practice.
