In this new work, which premiered at the 2012 Biennial, Kirschner and Panos return to their longstanding engagement with the tension between theory and practice, artistic form and historical facticity and the relation between economics and culture. Drawing on references from archaeology, philosophy, mathematics and ritual the work departs from the hypothesis that the introduction of coinage in the ancient Greek world effected a profound cognitive shift that was key to the emergence of western philosophic, scientific and dramatic traditions.
2012 Biennial Year Find out more
Ultimate Substance was filmed in and around the Numismatic Museum, Athens and Lavreotiki, a nearby mining district, which provided the silver that constituted the material base on which the edifice of the classical Athenian city-state was founded.
In contradistinction to the popular image of the acropolis, the vast mining galleries propose an inverse image of antiquity. Abandoned in Roman times, the mines were re-discovered in the 19th Century making Lavrio the first factory town of the modern Greek state. In the 1970s the local mining industry was again dismantled. Today the factory ruins house an educational museum on mining history.
Exploring how these different temporal strands have become compounded in time, Kirschner and Panos’ new work aims to consider the impact of this subterranean history on our present understanding of the fundamental division between sensual and abstract forms of knowledge and experience.
Anja Kirschner and David Panos live and work in London and are currently based in Greece. They were the winners of the Jarman Award 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, 2012), The Projecting Stage (castillo/corrales, Paris, France, 2011) and The Empty Plan (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany and Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 2011).
Ultimate Substance, 2012
Video installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2012, FACT,
Secession and Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen
Exhibited at FACT