Clap hands presents every plenary session of the Hellenic Parliament beginning on April 23, 2010, with the announcement of the country’s resorting to the European Stability Mechanism, until the official end of the programme on August 20, 2018. Mavroudis has processed the archival material in chronological order, editing out everything but the hand-clapping. The artist’s choice of keeping just the applause—rhythmic gestures that seem anything but spontaneous here—produces an awkward feeling. Politics appears like a show in progress. In this way, the artist demonstrates the destabilizing power of irony and the comic element in our current post-truth age. The video is screened on a Fujitsu-Siemens 32” television set, a product which was launched into the Greek market in 2008, the year when investigations about the Siemens scandal began. Many Greeks watched the Greek economic crisis unfold on this specific, best-selling TV model.

Text from the online catalogue of the exhibition “Still here tomorrow” organized by Artworks
Within the context of Summer Nostos Festival at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, Greece