2013
Video
Colour, sound
4 minutes, 50 seconds

“Orestis Mavroudis’s short video Attempt to Fly (2013) opens with a young man building a small electric-powered propeller in a home workshop. We next see him standing on a low hill equipped with gloves, goggles, and the motor as a backpack. The moment of truth arrives: the device works, in a way. The wooden propeller spins at roughly the speed of a microwave’s turntable. Undeterred, the man starts jogging toward the horizon, ready for takeoff. As part of “The Equilibrists,” an exhibition surveying Greek and Cypriot artists in their twenties and thirties, Attempt to Fly might be an overdetermined metaphor, but it’s also a sincere and poignant one.
Organized by New York’s New Museum and Athens’s DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, the show features some thirty artists who started their careers during a period of crisis. Caught between the threat of Grexit and the reality of Brexit, they and their peers have borne the brunt of punitive austerity and the highest unemployment rate in Europe. Yet images of outrage, protest, and violence—among the most visible responses to these conditions—are largely absent from the exhibition, which instead offers evidence of a strange optimism, sustained effort focused on perfecting craft, and the pursuit of idiosyncratic pleasures.”

William S. Smith
Art in America, 26.09.2016
Review about the exhibition: “The Equilibrists” curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Helga Christoffersen with Massimiliano Gioni – DESTE Foundation and the New Museum – Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece