Opening Reception: Wasteland

Undercurrent and Greece in USA present Wasteland, a performance-based interactive installation by visual artist Michalis Argyrou and performance artist Rafika Chawishe.

Wasteland echoes themes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on the 100th anniversary of one of the most iconic poems of the 20th century. The poem examines the decline of outdated certainties that held society together and what occurs when they break. There is no turning back, only transformation of those broken cultural fragments into something new.

The audience is invited to explore the latent meanings of Eliot’s writings by experiencing the transitions and transformative life of a human figure encapsulated in a 3.5-ton ice installation created by Michalis Argyrou. The viewers are invited to participate by lighting a candle and placing it inside the holes of the sculpture. Then, as it melts, the ice figure is transformed, and the artistic vision of a collective reawakening is revealed.