Book Review: Transfiguration by Antigone Kourakou
Transfiguration by Antigone Kourakou Book Cover
© Antigone Kourakou and Skeleton Key Press 2022
Written by Nikkala Kovacevic
Photo Edited by Christiana Nelson
Antigone Kourakou’s Transfiguration (Skeleton Key Press, 2022) is a celebration of the homecoming of humanity back to its natural roots. In her reality, the gap between humans and nature has been bridged, her works a seamless exploration of the two’s symbiosis. One could easily point out the apparent surrealism of each composition, bodies twisted and mangled, posed in their respective environments as if they themselves have been carved out of the stone or dirt surrounding them.
Athens, November 2019 – II.
© Antigone Kourakou and Skeleton Key Press 2022
Based almost entirely in Greece, Kourakou seems to take heavy thematic influence for her art from ancient Greek sculpture, bodies infused with emotion, curved in perpetual expression. This is where many would bring surrealism into the conversation, as the subjects are so overwhelmed with fierce emotion that they feel unnatural in an otherwise muted world. Focusing on the emotive nature of primal feelings and movements, the exaggerated positions of Kourakou’s subjects let them blend in with their natural surroundings just as much as they distort and concurrently make them feel distinct from everyday life.
Erik Vroons, whose essay “Reflections from the Deep Waves of the Midnight Sea” is featured in Transfiguration, describes Kourakou’s pieces as “fuelled with ecstasy, and the energy that reflects from it is seemingly determined by (and permeated with) the essence of creation — and being preserved in it.” Vroons himself is prominent within the realm of photography, providing critique and other insight on the industry. And as an artist, Kourakou draws on primal human emotion and physicality to center her subjects back into the schema of nature, the “creation” aspect appearing both in the sense of Kourakou’s creation of these scenes and this world, as well as the return to nature and our creation.
Tsepelovo (Zagori region), December 2012
© Antigone Kourakou and Skeleton Key Press 2022
Athens, August 2020
© Antigone Kourakou and Skeleton Key Press 2022
Transfiguration confronts readers with a fictionalized reality, but one that simultaneously reflects innately real human experiences. Kourakou explores a tie between nature and humanity that no longer exists, but that we can hope or believe once did. Devoid of any markers of contemporary society, these photos can exist entirely independent from time. The series is simply an exploration of relationships, specifically our confrontation as viewers with our relationship to nature. “Everything that is encountered in my photographs comes from a dialectic processing of the dynamics between nature and human presence…” Kourakou states. The world of transfiguration explores a reality in which this “human presence” is not a destructive force on nature, but an unavoidable tie between living beings.
Athens, July 2020 – I.
© Antigone Kourakou and Skeleton Key Press 2022
Kourakou’s black-and-white compositions are stark and poignant, with their contrasting shades acting as a microscope on the subjects themselves, begging the viewer to stare more closely at the compositions for just a little while longer on the chance that deeper meaning may emerge during those extra moments of observation.
The book’s full journey intentionally poses many questions that are to be left unanswered. In the end, Transfiguration is not so much a statement in one direction or another, but an exploration, of self and of our surroundings, that each reader is privileged enough to embark on.
