The Blind Image (2011), multidisciplinary installation.
The Blind Image consists of reproductions from magazines and educational books that were published between 1967 and 1969 in socialist Czechoslovakia. Before we come to know their provenance, we can tell they derive from a specific past. A clue as to their historical nature derives from their materiality. Cut out images, entire pages, closed books and magazines are on display. They not only function as representations of for instance science, flora and technology or solely represent a period in time, a socialistic condition in which labour was the main force, but they are also themselves objects produced by labour. The images constantly oscillate between these forces, creating a hybrid fluidity that never ceases to move. Their inherent temporality exists as a relation to the condition in which the images were produced, but simultaneously, due to their socialistic aesthetics, they presuppose an imagined future that was always à venir and will never arrive. The Blind Image is a way of re-reading and re-interpreting images without looking for the explicit information sealed within their textual context, but rather by searching for the knowledge that images themselves can produce.
By appropriating existing images and refraining from producing any new material, in The Blind Image Tsivopoulos takes on a personal political stance as he converts the concept of austerity to a means of production.