By Marina Fokides

The image of a young woman, seen from behind, leaning against a glass window that seems to be protecting some rare tropical garden brings to mind a number of hypothetical scenarios. On the other side of the glass there is a small crowd of people among which an elderly couple, stares with wonder at the curious exhibits. These separate worlds on either side of the window appear to be wholly disconnected from each other, though events taking place therein seem to be occurring simultaneously. Although transparent, the glass that stands between the two worlds gives the impression of a distinct yet impenetrable psychographic boundary between different realities. But then again, maybe not! It all depends on yet another factor, which comes to complete this play of multiple viewpoints that Venia Bechrakis orchestrates in her work The Garden (2004): it’s the gaze of each one of us upon this particular image. 

The subject or the object of viewing? Voyeur, or observer? Artist, or the audience of art? – the role of the artist is determined by the viewer and it is through these parallel readings of the image that the nature of her work may be determined. Bechrakis uses photography to construct imaginary, at times surrealist, environments that make reference to everyday life. Images that at first sight appear to be documenting a mundane reality, centering on the figure of a woman – the artist herself – challenge conventional restrictions, social taboo and what we tend to take for granted. Following in the footsteps of women performance artists of the 80s, who consistently probed the boundaries between various manifestations of mass culture in art and lived experience, Bechrakis investigates throughout her work gender and identity issues, the relationship between the public and the private, the space of the fictitious (in its cinematic version) as a space of real experience and a revision of the simulacra of advertising, which renders the viewer indispensable to the fulfillment of plot.

Merging various techniques borrowed from the cinema, advertising photography and the visual art tradition, Bechrakis creates a series of odd landscapes, a universe of oxymora and paradoxes that captivate the viewer. In these unorthodox situations that Bechrakis stages, she is at once the author of the image and the object of viewing. Whether waiting for the frog to turn into a prince on a metro platform, or enjoying a cocktail while she lounges, swimsuit on, in the middle of snowy Manhattan in front of the billboard add of some exotic drink, or hanging her laundry to dry along some urban avenue. The essence of her work lies as much in the final result – a frozen moment in time that is at once part of tangible reality and the realm of the imaginary, as determined both by the artist and the viewer – as in the creative process, which is a special private ritual in itself. Either through digital manipulation of her images, or through real action where she publicly performs the most private of routines (often in exaggerated form), the artist casts herself as protagonist in imaginary scripts staged basically as a means of personal feedback. The ultimate goal of this practice is not only to show the attractive aspect of everyday reality as it appears in the fictional worlds of advertising and cinema, but also to comment on the manipulative power of the image in contemporary culture. Although her works often have a sort of tongue-in-cheek, kitsch quality, they are not exclusively meant to entertain; they rather seem to focus with a sense of urgency on the mundane, the restrictions of daily experience and the stereotypical model of women’s life.  

 Shifting between the art of performance, photography in its emancipated form, the composition of classical painting and a cinematic representation of reality, Bechrakis’ creates works that go beyond the narrow limitations of traditional photography and reinvent the photographic image as a field of psychoanalytic investigation. Her way of treating photography explores the fine line between truth and the lie. By undermining the evident, she allows the viewer to become aware of the deception and to decide for themselves whether they want to be deceived or not.