Can a white, unrippable, resistant material become the starting point for an exhibition that focuses on lived experience, identity, and oppositional forms of expression from the 1970s to the present day?

The artistic director of ATOPOS cvc, Vassilis Zidianakis announces The Tyvek Project, an exhibition that is part of its Research Programme, RRRIPP!! a series of projects that take as their subject holdings from the collection.

The Tyvek Project was devised in collaboration with Mata Dimakopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), and Electra Stampoulou & Vassilis Vlastaras (Athens School of Fine Arts) and started with two items from the ATOPOS collection: a Tyvek jacket like the one that the American poet James Merrill ‘wore’ in “Self Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker,” an autobiographical poem informed by the poet’s anxiety for his own ailing body, and his discontent vis-à-vis environmental degradation and globalised capitalism; and a white Tyvek suit, hand-stamped by artists of the New York experimental and avant-garde scene of the late 1970s.

Participating artists engage with the mass-produced hyper-resistant material and reflect on urban decay, crisis and austerity, intimacy and queer experiences.

This body of work was produced in the context of workshops that conjoined research, theory, and art practice and took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in the fall of 2021 and 2022.