The Diving Horse and Other Mythologies by Konstantinos Papanikolaou

Konstantinos Papanikolaou has fished five images out of the disparate libraries that populate his personal computer. Five documents plucked from the dance realities of times past: forgotten dances and lost practices. Brave girls gallop into the void, couples dance themselves to exhaustion under the greedy gaze of an insatiable audience, ethereal ballerinas sacrifice themselves at art’s altar. Taking these five photographs as his starting point, Konstantinos contemplates dance practices that time set on a trajectory of decline, pondering both their origins and any traces of them left in the present.

He leaves the interpretation of documents to the historians. He does not study them, but rather muses over them. He does not reconstruct history, but rather tries to come to terms with the present. He builds small and fleeting bridges from his premise towards each source.