Maria Mavropoulou

The Desire for Consciousness

These images have no titles and no captions to guide you about what to see or how to perceive their content. There is no text to recreate the missing context.

In these images it’s impossible to determine the time, the place or the circumstances under which the photo was taken as the black background deprives us from any other information that would help us locate its subject in the real world.

In this way, relocated in a virtual space, the depicted object somehow loses its “realness” and tends to represent the meaning of it, it becomes an idea and it is transformed into a symbol.

Although the operation and the meaning of a symbol are predetermined in this series I create new symbols and invite the viewer to give them meaning by reading them literally or metaphorically. In my mind these images work in coherence, like a deck of cards that tells a different story every time it’s shuffled, raising questions about how differently each one of us interprets the same stimulus and therefore how diverse interpretations can occur when meanings are not fixed but depending on the ever changing context and every individual viewer.