Fury Tails brings together the work of five artists who explore the unpredictable and transformative nature of contemporary reality through the collective act of reflection. Inspired by the Surrealist technique of Exquisite Corpse*, the artists exchange fragments of ideas of their works that strangely link themself together—tail by tail—into the unfolding narrative, ready to be revealed by an attentive viewer.

 

The project's title itself plays on the phonetic similarity to fairy tales, but the substitution of the words for the similar sounding fury tails disrupts traditional associations with such narratives. The title thus reflects the shifting and fragmented psycho-emotional landscape of our time, in which constructive narrative structures transforme to contingent storytelling (= storyselling according to the contemporary philosopher Byung Chul Han), leaving us adrift in a turbulent stream of unpredictable consequences. If narratives rooted us in being, that is, transforming ‘being-in-the-world’ into ‘being-at-home’, then the noise of storytelling, in turn, creates a narrative vacuum that manifests itself in semantic emptiness and the loss of reference points.

 

The structure of a standard fairy tale involves particular stages: the hero’s journey into other realities, facing trials, meeting mentors, accomplishing tasks, reaching climax, undergoing transformation through lived experiences, and returning home in a different (better) capacity. But what if the usual structure of the fairy tale and its circumstances have significantly mutated? The contemporary hero/ine (mostly depressed one)—burdened with misinformation, stuffed with various miraculous elixirs and inhabiting dysfunctional spaces—faces trials that challenge not only their wits and endurance, but the very fabric of their reality. What future awaits such a hero/ine navigating this tangled landscape? What traps and challenges are hidden in contemporary hallucinating stories, enchanted by algorithms?

 

The project builds upon the artistic explorations of the choreography of the so-called ‘tails’—concealed movements of power—within the realms of the body, architecture, and media. In this regard, the artists refer to the philosophical concept of plasticity by the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou as a key aspect that allows entities to adapt to changing conditions and open up to the future. Malabou contrasts plasticity with flexibility, considering the latter as an ideological product of capitalism. Flexibility is the ability to adapt to everything, reducing an entity to a passive object of external influence, like modeling clay. Plasticity, on the other hand, is an active ability to resist and respond to external forces, while maintaining its integrity. Plasticity includes not only the ability to take form, but also to destroy form, managing to resist complete submission to external influence.

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*Exquisite corpse (from the French Cadavre exquis) is a collective game that arose among the surrealists about a century ago. The game reflected the participants' desire to combine incompatible elements into a single whole. It was seen as a separate technique, not a means of entertainment. One of the prototypes is considered to be Burime (from the French bouts-rimés “rhymed ends/tails”) — a literary game that consists of composing poems to given rhymes and on a given topic. Usually, a few lines are written down first, and then the paper is passed to the next participant to continue, leaving only the last tail visible.

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​Text by Ilina Chervonnaya

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Participating Artists:

 

Katerina Neofytidou,

Ilina Chervonnaya,

Rebecca Efstathiou,

B.C. Epker,

Efklides Papadopoulos

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