In Proposing Everything Twice, Eleni Papazoglou gives space and time to what usually remains unseen: the things she has lived with in her studio. The exhibition reads as a personal portrait built out of residue—unfinished prototypes, discarded attempts, objects that felt “not good enough” to become works, gifts from and for friends, and other fragments that simply happened to stick around. The gesture is both practical and emotional: a form of studio clearing and self-validation, and a way to acknowledge how one’s feelings toward objects—and toward the conditions of their making and presentation—shift over time.

The title reads like an instruction or a rule for oneself: if something doesn’t work out the first time, propose it again. The exhibition takes shape in response to practical limitations—of budget, transport, time, and space—understood not as restrictions but as a framework. With score-like clarity, Eleni sets the terms: no new production spend, no shipping, only what already exists in the studio; works that can travel in a suitcase and be installed quickly; a show that doubles as organisation, cleaning, and making room for what comes next. Here, constraints don’t restrict the work; they generate it.

[…]

Excerpt from a written response to the exhibition by Panos Fourtoulakis. Full text can be found here

Bearings is a duo exhibition with works by Oona Wilkinson and Eleni Papazoglou. It takes notice of what is already present in the project space: labour and collectivity, ajar doors and murmurs through walls, temporalities and shifting circumstances, daydreaming and impending eviction dates. It sits with the social and physical conditions of artist-run spaces in London in the face of being squeezed.

The exhibition was accompanied by two poems written by Francis Jones which can be read here.

For ‘Half a second or less’, Papazoglou turns her attention to the world of punctuation, paratext and marginalia. Presented here entirely removed from their intended context and isolated from their inherent function, her chosen symbols serve as a subversive reflection on the order and disorder of communication systems, as well as a commemoration of their mundane beauty. Whilst ubiquitous in the written word—a back and forth between reader and writer; controlling, instructional—punctuation is all but entirely invisible when spoken. Instead, its purpose becomes performative, comprising breaths, interruptions, stutters and subtle facial expressions; the speechless movement of a mouth. The exhibition’s title, therefore, references the recommended length of pause required between sentences when speaking, the verbal equivalent of a comma. Papazoglou proves that whilst meaning is defined, it is also adrift and open to individual interpretation.

Wall vinyl interventions set the stage for an exhibition consisting of errors, lapses and stutters. Featuring Papazoglou’s own invented punctuation point—the merging of a bracket and parenthesis, both symbols intended to make space for additional information, explanation or afterthought—it appears to enclose and encase the gallery space itself, holding space for the artworks within. Each fictitious glyph is enlarged onto a life-sized scale, inserting the corporeal into the paratextual while assigning importance and supposed significance to the assembled forms. Papazoglou repeatedly implies meaning, and yet withholds it. Artworks present as if coded ciphers desiring a solution, or keys available if only for correct elucidation.

Throughout the exhibition, Papazoglou highlights the importance and omnipresence of graphic design. The visual language of information exchange, it is integrated into almost every aspect of public life. A constructed call and response between context and the conveyance of meaning, at once relational, institutional and instructional.

***
To accompany the exhibition, I wrote the text A nothing full, which can be read here

Products & Services is a poetic catalogue of the visual language(s) surrounding commodities. Through a series visual works, texts, and a hoard of found objects, the publication explores how value is held: by dusty packaging, bootleg logos, misspelt slogans, global display systems and localised notions of worth.

By applying frivolity as a method for questioning value systems, the publication churns commercial with art objects, forges ubiquity through the handmade, and swirls in the long string of small social interactions that make nothing into something in a world that seems to sell everything.

Products & Services stems from Eleni Papazoglou’s visual investigations presented alongside the written contributions: Friendly Exchanges by Lucy Cowling, Bag and Bootleg by Elaine M L Tam and The Artist & The Shopping Centre by Lisa Sudhibhasilp, The Commodity & the Exhibition by Joshua Simon. Edited by Daniel Fletcher. Published by Foolscap Editions.

Available here

For the third (*) and final occurrence of the SOLO HOTEL activation cycle this season, Caroline Rose Curdy and Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos invite Xavier Michel and Eleni Papazoglou. The two artists use residual performative or graphic gestures to infiltrate the flow of lives that come and go in the same hotel room. Stedman, Lorrain, Denise, Doris, and Delroy—we imagine them coming and going: checking in, jotting a note in a notebook, calling room service, brushing their teeth, checking out. These ritualized banalities speak as much of commonality as of indifference. What remains are ghosts—an object under the bed, a name in a ledger, the blurred memory of a face.

Hall of mirrors is an exhibition that draws on the residency as a site for self-reflection, distortion, refraction and fragmentation. The title references Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, as an example of the historic use of mirror or lens as a tool for power. Works on display range from pools for gazing or fleeting glances across a crowd, unlikely doppelgangers and carbon copies, parodies of group behaviour or private moments of split-self.

A sign is designed using punctuation symbols that hold or make space~like asterisks and brackets. The sign can be read but not spoken; its meaning both fixed and adrift. Placed on the high street, it marks P.E.T. Projects as container in itself, one that allows unprescribed activity. In doing such, it celebrates the mechanisms that allow for open-endedness next to shops that cover one’s day to day needs.