Dia Manesi: Forced Heirship

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Welcome to the online edition of Dia Manesi’s solo exhibition “Legitimate Fate”.

In her latest exhibition, the visual artist presents three distinct series of her works, painted on plexiglass.

The exhibition explores what is not enshrined in law: memories, traces, and lived experiences that persist as the unwritten, unofficial legacy of the self.

The dancer and choreographer Aggeliki  Moutsopoulou participates, complementing the works through movement.

The exhibition is supported organizationally by ARTgrID,
and curated by Paris Kapralos.

CURATORIAL NOTE

Forced heirship: the minimum portion of the estate of the deceased that the law mandatorily reserves for certain close relatives (called necessary heirs), even if there are contrary provisions in the will. Forced heirship does not constitute an independent right to inheritance, but protects the necessary heir from potential total deprivation due to a will or gratuitous gifts made by the testator.

Dia Manesi’s work develops a painterly thought that organises the gaze under conditions of displacement, temporality, and involvement. The choice of materials, the mode of construction, and the composition activate the viewer’s participation in a multilayered environment. The forms act as centres of experience, incorporating observation into a field of aesthetic and reflective dialogue.

The series of works presented in Dia Manesi’s exhibition under the general title “Forced Heirship” constitute a painted world in which the image extends into space, and the experience of seeing gains duration and movement. The use of plexiglass enhances this dynamic through successive painted surfaces that function interdependently. The narrative unfolds through the layers, as each transparency contributes to the overall composition. The viewer moves through the dimensions of the image and observes the painterly script being activated by light and spatial positioning.

The artist develops a thematic focus closely tied to the concept of personal and collective inheritance. The forms that emerge from the compositions allude to bodily imprints, everyday ghosts, traces of an experience without fixed boundaries. The image becomes a field of continuous negotiation with time. Space operates as a storytelling tool, activating the viewer’s thought around memory, trauma, the desire for continuity or transformation.

Each composition shapes a visual and conceptual field marked by strong rhythm and detail. The concepts of fate, origin, the need for resistance, and the boundary between survival and freedom are expressed in a way that emphasises material and representational relationships. Imagery functions both as a field of inscribed experiences and as a field of thought.

Manesi’s compositions connect historical references with a persistence in personal testimony. Painting is transformed into a field that negotiates tensions and legacies. The image is inscribed into space, acquires rhythm, and shifts the traditional relationships between vision and interpretation. The composition becomes a vessel of memory, and the experience of the work is activated through the multiplicity of its visual and narrative elements. Painting emerges as a tool for reading identity, loss, and the need for interpretation.

Through its sequential and reflective construction, the image gains duration and is incorporated into the historical continuum of contemporary art with consistency and expressive fullness. Manesi’s painting practice aligns with contemporary explorations that extend the image into space. The compositions follow an installation logic, forming structures that exceed the surface of the canvas, bringing the viewer into direct contact with the materiality of the work.

The technical choice of plexiglass allows painting to incorporate light, projection, and refraction, proposing a different way of perceiving the image. The narrative arises through temporal sequences, internal planes, and intersections of the gaze. Furthermore, it gives the works a distinctive materiality based on transparency, reflection, and continuity. The successive surfaces are precisely organised, creating an internal rhythm. The viewer’s gaze gains direction, pauses, and shifts as it moves through the painted layers.

This visual approach aligns with the directions of expanded painting, which have developed since the late 20th century and continue to evolve as painting practices with an installation character. The image acquires depth through multiple surfaces and enters the field of time, experience, and mediation. Painting does not remain confined to the plane but creates a spatial mechanism in which memory is imprinted through layering, detail, and material weight.

These elements lead the work into the spatial, hybrid fields of post-painting contemporary practice. It can be situated within the framework of mixed media painting (where the painted canvas becomes object/hybrid), as well as the trend from the 2000s onward for breaking up the flat image into painting that extends into three dimensions, into painting-as-object. The act of placing each work in a plastic plexiglass box transforms painting into a “small-scale installation”; the slightest shift or change in viewing angle renews the experience.

Thus, the work may be associated with currents such as post-painting (painting that examines and transcends the traditional canvas), installation-oriented painting, and space/time-based painting for inscription. The work is not merely an image but a space of thought, society, and time. The visual outcome surpasses the static nature of the image and offers an experience open to interpretation and reflection. The work proposes a mode of being that connects memory with materiality and painting with spatial contemplation. The encounter with light, time, and form creates a dynamic image system, within which new perceptual possibilities are activated.

Paris Kapralos
Art Curator

ARTWORKS

ARTIST’s STATEMENT

The exhibition “Forced Heirship” explores the concept of inheritance not only material, but primarily immaterial: the roles, fears, memories, and instincts passed down from generation to generation, shaping human existence. The figures, often nude and stripped of roles, move between memory and forgetting, habit and rebellion, continuity and rupture.

The family serves as a central point of reference. In the “family photographs”, people stand within a ritual that feels familiar yet simultaneously distant; the presence or absence of children defines the tension between mandatory continuity and its interruption. The anonymous bride, the silent children, and the nude figures illuminate the construction of social roles and the burden they carry.

Figures such as the grandmother knitting, the mother with the hidden rod, or the person surrounded by snakes highlight the invisible power of tradition. The knitting, the back, the snakes act as threads of memory and fear, as symbols of inheritance that at times connect and at others restrict. Fate here is not dogmatic; it is a system that reproduces itself silently and demands confrontation.

At the same time, nature appears fragmented, geometric or hybrid: a landscape analyzed into shapes, a sea coexisting with a tiger, a vortex that begins and erases the human form. The human need for delimitation meets the ceaseless fluidity of the natural world, while suggesting that fate is neither fixed nor given: it is an ongoing negotiation.

The subject of material inheritance is approached through the ruined house, the piles of gold, and the figure that insists on touching the precious metal, as if searching for meaning in something that has already abandoned her. The work engages in dialogue with the human desire for possession, but also with the fragile balance between security and loss.

Violence and obedience appear stripped of their heroism. Symmetrical military figures, toy soldiers blowing soap bubbles, and threatening silences reveal how war is inherited mechanically—as habit, not as choice. The exhibition reminds us that “forced” heirship is often imposed through forms that no one has questioned.

In contrast, works related to memory and forgetting point to the possibility of transformation. The flowers covering the face, the figure eating blossoms, the cacti surviving without water, and the butterflies continuing their cycle compose a reflection on the endurance of memory and the ways it persists, even when it changes form.

Yet the body always returns to the centre. The nude bodies dancing atop the ruins are an act of survival, a primal reminder that life insists even after collapse. The lion and the lamb embody the animal instincts that either erupt or mock human seriousness. The childlike figure departing with a lifeless toy becomes a symbol of the distance opening between what once was and what remains to become.

The exhibition concludes with the sea: an infinite, living surface that does not impose form; on the contrary, it dissolves it. It is a place of distance, but also of a clear beginning. In the end, “Forced Heirship” is not presented as a condemnation. It is revealed as a network of relationships familial, social, primal that one may recognize, carry, question, and perhaps one day transform.

Dia Manesi

PERFORMANCE AT THE EXHIBITION’s OPENING

During the opening, the audience had the opportunity to experience a unique moment through a performance that unfolded unexpectedly in the space, without prior announcement, using the tactic of a “sudden crowd”. The action was conceived and performed by dancer and choreographer Aggeliki Moutsopoulou, who, with her sensitive movement-based approach, framed the works of the exhibition. The performance also featured Eirini Kourouvani and Evangelia Karanatsi, creating a poetic and physical journey among the works that activated the senses and enhanced the experiential reception of the visual proposal.

IDENTITIES | PERFORMANCE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE EXHIBITION [Thursday 4 December 2025]

On Thursday 4 December at 17:00, Chili Art Gallery hosted the visual performance by Aggeliki Moutsopoulou entitled “Identities”, featuring Eirini Kourouvani, Chrysostomos Chamalidis and Evangelia Karanatsi, as part of Dia Manesi’s solo exhibition “Forced Heirship”.
 
The performance “Identities” approaches the theme of human identity as a continuous and complex process of formation. Starting from the early experiences of childhood and adolescence, from the family, the parents and the familiar environment, and progressing through the social, cultural and personal imprints that shape us over the course of life, the performance highlights the layering of identity. It does not concern a single, unified identity but a sequence of identities that succeed one another in constant interaction with time, lived experience and social condition.
 
The action engages in dialogue with the concepts and visual proposals of the exhibition “Forced Heirship”, functioning as the conceptual and experiential completion of the work. In the exhibition, the notion of inheritance unfolds not only as material trace but primarily as immaterial burden, including roles, fears, silences, memories and primal instincts that are inherited and reproduced through the sphere of the familiar, and especially the family.
 
Within this conceptual framework, the performance “Identities” functions not only as an echo but also as a physical expression of the need for deconstruction and reconstruction. Through the live presence of bodies, movements and silence, the potential for transformation is projected, from memory to forgetting, from role to liberation, from necessity to choice.
 
[photos and video of the performance will be available soon]

About the Artist

Dia Manesi is a visual artist living and working in Athens. Since 2012, she has participated in more than 25 group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, in cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki, Venice, Vienna and Limassol. She has studied Chemistry and Classical Ballet, two seemingly opposite fields that feed her work with a balance between technical precision and a physical, experiential relationship with space. She primarily creates three-dimensional painted works on plexiglass, making use of transparency, light and shadow to activate the viewer’s gaze. Her forms are often symbolic, visual representations of inner states and sensations. Her works are part of private collections and are mainly available through exhibitions or by commission.  Further information can be found on her website HERE.

About the Performer

Aggeliki Moutsopoulou studied Sociology at Panteion University and Dance at the Laban Centre. She also studied Dance Therapy at Herefordshire University and Yoga at the Sivananda Centre. She has specialised in contemporary dance, improvisation and physical expression. She teaches dance and yoga to various groups. She has performed in five productions in London as a dancer and choreographer. In Greece, she has performed in eleven productions as a dancer and choreographer and has directed eight productions with teenage theatre groups.

About the Curator

Paris Kapralos is an Art Curator, Founder & Coordinator of ARC – Art Revisited Collective, and co-publisher of Arts & Antiques CCR. He was born in 1975 and raised in Athens, where he lives and works. He studied Economics (Athens) and Graphic Arts (Staffordshire, England). He worked as a journalist specialising in technology topics for financial newspapers, magazines and online news agencies (1999–2006), as an event executive in business conferences in the Information and Telecommunications sector (2004–2011), and changed professional direction by moving into the field of Art in 2011. He has curated and organised more than 200 exhibitions, visual arts actions, projects and participations in Greece and abroad. Full details are available on his website HERE.

About the venue

Chili Art Gallery was founded in 2010 and is located in Thiseio, next to the “Melina” Cultural Centre of the City of Athens, just a breath away from the city’s most vibrant area, Gazi. It is a cultural venue where art lovers and the public in general can engage with all forms of Contemporary Art. Painting, sculpture, collage/compositions, installations/constructions, printmaking and photography are presented on a monthly basis through solo and group exhibitions and events. Further information is available on its website HERE.

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