Alliance Française, Islamabad, Pakistan, September 2004
Martina is a Greek Artist who studied art and art history in the UK. Although at heart she is a painter, her convictions have lead her to use more immediate forms to express her ideas. Together with painting, photographic means have been a dominating aspect of her work. In her own words: “It is more important for me to convey an important message rather than be only praised for the stylistic quality of my work.” For this reason she has combined photography and painting to make her so called “photo-paintings”.
Although Martina has spent a lot of time traveling abroad, her greatest influence is Byzantine and folkloric Greek culture. This together with her time here in Pakistan has been essential in forming the collection exhibited here in the Alliance Francaise, her most recent work. Martina traveled to the boarder areas of Baluchistan province close to Chaman. There she visited the Afghan refugee camps and discovered a whole new world of experience. She found that the basic contradictions of life seemed to be simply written in the faces of the children looking uncompromisingly back at her. The human and inhuman, the proud and humiliated, the brother and foe. She saw in these earnest young faces a life time of human experience and spirit, which she yearned to reproduce. This exhibition is therefore dedicated to all those little gods and goddesses of Lande Karez and Roghani refugee camps in Chaman.
