Hands Up!

Installation, engraved tablets, video in loop, variable dimensions, 2025

In collaboration with Vasilis Galanis

Hands Up is a multimedia installation consisting of two engraved tablets and a looped video on a cellphone. Figures of power, both ancient and contemporary, are etched on tablets accompanied by a video displaying quotes by Mark Fisher’s essay Terminator vs Avatar, (2012).

Bringing together broken electronic devices, Zeus' severed hands and digital gods waving axes, the installation investigates notions of historicity, technology and obsolescence.

Hands up, those who desire a return to the glorious past, hands up those who wish to accelerate towards a virtual future, as long as both possibilities can be imagined beyond functioning as “fully incorporated components of the [late] capitalist libidinal infrastructure”.

"The work of Fiona Elli Spathopoulou (Athens, 1989) interrogates the labyrinthine relationship between technological media and madness, exploring how technological and cultural frameworks influence our ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. Her practice engages with the psychological fractures that emerge in a world dominated by hyper-connectivity and mediated representations. Together, Galanis and Spathopoulou construct multi-layered visual dialogues. Their work challenges conventional notions of time, space, and cultural continuity, reflecting our era's instability while proposing new ways of inhabiting its fragments. Their practice recontextualises familiar narratives by incorporating references to classical antiquity and contemporary digital culture. Figures from antiquity interact with avatars of modern media, unravelling the tensions between tradition and the algorithms of an ultra-accelerated world."
Panos Giannikopoulos, excerpt from exhibition text All the Wrong Places, 2025

Installation view at Batagianni Gallery, All the Wrong Places, 2025, curated by Panos Giannikopoulos