Anti-Structure at DESTE

Here’s a recipe for success. Take one provocative installation by Urs Fischer – a renown Swiss sculptor who once created a giant rainbow rainstorm out of clay. Then let it start a conversation with the works of 21 Greek and Cypriot artists, spanning various generations and grooves (heavy hitters like George Lappas and Takis among them). The DESTE Foundation’s engrossing new live exhibition Anti-Structure explores the far-fetched realm of “fine lines between order and chaos, stasis and flux, structure and fragility”.

Coined in 1969 by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, “anti-structure” is a study of the state of mental and spiritual limbo that occurs during our transition to any rite of passage: that interlude when we’re neither here nor there; but in a temporary preternatural void. Turner recognized that in moments of great happenstance (hello pandemic), culture often reboots itself and new symbols, models, and paradigms arise. Into this fertile ground, radical thought and strange ideas can take seed; cultivated in the fringes of institutionalized etiquette. When fully formed, these novel new notions can either make – or break – the mainstream. Sounds exciting, no?