Forced Isolation and Denied Privacy: An Instagram Journey through and beyond “Voyage Around My Room” (55 days, 2017-2019)

The exhibition “Voyage around my Room” curated by Kika Kyriakakou (with production coordinator Vicky Tsirou), took place between March 18th and May 2nd this year at the Athens Municipality Arts Center in
Parko Eleftherias.

Conflating Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1926) and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre (1794), the exhibition explored ideas of privacy, autonomy and self-expression in today’s world of digital feminism and the #metoo movement.

Like many of you reading this, I didn’t see the exhibition in person. However, I did follow it via Instagram. Seeing images from the room in the Parko Eleftherias where Paul B. Preciado’s The Parliament of Bodies unfolded during documenta 14, even though I knew there was no direct link to that mega-exhibition (even if some of the artists and participants – Jonas Mekas, Eva Stefani, Sylvere Lotringer, Kostis Velonis – had some relationship with the 2017 exhibition split between Athens and Kassel), nonetheless, from a distance, I couldn’t help but think of the shared space across time. To make sense of this disconnect between the exhibition and my remote engagement with it, I decided to create a post that would use Instagram posts of a period of 55 days (slightly longer than the run of the exhibition) March 14-May 7, but ranging over the period of 2017-2019 so as to include documenta 14 within the framework of the exhibition.

Thanks to Instagram and other Social Media platforms (and the ingenious archival function of the hashtag and furtive operation of the screen-grab), exhibitions do not have a beginning or an end, in spite of their limited run-time. Just as the artists included made work before the doors opened, they will continue to make work once the doors are closed. The same room was used before and takes on new resonances as time passes. The question remains, however, what joins those of us who decided to pay attention? Even if for the briefest of moments, as we click and post? Thanks to Instagram, we are all living in ‘A House that Enforces Isolation but Denies Privacy’ (to borrow the title of the short essay by Anne Boyer) and as such, for better or worse, any so-called ‘Room of One’s Own’, especially when that room is an exhibition, opens out onto the world, a world that cannot be contained.

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March 14