Danae Io. Recording Angel
Critic's commentary:
An art exhibition at Akwa Ibom, that stands out for its solid conceptual background. Danae Io deals with movement as a vector of memory in a completely unconventional and original way.
PRESS RELEASE
Recording Angel, the title of both Danae Io's new film and the exhibition at Akwa Ibom in which it premieres, borrows from the symbolic figure found in religious and literary traditions—a celestial scribe believed to record each person's deeds, thoughts, and words. The film unfolds through the mirrors of a moving car in Thebes and the surrounding countryside, capturing the landscape in passing reflections—sidelong, fragmented, and fleeting. As a radio program introduces the 19th-century watercolours and writings of lawyer and draughtsman James Skene, the film draws a quiet parallel between past and present acts of observation. This gesture extends into a new series of sculptures based on phone cards produced in 2003 by the National Historical Museum of Greece, featuring Skene's painted panoramas. Using mirrored surfaces and devices like a praxinoscope, the sculptures blur the boundaries between recording and reflection, proposing that motion itself—not the apparatus—animates memory. In this way, the exhibition reflects on how acts of documentation shape both historical narrative and the perceptual frameworks through which it is experienced, casting the recording angel not as divine witness, but as a shifting mechanism—recursive, refractive, and unstable in its vantage.
Danae Io is an artist based in Athens and Rotterdam. Through moving image and sculpture, her practice focuses on how collective and personal histories are narrativized. Her films have been screened at Doclisboa (2024), the Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival (2024), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2023), and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023), among others. She had her first solo exhibition at State of Concept, Athens, in 2023. Some of her recent group exhibitions and performances include: 'out of my mind with pleasure' at Nobel Building (2023), Open Systems at UKS, Oslo (2023), and I am inside who I was at PuntWG, Amsterdam (2022).
The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Carved to Flow Foundation and CBK Rotterdam.
Duration: April 26th – June 14th, 2025
Visiting hours: Wednesdays four to eight p.m., Saturdays two to six p.m., and by appointment
Where: AKWA IBOM, Valtetsiou 35
(1st floor), Athens, Greece, 106 81
—
AKWA IBOM is a non-profit exhibition space (est. 2019) by Otobong Nkanga and Maya Tounta, conceived in the logic of a book, wanting to explore the extended lifespan of exhibitions by focusing on alternative methods of photographic documentation and mediation through text.
With regard to the challenges opacity and format place on translation, Akwa Ibom is interested in shows that bring together works from disparate disciplines, geographical and historical contexts to reveal shared sensibilities and forge new narratives.