This is not a movie. It’s 1996

Meimaroglou’s series entitled This is not a movie. It’s, occurred while the artist was watching the evening news in New York during the time of the Oklahoma bombing in the mid nineties, and heard a sentence from the news commentator: “...This is not a movie. It’s...” and at that instant she realized how removed the American public was from terrorist acts that frequently take place in other parts of the world. The work constructed from this observation consists of blown-up photos deriving from terrorists’ acts taken from the media, blown up to such an extent that they are no longer identifiable at first sight. The seductive colour scheme was left as is for the viewer’s immersion.
The images from This is not a movie. It’s series -comparable appropriations from the History of Art- inform with the titles of the works themselves – Annunciation’ 94, Angel B’ 95, Ecce Homo’ 95 – making clear references to known images. This method of appropriation could be a way of using recognizable symbols (the Virgin Mary, Christ) in order to come to terms with something traumatic, at least for the artist herself who contrary to the viewer knows that the original image is a violent one (an analogy can be found in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud who elaborated on how repeating a traumatic event, whether in actions, dreams or images, helps integrate it into a psychic economy, a symbolic order). In a way then, the images contain the imprints of an artist coming to terms with her subject, a personal process of art making.