RECORDING ANGEL

The Recording Angel is a symbolic figure in various religious and literary traditions, believed to document every person’s deeds, thoughts, and words for judgment or remembrance. Often depicted as a celestial scribe, the figure serves as a metaphor for conscience, divine memory, or the inescapable record of one’s life.

Danae Io’s film Recording Angel, shown for the first time in this exhibition, unfolds through the ordinary mirrors of a car driving through Thebes and the surrounding countryside, capturing perspectives not head-on but sidelong —fragmented and fleeting, seen only through passing reflections. As the vehicle moves, a radio show plays in the background, introducing the topographical watercolors and travel writings of James Skene, the 19th-century Scottish painter, explorer, and chronicler of Greece as it emerged from Ottoman rule. Skene’s works quietly parallel the film’s own cadenced act of observation, each offering a partial, mediated record of a landscape at the edge of transformation. Thebes, once the setting for myths of prophecy, madness, and divine intervention—where Oedipus met his fate, Dionysus caused frenzy, and Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth—now presents a modern life where agricultural fields give way to industrial decline. As the town passes by, the film evokes a present-day recording angel: not celestial, but mechanical—driving, listening, observing—while the landscape itself becomes an alternate recorder, inscribing histories through its accumulated marks, transformations, and absences.

The act of recording in the film extends into a series of sculptural works in the exhibition, each engaging with obsolete recording devices and optical illusions.

In the first room, Dial II (2025) reanimates a series of telephone cards produced in 2003 by OTE (Hellenic Telecommunications Organization) and the National Historical Museum of Greece, which feature Skene’s panoramic watercolors of 19th-century Greece. Mounted within a hand-assembled, motorized praxinoscope —an early optical device invented in 1877 that used rotating mirrors to create the illusion of motion—the cards form a looping sequence. The praxinoscope’s circular movement echoes cinematic mechanics and camera pans, offering a low-tech meditation on visual sequencing and apparatus, while suggesting that it is movement itself, rather than the act of recording, that animates history. Within the vertical shaft of the 1930s lightwell in the corridor, Untitled (hours) (2025)—a periscope—is installed, its mirrored interior angled toward the building’s uppermost window. A periscope, an optical instrument designed to see over obstacles, directs the viewer’s gaze upward, bypassing the constraints o f the surrounding architecture. Referencing both the Renaissance Book of Hours, with its structured meditations on time and light, and the polemoscope—a 17th-century variant of the periscope originally used in military and theatrical settings to observe discreetly from concealed positions—the work transforms a utilitarian aperture into a contemplative device.

In the main room, Dial I (2025) assembles five of the same commemorative telephone cards, arranged diagonally so that their mirrored reflections create the impression of a continuous, unfolding panorama.

Together, these works animate the processes of recording—not as neutral acts of preservation, but as gestures shaped by the material tools, optical devices, and atmospheric conditions through which histories are filtered. The exhibition proposes that every record is also a speculation, imbued with the intangible elements of the recorder’s inner landscape and subject to endless reinterpretation. Within this recursive cycle, the recording angel—whether celestial, mechanical, or embedded within the landscape itself—begins to lose its definition, dematerializing into atmosphere.