Rap Divas // Silvia Tsopanaki
The photo exhibition "Rap Divas" by Silvia Tsopanaki opens on Thursday, March 16 at "ATH Newspaper" (Vissarionos 9 & Sina 6, Athens).
The exhibition will last until April 2. "Rap Divas" is an observational photography project of the hip hop community that focuses on female rappers, their art, their style.
It is a photo exhibition for those who grab the microphone and rap, for those who tell their stories in their own voice, in their own words.
The presence of women in rap – and in the arts in general – is constantly ignored, underestimated or marginalized. However, female rappers constitute an important voice in hip hop and contemporary Greek cultural production in general. They express and interpret in words the concerns and hopes of thousands of young women whose voices have been banished to the silent margins of public discourse. Silvia Tsopanaki turns her lens on these women, to the divas of Greek-speaking hip hop, he follows them in their daily lives, records small moments of women who often construct larger-than-life characters, out of the ordinary. It focuses on recording and composing images of a vibrant community that, in times of crisis, increasingly claims space and visibility in the public sphere.
Silvia Tsopanaki focuses on small rituals, nods, looks, thoughts and objects that often go unnoticed. Her portraits highlight the represent as a structural part of hip hop. White, black, gray tones suggest the historicity of the photo as well as hip hop culture itself. They invite us to focus on details that we would otherwise overlook. To reconstruct the color of the rappers' windbreakers, their hair, their make-up, the graffiti that breaks the gray of the city. To imagine a colorful world in our black and white everyday life.
Silvia Tsopanaki was born in 1991. In her work she mainly deals with working-class cultures. For the last seven years he has been photographing the domestic hip-hop scene, with an emphasis on female rappers. He has participated in group photography exhibitions in Athens and Thessaloniki ("24 hours, 7 days of hip hop", "Upperclass Underground Project", etc.). Her photographs have been published in Bring the Noise: Fifteen Essays on Hip Hop. She is currently filming her first short film.