Yannis Bournias’s new exhibition, A Manual for Solitude, explores the forms of contemporary solitude, unfolding in a landscape – a tribute to John Cage’s eponymous composition – where silence becomes a space of listening, suspension, and fragile presence.

The exhibition unfolds as a photographic cycle that opens and closes with images of a city in the aftermath of an explosion. The streets seem suspended in the wake of an unseen detonation, a city caught in the instant after impact. Objects hover midair: a crumpled cup, a falling card, a compact disc scattering reflected light.

These fragments bear traces of prior use while already undergoing dissolution and reconfiguration. Bournias situates the viewer within a temporal fracture, a scene held in suspension between disintegration and renewal. At night, the glow of windows reveals isolated figures framed within the architecture of their rooms.           

The nocturnal cityscapes focus on apartment façades, where looking acquires a double valence, operating both as intrusion and as invitation. Solitude takes spatial form, inscribed in doorways, frames, and windows.  The viewer inhabits a zone of ambiguity, oscillating between voyeur and participant, witness and subject.

The body emerges as another site of inscription. Figures stand in exposed or provisional settings, performing solitude through gesture, posture, or withdrawal. Vulnerability and resistance intersect, while the camera records presences that test the outer edge of visibility.

A cinematic undertone runs throughout. Echoing David Lynch’s interiors, the familiar becomes unstable, charged with an undercurrent of menace. A warmly lit room reads as a stage of tension; astreet carries the weight of aftermath. 

A Manual for Solitude brings to the surface the fissures of everyday life and the atmospheres of uncertainty that envelop them. Bournias positions his practice between documentation and fiction, rupture and routine.
The photographs construct a world lingering in suspension, where light and texture unsettle the boundaries of the ordinary. In A Manual for Solitude, looking is never neutral: to view is already to participate, and every act of observation encounters a gaze that returns it.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text written by Panos Giannakopoulos.