Cry freedom
The letters that scream from a makeshift-looking sackcloth and plaster base have the desperate energy of graffiti in the red of a bloodied handprint. The central “E” hollers at you – E for Ellas (Greece), for Eleftheria (freedom) and for EAM, the resistance movement that challenged the Axis occupation of Greece during the second world war.
Journey without end
Created in 1959, this was not just a work about the past. The dot dot dot in its title suggests ongoing struggles of oppressed peoples, including the military dictatorship that had forced Caniaris to leave Greece.
Agit-prop poetry
Today the late Caniaris is celebrated in his homeland for his idiosyncratic use of the everyday materials favoured by Italy’s arte povera movement, marrying its poetry with politics.
Lonely roads
His best-known work could scarcely be more apt today: its subject is the plight of migrants. He created human-scale assemblages using everything from rusted bikes to children’s drawings found in their dwellings, conjuring an itinerant life where social movement was cruelly mired by deprivation.
