BIOGRAPHY

Constantine is a mixed media artist, based in New York City. He works with stories, images, Greek Bronze Age hieroglyphs and languages thought to be lost to time. He is among the last speakers of Arberishte, a sister language of medieval Albanian, spoken in the villages outside Athens and Corinth, where he grew up. Among his subjects are the lost words and sounds of Arberishte, as well as other forgotten languages of Greece, breathing life into ancient cultures and systems of knowledge that have faced erasure. Constantine—known in the literary world as Peter Constantine—is a translator, writer, and activist for a diversified linguistic ecosystem in our world. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, as well as national literary prizes from Kosovo and Greece. His visual art has been part of group exhibits in Moscow, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Helsinki, and Pennsylvania’s Hazelton Art League, which has acquired one of his works for their permanent collection. A series of six works based on the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, is part of the permanent collection at the State Museum of Urban Sculpture in St. Petersburg. His most recent individual exhibition took place at Galerie Robert Art Room in Paris in November 2022.

CV

STATEMENT

In my current series of works I show struggles and interactions between human figures and ancient Greek (pre-Homeric) hieroglyphs; people entangled in lost sounds and words, at times in communion, at times in battle. It is part of my lifelong fascination with the rich linguistic tapestry of Greece, the history of its languages stretching back over the millennia. In some cases we know what the sounds and meanings of the hieroglyphs are—but in most cases we do not. The human figures in my works are all, in their own ways, making contact with these forgotten words and meanings.

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