Month: February 2024

A programme of artists’ moving image works which share reflections on technology, ritual and the more-than-human world.

This evening of screenings includes works by Patricia Dominguez, Kyriaki Goni, Agnieszka Polska, Laure Prouvost, Tabita Rezaire, Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, and Emilija Škarnulytė. The programme will be accompanied by live interventions by artists Kyriaki Goni and Patricia Dominguez.

An Act of Wonder and Gratitude was originally curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Serpentine Head of Ecologies, as part of the Woods: More-than-Human-Curiosity symposium. Organised by are-events.org, the event takes place annually in the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic. Woods operates at the intersection of contemporary art, the landscape, human health, and interspecies coexistence.

Serpentine Cinema: An Act of Wonder and Gratitude
Part of Serpentine Ecologies
Offsite / Ciné Lumière, Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DW
Monday 12 February 2024, 7-9.30pm
PRICE: £9, £7 CONC

Programme:

Patricia Dominguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022

Emilija Škarnulytė, Sunken Cities, 2021

Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022

Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect, 2016

Laure Prouvost, Into all that is here, 2015

Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023

Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, Time and Love, 2022

*Kyriaki Goni is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow (2018)

On Saturday, February 10th, at 8pm, Anastasia Valsamaki presents “as she rests, the wrestler bleeds her promises”, an exhibition curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. Hosted at opbo studio until March 1st, the show is a presentation of archives, sculptural gestures, films, and words, arising from or responding to the dance performance “W REST L ING”. The performance, conceived and choreographed by Anastasia Valsamaki, will be presented at 9 pm during the opening night.

“W REST L ING” utilises wrestling as a tool to see through the surface of a combat sport and to explore further the seemingly contradictory forces or expressions residing in our ways of acting, enacting, attacking and attracting defense or resistance. It instead aims to unleash the significance of the times, spaces and interactions occurring in-between those modes; to look with them as mechanisms that can feed or disrupt these active dynamics. Thinking through the semantics coming with the verticality of bodies or objects standing or moving, versus their horizontality when laying or standing still, Valsamaki’s work explores the meanings, understandings and interpretations of vitality and alertness, of passivity and inertia, of wrestling and resting.

How do we, human beings, prioritize production over ease or inactivity, idealise proceeding over pausing or staying awake over falling asleep, even when our bodies, minds or souls impose us otherwise? And how can such behaviors, decisions or (in)actions be thought of or be used as parables to think across sociopolitical, environmental, or financial modes, models and paradigms worshiping a nonstop extraction of energy and fuel and love and care, when there’s nothing left, when these graspable or ungraspable commodities, have already been squeezed out or appropriated? How can pauses, breaks and hiatuses allow us to organically touch robust personal transformations, grief over collective alternations, find other ways of striking back or requesting for?

These are some of the questions raised in a work that tries to twist the world, and against all odds, stroke instead of attack, play instead of ambush, dance instead of condemn. Both the choreographed gestures of the five bodies moving and resting in time and space and the traces their presence leaves behind when the performance is over, become a celestial, yet youthful, ecstatic and untamed ritual of sharing anger, sorrow, fear, but also desire, solidarity, kinship. By performing aspects of wrestlers’ fights, “as she rests, the wrestler bleeds her promises” invites us to an acceptance of our contradictions, a close listening of our breathing when in vigilance, an unconditional encounter with our chasms when in turmoil.

Curated and text by Ioanna Gerakidi

“W REST L ING” Contributors
Concept & Choreography: Anastasia Valsamaki
Music & Sound Composition: Jeph Vanger
Dancers: Gavriela Antonopoulou, Nikos Grigoriadis, Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Thanos Ragousis, Xenia Stathouli
Dramaturgy: Anastasios Koukoutas
Styling: Nefeli Asteriou
Technical support: Giorgos Antonopoulos
Production: MINDTHELOOP

Created during Anastasia’s Valsamaki Artist Fellowship Program 2020 supported by ARTWORKS and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)

Creation and touring are realized with the financial support of the Greek Ministry of Culture.

Info:
opbo studio, 86 Filonos Str., Piraeus, 18536
Exhibition opening: Saturday 10 February 2024, 20.00
Exhibition duration: February 10 – March 1, 2024
Visiting hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12:00-18:00
Free entrance

*Anastasia Valsamaki, Jeph Vanger, Nefeli Asteriou and Ioanna Gerakidi are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

In “Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or” Vasilis Papageorgiou reflects on the vicious cycle between labour, leisure, and exhaustion (both human and planetary). By associating the depletion of planetary resources with burnout, Papageorgiou investigates the relationship between capitalist systems of pleasure, their role in the cyclical depletion of planetary resources, and the loop these create in relation the need for rest and regeneration.

The concept of the exhibition is somewhat influenced by George Papam’s text Hospitality Fatigue: Symptoms and Potions (in: Island after Tourism – Escaping the Monocultures of Leisure, Kyklada Press, 2023), in which the author is exploring different models of inhabiting and relating to landscape. Following, Papargeorgiou links the exhaustion of planetary resources to burnout, poetically employing the beach as a central metaphor to portray it as the ultimate fantasy where the dichotomies of nature and human indulgence merge. He reflects on leisure and pleasure as both a cause and a symptom of this exhaustion, hinting that structures of leisure, such as private beaches, contribute to further resource depletion, trapping humanity in a vicious cycle that ultimately stifles imagination.

The exhibition operates with several motifs embedded in the exhibition as sculptures or in the form of video installation. The metal sunbeds with various significant elements such as copper-plated beach towels, or a flower that emerges from beneath a sunbed, as a symbol of resilience against the structures of human-created leisure. Quotidian situations in which people utilize water against heatwaves in different parts of Europe are captured by the artist by his phone camera. One video depicts an elderly lady in the village Lin in Albania throwing a bucket of water on the street. Another shows affluent children playing in a fountain at Place des Vosges in Paris. These contrasting uses of water in different European contexts underscore the disparity in resource utilization in the cycle of leisure and exhaustion.

Vasilis Papageorgiou (*1991, Athens, Greece) is an artist based in Athens. His work has been showcased in notable exhibitions, including the 7th Athens Biennale – Eclipse (2021), Benaki Museum (2019), Stavros Niarchos Cultural Foundation (2019), and MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (2019). He also participated in the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts (2018), among others. Additionally, Papageorgiou is a co-founder of Enterprise Projects, an initiative and project space in Athens, established in 2015, that focuses on artist and curator collaborations.

*Vasilis Papageorgiou is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2018

Orientation: Mater Land
Evangelia Spiliopoulou
Duration: 15 February – 23 March 2024
Opening: 15 February 19:00-22:00

The works at the exhibition allude to an existing body in its disappearance. Thumbprints, marks, spots, signs, cyphers and grids, spot areas and space. Natural and artificial materials mark surfaces and summon a narrative of the body at work, relevant spaces and equipment played on repeat. They refer to a state of being invisible or non-existent; to the absence yet appearance through vague circumstances; outline the physical presence and allure its gradual waning; they are a reference to the physical world, the one that can be experienced subjectively through the senses yet also that which escapes our perception.

For her first solo exhibition in Greece, Evangelia Spiliopoulou (b.1981) shows a series of works, which examine the concept of work as physical and intellectual labour and the role of objective (biological, physical) as well as collective (social and cultural) biases in the reception of the artwork. Repetition, duplication, reappearance, reoccurrence, frequency of physical and artificial nature document aspects of a living body at work; and the work as a living body gaining autonomy as a critical institution within culture.

Evangelia Spiliopoulou’s practice expands from drawing and painting, to sound and light installations and environments which encompass mixed media. These environments often work as visual puns questioning the reliance on our biological (mainly visual and auditory) trigger responses, which form the first impression. Yet the works unravel separate stories after they are first experienced.

The works presented at the exhibition, focus on the institution of work and its relation to and impact on the human body, culture and nature. They consist of series of detailed drawings as well as larger scale prints which examine the physical and technical narratives produced or created in various working stations, the use of computer, internet resources, technical paraphernalia and the influence of their signs and symbols to the human responses and perception.

The exhibition focuses on three phases of Evangelia Spiliopoulou’s practice, their development and relation to the conceptual history of art, the black and white drawing practice, the references to minimalism, the use of colour, the energetic fields of abstract expressionism, the colourism and the cerebral image ‘burn’ of impressionism. Her work has been exhibited in Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art; London, Drawing Room; Milan, PeepHole; Prague, DOX; Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum Library; Rome, Ex-Bibli; Vienna, Kunstraum Am Schauplatz; Manchester, Castlefield Gallery, Bury Museum, Rochdale Museum-Touchstones; Antwerp, Lokaal 01. Her drawing practice has been part of the 2021 Drawing Biennial, (Drawing Room, London, UK), has been nominated for the Drawing Room Bursary (2015, 2011) and shortlisted at the New Contemporaries (2010).

*Evangelia Spiliopoulou is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow (2021)

State of Concept proudly presents a group exhibition with newly commissioned works exploring the relationships between attention, algorithms, and social justice. Founded in a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and Swiss Institute New York, with The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris) as associated partners.

The two-year collaborative project Attention After Technology explores how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise, through newly commissioned works by six international artists. The artists consider how our attention is commodified and monetized, examine how algorithms reinforce bias while also probing their emancipatory potential, and analyze attention as a political space to foster sustained critical thinking and to support collective action.

The exhibition title, Attention After Technology, is a reference to Ruha Benjamin’s celebrated book Race After Technology (2019). In her publication, Benjamin decodes the discriminatory designs embedded in algorithms that prop up racial, socioeconomic, and other systemic hierarchies. Attention is a much discussed topic with regard to technology. It is closely connected to epistemic justice, or the creation and recognition of diverse forms of knowledge, experiences, and perspectives. Our capacity as knowing subjects, and being recognized as such, is an essential component of agency agency and our ability for choice. It is crucial for social justice.

While distraction and fragmentation may seem like antonyms of attention, the exhibition resists such simple dichotomies. Far from luddites opposing technology, the exhibiting artists both use and hack, celebrate and critique, discard and invent new tools. The exhibition explores attention as a practice, as an embodied technology, and as an evolving aesthetic, social, and political sphere. In bringing attention into debates around algorithmic justice, the works in Attention After Technology pull back the curtain on the neutrality of technology, while using it to draft new ways of relating.

In the lead-up to the exhibition, which considers the intersections above, the artists participated in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators, the associated partner collective The Friends of Attention (an informal network of creative collaborators), and advisors from diverse disciplines including computer science and artificial intelligence, visual arts, and queer and transtechnology studies.

This exhibition is the last of three expressions of the expansive project, spanning over two years (2022–2024). The exhibition has travelled from Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (13 October 2023–28 January 2024) to State of Concept Athens (24 February 2024–27 April 2024). Online versions of the artworks have been available on Tropical Papers’ web platform from November 2023. The associated symposium “The Digital Divide – Attention, Algorithms and Social Justice”, coordinated by Art Hub Copenhagen in partnership with IDA – the Danish Society of Engineers and TOASTER, took place on 4 May 2023, while Art Hub also hosted two artist residencies, with biarritzzz and CUSS Group. The overall project also includes curatorial and strategic contributions by Swiss Institute New York, USA.

The last activity of the parallel program, is an online discussion between iLiana Fokianaki (Founder
and Director of State of Concept) on the 29th of February at 18:30 CET. Zoom Link HERE

The exhibition is collectively curated by Kunsthall Trondheim’s team: Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, curator and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Stefanie Hessler; Liz Dom, project manager “Attention After Technology”; Kaja Grefslie Waagen, producer and communications manager; and Art Hub Copenhagen: Lars Bang Larsen, head of art & research; Rose Tygat, project coordinator; and Tropical Papers: María Inés Rodríguez; and State of Concept Athens: iLiana Fokianaki, founder and director; Konstantina Melachrinou, production manager and press officer; and Swiss Institute New York: Stefanie Hessler, director, curatorial concept and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen.

In collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and Swiss Institute New York, The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris).

ATTENTION AFTER TECHNOLOGY
Group Show

24 FEBRUARY—27 APRIL 2024

WITH
biarritzzz (Brazil), Vivian Caccuri (Brazil), Shu Lea Cheang (USA/Taiwan), Kyriaki Goni* (Greece), CUSS Group (South Africa), Femke Herregraven (Netherlands)

CURATORS
Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers, State of Concept Athens, Swiss Institute New York

*Kyriaki Goni is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow (2018)