Author: gourgourini

Two creatures are struggling to exist. Everything shatters and everything is put back together. Τhe world and their bodies reattach in ever-changing combinations.
These creatures do not know if they will eventually dodge what is about to crush them.
Surprisingly they go on and on with their elusive life cycle. After all, the only thing they are left with is survival. Isn’ t life a miracle? They may feel so small and terrified sometimes, some other times a bit aggressive. But let’s be honest here, they are completely harmless. If only they could pull this off!

Credits:
Concept- Choreography: Natasha Sarantopoulou
Performance: Ioanna Antonarou, Natasha Sarantopoulou
Dramaturgy Consultant: Alexandros Mistriotis
Set & Costumes Design: Dimitra Liakoura
Music Composition: Pavlos Katsivelis
Light Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Assistants: Giannis Stavropoulos, Foivos Petropoulos
Photography: Aris Papadopoulos, Periklis Pravitas
Production: En Exallo AMKE, Prosopo Organisation

Special thanks to:
Giorgos Hanos, Christina Maraboutaki, Alimos Municipality for the courtesy of rehearsal space & the electronic music crew “Acid Arab” for providing the music theme “Électrique Yarghol”

Information:
March 10, 17, 24 and 31 at 21.00.
At M54, Menandrou 54:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HNS7kHhjbWk79zs79
Pay What You Wish Αdmission.
Reservations are required due to limited seating.
Reservations: 6977660260
Duration: 30’
Strobe lights will be used during the performance.

With the financial support of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and NEON Organization.

*Natasha Sarantopoulou is a dance SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020).

“The woman of my dreams arrived. She was dressed in black. Long black hair, pale skin. She was ageless. She playfully looked at me exhaling thick smoke from a USB stick. I wanted to touch her but an invisible wall of leather and honey scents didn’t let me get close. Under her influence I would do anything; go anywhere; submit to any sexual act; lick her feet or buy her jewellery. I met her at a party but after a while she disappeared. A soft perfume and a feeling of lust is what she left behind.’

Jupiter the planet of expansion and luck will be moving through the sign of Pisces throughout 2022 bringing good fortune, confidence, and optimism about the future. It is the planet of possibilities and promises (whether true or false remains to be found out). During this period it is also said that intense passionate feelings and bonds will be formed between people that can either lead to fulfilment or destruction. One needs to be aware of the moving waters that can either lift up or bring down. The exhibition Jupiter in Pisces brings together works that explore themes of intimacy, lust, affection but also loss and pain. Using different or somehow similar media the artists in the show look at desire and its scope of emotions, often decentering the self to make room for another, delving into human erotic feelings. Sometimes fetishizing / fantasizing lovers and objects or testing the boundaries we set in order to protect ourselves.

Leda Bourgogne’s practise investigates the tensions between tenderness and violence, using materials which are precious but then get destroyed, while Eleni Christodoulou’s meticulously stitched soft sculptures look into what is hidden or suppressed, coming out emboldened and strong. Kristina Nagel’s photographs survey the underlying intensities within a consumerist society, cloaked in a tint of uncanny aloofness. Spyros Rennt peeks into desire through a more romantic and tender gaze, while Lukas Stöver’s sculptural works have a more forward nearly fetishist feeling, made of materials like PVC or leather.

Whilst Jupiter is making its journey, forming rectangles and triangles with other planets, it is important to remember that this world is in flux; hardly anything is permanent.

Jupiter in Pisces
Opening 12th of March 19:00 – 22:00
Duration 13 March – 30 April
Opening hours Thurs. – Fri. 4-7 & Sat. 3-6
Participating artists: Leda Bourgogne, Eleni Christodoulou, Kristina Nagel, Spyros Rennt, Lukas Stöver
Curated by Amalia Vekri

*Amalia Vekri and Spyros Rennt are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows in visual arts

Ekfrasi-Yianna Grammatopoulou gallery presents the solo show of Apollonas Glykas entitled INHALE ‘notes from behind a window’.

The exhibition presents the artist’s most recent work consisting of photographic collages and constructions. Through this series of works, Glykas focuses on shaping the subject’s communication with the city and the public space through a fixed perspective, as it was formed during the last two years. Photographs from the period of the confinement that the artist takes from his house depict architectural details. antennas and other communication devices, which imply the human presence and the need of man to maintain a contact with external reality. The metal constructions reflect details found in the photo collages and together compose an installation, where materiality and usability are reversed creating a sense of autonomy and strange intimacy.

Ekfrasi-Yianna Grammatopoulou

March 17 – April 9 2022

9a Valaoritou, , 10671 τηλ: 2103607598 email: [email protected]

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 12.00-20.00, Wednesday: 12.00-18.00
Saturday: 12.00–15.00, Sunday and Monday closed

Sam Albatros’ performance based on their best-selling novel “faulty boy”
10 March 2022 20:00
ΜΟΜus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Thessaloniki, Greeece)

The performance will be followed by a discussion of the book “faulty” boy by academics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

concept-adaptation-performance: Sam Albatros
performer-dancer: Lefteris Konstantinou
academics: Tassos A. Kaplanis, Yannis Mitrou
thanks to: Thouli Misirloglou, Eleni Stergiou, Andreas Takis, Alexandros Triantafillidis

“Oh, blackout I won’t tell where you’re from cause you’re in the dark
I could be anyone,
Don’t leave, don’t leave me”
Anna Calvi

Through the use of light reflections and darkness, movement and stillness, sounds and silence, our emphasis is on the spectators’ field of perception. What do different qualities and intensities of darkness give rise to?

The performance questions the common notion that darkness and blackout are obstacles to be surpassed for a “clear” vision.

We do not propose a balancing act, whereby one sense is substituted by another – what we do is pose the question of how we can see, experience and imagine other kinds of dance/movement in the darkness.

Violin, FX: Dimos Vrizas
Dance, lighting : Alexis Tsiamoglou

Performances
Saturday 12/3 20.00
Sunday 13/3 20.00

Studio Pellizco
1st flour, 5 Orfanidou, Thessaloniki

Event link fb
https://www.facebook.com/events/1070202496890592/
Ticket: 5 euros
Bookings: [email protected]

*Alexis Tsiamoglou is a dance SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2021)

Moon, 66 Questions is the first feature debut of Jacqueline Lentzou, SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2018. It initially defines itself as “a film about flow, movement and love (and lack of them)”.

After years of distance, Artemis has to get back to Athens due to her father’s frail state of health. Discovering her father’s well-kept secret allows Artemis to understand her father, in a way she was not able before, therefore love him truly for the first time.

The film world-premiered in the Berlinale’s Encounters competition and is screening on greek cinemas by February.

The exhibition approaches the questions and issues associated with hospitality not within an axis of tradition and ownership or in the context of hierarchy, but instead through an unconditional acceptance for the uninvited and unexpected, taking into account all the risks and acknowledging the traces they will leave; the exhibition evaluates the approach of allowing contact with the unknown as the sole method of coexistence.

Artists: Silva Bingaz, Claire Denis, Alfredo Jaar, Ismene King, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Necla Rüzgar, Anri Sala, Kiki Smith, Stefania Strouza, Hale Tenger, Kostis Velonis
Curated by Burcu Fikretoğlu

True Love Leaves No Traces
Galerist, Istanbul, February 8th to March 19th, 2022

Image Credit: Anri Sala, If and Only If, 2018, Single channel HD video and discrete 4.0 surround sound installation, colour, 9’47’’
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Galerie Chantal Crousel

The exhibition brings together a wide spectrum of techniques and materials that highlight the artistic process; the inception of a creative idea, what strikes the imagination, and all the various influences and references of a work in development until the potential completion of a project.

20 artists that work with a variety of media reflect on the production process of their works and give access to their methodology revealing pieces that remain unseen in their archive. Studies, designs, multimedia collages, photographs, experiments and “final” works that unravel the dynamics of artistic research during which a work can evolve in various ways and forms.

With references to art history and the artistic principle of non-finito, these works, important moments of a wider study, are reconstituted in an exhibition space acquiring collectible value.

Such unguided approaches to the art-making, make the artistic process an “open-ended” process and spark both the imagination and the conceptual activation of the viewer for the potential completion of the artwork.

Participating artists: Nikos Alexiou, Venia Behraki, Xenophon Bitsikas, Despina Charitonidi, Kostas Christopoulos, Thomas Diotis, Dimitris Efeoglou, Georgia Fambris, David Fenwick, Despina Flessa, Alexandros Kotoulas, Vasiliki Koukou, Nikos Moschos, Melina Mosland, Sofia Papakosta, Fotini Palpana, Sofia Rozaki, Eric Stephany, Pavlos Tsakonas, Marina Velisioti

Curated by: Georgia Liapi

Exhibition duration: February 10 – March 4, 2022

Opening: Thursday February 10, 17:00 – 21:00.

Zoumboulakis Galleries, 20 Kolonaki Square

Opening hours: Tue., Thu. & Fri. 11.00 – 20.00, Wed. & Sat. 11.00 – 15.00, Sundays & Mondays closed

*Dimitris Efeoglou, Despina Flessa, Fotini Palpana and Pavlos Tsakonas are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

“Whether we want to or not, we are travelling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”

Ocean Vuong, On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous

“How long is forever? asks Alice. Sometimes, just one second, replies the rabbit.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

There is Nothing inevitable About Time is neither a statement of certainty, nor a question, but a persistent intent, a hovering thought, a shared wonder and a desire to comprehend.

It is an exhibition of sorts, fluctuating in form with three overlapping chapters, with art works in dialogue with each other for variable measurements of time, a day, a month or so, or even three. It is an experiment that proposes a psycho-kinetic system with its own internal logic. Subverting the belief in linear progress, the exhibition proposes a time and spatialization of form that undulates, looks forward and back, sideways and frontally, toying with ideas of impermanence, causality, suggestive of elective affinities and emergent possibilities.

Each artwork is of course its own autonomous universe, touching on interlocking themes such as cyclicality, indigenous knowledge, ancestral callings, the ghosts of the past and future, acceleration, the time span of making: of being and becoming. Yet, simultaneously, the selected works relate to each other in an unfolding durational choreography allowing for shifting meanings and conversations. Time it is suggested, is a relational experience, a field of in between states, a temporal co-existence.

As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “the space-time itself is first of all the possibility of the ‘with’[1].”

The word ‘time’ derives from an Indo-European root, di or dai – meaning to divide. But who does the dividing and what indeterminate space lies in between? The grammars of most modern languages conjugate verbs in past, present, future tenses – not well adapted for speaking about shifting temporalities. Time slips like language. And yet words rush behind, never really to contain the immeasurable potentialities of what we feel. Time and again, seemingly unavoidable as our daily look in the mirror, the human mind has tried to wrap itself around understanding the pace of who we are. Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? Where does it begin?

Thinking of time as a human desire and need for remembrance led us to collaborate with FRMK, a Greek poetry collective on a publication of a selection of poems circling around time and the language we use to talk about everything it affects, the who and the how of our lives, the past as present, its reciprocity. Expanding the intersubjective space of the exhibition field further, these poems will be disseminated both at the exhibition and in the form of posters in the city around us in digital and analogue forms. These poems can be read as a prologue, interlude or postscript of the exhibition. The linguistic (pre)memory of everything you (will) have seen.

As Emmanuel Levinas writes, “The present rips apart and joins together again; it begins; it is beginning itself. It has a past, but in the form of remembrance. It has a history, but it is not history[2].”

At moments like ours, when future imaginaries are repeatedly negated, when the present feels fraught, when the tools we have to understand the world seem inadequate, it seems timely to wonder whether, There is Nothing Inevitable about Time?

Artists: Etel Adnan, Meriç Algün, Francis Alÿs with Julien Deveaux, The Athens Zine Bibliotheque, Sena Başöz, Eric Baudelaire, Euphrosyne Doxiadi, FRMK, Konstantinos Giotis, Karrabing Film Collective, Lala Meredith-Vula, The Otolith Group, Malvina Panagiotidi, Corinne Silva, Praneet Soi, Ritu Sarin & Tenzing Sonam, Sasha Streshna.

Opening: Thursday 3 February, 16:00-22:00

Exhibition: 3 February – 7 May 2022

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 12:00-20:00, Saturday: 12:00-17:00

Access: Anaxagora 33, (1st floor), Tavros. Tavros Μetro station

*Konstantinos Giotis, Malvina Panagiotidi and Sasha Streshna are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press

[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Time and The Other, Duquesne University Press

Supported by:
SAHA – Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey provided support for Sena Başöz, Iaspis, Swedish Institute at Athens, Perianth Hotel

The art exhibition Rebetiko, organised by the Culture, Sports & Youth Organisation of the City of Athens (OPANDA), aims at visualising the essence and iconography of rebetiko music, through 125 works by 50 modern and contemporary Greek artists, including Yannis Tsarouchis, Tassos and Alekos Fassianos. The exhibition will be hosted in three venues from 10 February to 3 April 2022.

The thematic exhibition Rebetiko “is all about love, escape, ‘joyful mourning,’ and all the thoughts, memories, and symbols associated with this ‘major occurrence in modern Greek culture’”, according to its curator, Christoforos Marinos (OPANDA Curator of Exhibitions and Events). As he points out in the exhibition’s catalogue, its aim is to represent rebetiko music and its “mythology” through a contemporary visual outlook, and explore how contemporary visual artists can engage emotionally with rebetiko and “translate it into image”.

“To this day, when the words rebetiko and visual arts are mentioned in the same breath, the first things that come to mind may be Alekos Fassianos’s illustrations for books by Elias Petropoulos, Tassos’s engravings for [Sotiria] Bellou’s album covers, or the zeibekiko dancers that were such a frequently represented subject in Tsarouchis’s paintings”, writes Marinos, adding that “Rebetiko intends to expand the visual representation of the world of rebetiko, fundamentally changing the way it is perceived in the visual arts”.

The mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, pointed out in his statement that the majority of the works showcased have been commissioned by the Municipality of Athens specially for this exhibition, so that contemporary artists can converse with the artistic heritage left by the great moderns, on the theme of rebetiko and its interpretation by people of our times. The exhibits include paintings but also engravings, photographs, video and sound installations and performances.

Among the featured artists we find the names of iconic modern painters, sculptors and engravers, such as Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989), Tassos (1914–1985), Alexandros Korogiannakis (1906–1966), Giorgos Sikeliotis (1917–1984), Lambros Orfanos (1916–1995) and the recently deceased Alekos Fassianos (1935–2022), as well as contemporary visual and performance artists, from Sotos Alexiou, Panos Charalambous and Alexandros Psychoulis to Katerina Zacharopoulou, Maria Tsagkari, Maria Louizou, street artist Cacao Rocks and the artistic collective The Callas.

The exhibition (10 February – 3 April 2022) is hosted in three venues –the Municipal Gallery of Athens in Metaxourgeio, the Arts Centre of the City of Athens at Eleftherias Park and the foyer of the Olympia Municipal Music Theatre “Maria Callas”– and admission is free. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, with texts by the participating artists, guest writers and rebetiko scholars.

Janis Rafa (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2020) takes part at the 59th Venice Biennale’s Main Exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Italian-born, New York-based curator Cecilia Alemani. The Venice Biennale’s main exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” will feature 213 artists from 58 countries.

“The Milk of Dreams” takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) – Cecilia Alemani stated – in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else. The exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” takes Leonora Carrington’s otherworldly creatures, along with other figures of transformation, as companions on an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.

The show is set to include scores of fresh positions spanning more than 150 years: a total of 180 artists, dead and alive, are taking part for the first time, and there will be 80 newly commissioned productions.

Congratulations Janis!

The 59th International Art Exhibition will take place from 23 April to 27 November 2022 (pre-opening on 20, 21 and 22 April).

More information here.

Sofia Georgovasili’s third short film (SNF ARTWORKS Fellows 2020) premiers at the competition programme Generation 14 of the 72nd Berlinale.

Memoir of a Veering Storm by Sofia Georgovassili
Greece, 14’, 2022
It is a morning in September. A storm is about to break. Α mother drives a girl to school in the morning and picks up a woman at the end of the school day. Anna, a fifteen-year-old girl sneaks out of school, and with the help of her boyfriend, they visit a hospital. There, she has to face an event that will jolt her into adulthood.