Author: gourgourini

Eleonora Siarava was selected to participate in the international interdisciplinary project TANZ:DIGITAL – Process, Dynamics, Discourse for the artistic research and experimentation with applied tools of Digital Technologies in Dance in a team of choreographers, dance artists and media artists.

Berlin, Kunstquartier Bethanien, February 2023

The program TANZ:DIGITAL – Process, Dynamics, Discourse is a cooperation of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland and ITI International Theatre Institute Germany/Media Library for Dance and Theatre.

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the programme NEUSTART KULTUR, tanz:digital aid program of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland.

In parallel, the program organized a group exhibition – video installation where extracts of the following pieces of Eleonora Siarava were presented:

BLUE BEYOND (2022)

BLUE BEYOND, drawing from the chi-fi book of the beginning of the 20th century “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future” by Olaf Stapledon, explores corporealities, cartographies and images of the Future and seeks to invent how the vision or the fantasy of the Future is depicted, reflected, embodied. Through an interplay with realities, dramaturgies, fictions, topologies, imaginary spaces of the future, memories of the live present and embodied traces of the past, BLUE BEYOND turns the stage into an active hybrid space with movements, objects, sounds, words and creates a live moving capsule of imprints and visions forming a Memoir for¦of the Future, a cyclic schema to represent time.

The piece questions how the body can map the future, with what material and movement landscapes. With what mythologies do we invest it, what archives it carries? In reverse, the performance, as a living space with memories, predictions, scenarios seeks to detect atmospheres and impressions of tomorrow floating in the sea of now, tune in to resonances, movements, waves of what is not yet here, has not arrived but it is already inscribed within us and within the dance to be made. What if the present through the moving body already encapsulates echoes of Future in a dance just before it ‘comes into being’.

Trailer:

The piece, was supported by the Ministry of Culture of Greece and presented in Theseum Theatre in Athens and the National Theatre of Northern Greece.

The Body and the Other~ (2020)
Premiere ΤANZHAUS NRW, Temps d’ Images Festival (Düsseldorf)

The Body and the Other~ is a dance performance / choreographic installation about the multiple body as a physical, digital and hybrid in-between corporeality placed in a mixed reality topology. There, temporal linearity is shattered and digital algorithms create random past, present and future blendings and overlappings. Through an experimental scenography involving video, projection mapping and motion tracking and the use of surfaces, objects and materials that follow their own technology and potential of movement, the aim is to unfold a performance as an unpredictable and unprescribed living entity with autonomous choreographic dramaturgy. By revealing what escapes or slips away from technology, The Body and the Other~ invites the elusive real in a piece based on an interplay between tactility and emptiness, appearing and disappearing imagery, absence and presence, with the moving body as a mediator and reminder of the deep human essence.

The project was co-funded by the program »Transfer International« of NRW KULTURsekretariat, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and
i-Portunus (Creative Europe), with the support of Tanzhaus NRW in the framework of TEMPS D’IMAGES Festival and is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Eleonora Siarava | Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform and Mixed Reality and Visualization Institut | Department of Media, Düsseldorf University

Trailer:

Eleonora Siarava is choreographer and artistic director of Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform working between Greece and Germany. She studied ‘Dance Μaking and Performance’ (MA-Distinction, Coventry University) and ‘Choreography and Performance’ (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany). She has presented her work in Greece and internationally. For her piece The Body and the Other~ premiered at Tanzhaus NRW, Temps d’ Images Festival (2020), was supported by the program »Transfer International« of NRW KULTURsekretariat of Germany, Ministry of Culture and Science of NRW, artistic mobility grant I-Portunus/Creative Europe and collaborated with Mixed Reality and Visualization Institut (Düsseldorf University) for the use of digital technology. She worked as a performer for Marina Abramović’s project ‘A different way of hearing’ at Alte Oper Frankfurt and was resident choreographer at SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographing Development/Interdisciplinary Incubator 2019 (Prague) and Duncan Dance Research Center (Athens). She participated in ‘Moving Digits’/Creative Europe project for Dance and Digital Technologies (2018-2020) and was fellow of START program by Robert Bosch Stiftung & Goethe Institut. As an artist she is interested in abstraction in dance and her intention is to create enigmatic multilayered performances through the experimentation with aesthetic forms, imaginary and real spaces, overlapping temporalities, multisensory perception, hybridity, atmospheres. Her site & time specific choreographic installation “Step-in” was presented at Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Since 2020 is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Greece. During that period she created the pieces Who knows where the time goes-potential destination #1 and BLUE BEYOND (National Theatre of Northern Greece) and developed the choreographic research UnderScore, Choreographic Objects and more.

*Eleonora Siarava has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022 in the field of Choreography.

www.per-dance.com

The “Office of Hydrocommons” is an interdisciplinary and interartistic program that focuses on climate and social change in relation to water and the body. Informed by the properties of water’s liquidity, the endeavor unfolds in different manifestations: an exhibition, an international artist residency, a series of weekly public events, and the Research Office. “Hydroresearchers” from different fields, such as the arts, marine biology, agronomy, urbanism, sports, and activism, are invited to participate in the program. The Office of Hydrocommons is actualized following an invitation by the ATOPOS cvc artistic director Vassilis Zidianakis to the independent curator Eleni Riga in the context of #ΟccupyAtopos.

Exhibition “Wet Heart”
From the positionality of the Mediterranean South, the artists participating in the exhibition “Wet Heart” investigate problems such as water scarcity, the deterioration of the natural environment due to industrial, touristic, and military activities, and the pollution of waters due to plastics and microplastics; at the same time, they reflect on their impact onto vulnerable human and non-human lives.

Departing from the “wet heart,” the well in the center of the ATOPOS cvc premises, five Greek visual artists – the duo Ileana Arnaoutou and Ismene King, Eleni Mylonas, Maria Nikiforaki, Despina Charitonidi – respond to crucial questions about water: Which waters are we talking from? Which waters are we talking about? On which waters are we standing? What are “our” waters?

Ileana Arnaoutou, Ismene King
Artwork: A Conservation of Water-Writings

The creation of the site-specific sculpture “A Conservation of Water-Writings” by Ileana Arnaoutou and Ismene King is fueled by encounters around the well, and based on an alternative experiential relationship with the well itself, drawing on expanded practices of care. The artists approach the well by “performing a gesture of caress” – a hand touch that carries messages of care – and try to retrieve its history, the places where water once traversed or stood, the places where the moisture eroded the stone, the hollow from the pulley in which bryophytes grew. The practice of caressing is linked to haptonomy, the “science of sensitivity” developed by Dutch healer Frans Veldman in the 1960s. In prenatal medicine, a series of targeted gestures of touching the abdomen allows for the creation and tightening of the emotional bond between parents (be they biological or foster) and their children. Similarly to a parent communicating with a baby in the womb, the artists communicate with water. It is “a way of facilitating life beyond biological pregnancy” (“gestationality” Neimanis 2017), “a form of broadly inclusive kinship” (The Care Collective 2020).

Credit
A Conservation of Water-Writings, 2023
Installation, iron, resin, aluminum, rubber, stoneware clay, dimensions variable

Ileana Arnaoutou and Ismene King’s work is realized with the support of ATOPOS cvc and the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation as part of the Research Residency Program 2022.

Resume
The collaborative duo was formed in 2019, between Ismene King and Ileana Arnaoutou. Ismene King (b.1993) is a sculptress and ceramist, graduate from the MFA Sculpture of the Slade School of Fine Ar. Ileana Arnaoutou (b.1994) is a painter and sculptress, graduate from the BA Fine Art of the Slade and the MA History of Art of University College London. They are currently based in Athens. They have been awarded the G&A Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize 2022 for their work ‘Tender shell geophilia’, and they have both received the ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship.

For photo materials visit the project’s press kit, which will constantly be updated during the course of the project.

Visiting Hours
Thursday–Saturday
17:00–21:00

Free admission with pre-booking

Contact
For more information, please contact ATOPOS cvc at [email protected]
or visit the websites:
atopos.gr/occupyatopos-eleniriga-the-office-of-hydrocommons
facebook.com/atoposcvc
instagram.com/atoposcvc

Facebook Εvent
https://fb.me/e/Xm43D7vj

There is a house built by desire itself. It is a house that envelops a fabled story, as those you would find on the walls of a dreamy Renaissance villa furnished with enchanting frescoes and mellow tapestries, a dwelling vivified by lavish banquets and elegant inhabitants, enclosed by gardens sprouting balsamic aromas. Please step forward and smile: today you are invited to enter Sofia Stevi’s “When We Start to Understand the World”, an exhibition that pivots around a monumental trilogy of fabric paintings, casting its guests in an intimate adventure of introspection and discovery.

The journey is exuberant and pensive: expect a relentless palette of reds and greens, pinks and yellows, blues and oranges, all convened in an incessant and tumultuous festival moving fast and steady in the shape of bulging clouds, hazy vapours, watery streams, and mineral edges. The sincere colours springing from Stevi’s inventive brush embrace and cuddle the viewer’s eyes with joyfulness and charisma, as the accomplishment of a skilful director.

Sofia Stevi (born in Athens 1982), a graduate of Central Saint Martin’s School of Art & Design in London, lives and works in Athens.Her paintings are interpretations of materiality through fluid narratives.Time and space are conflating, in a universe where dream is a basic construct of the everyday experience, bodies are in flux and chance acquires a permanent substance.

Selected exhibitions include: The Sky above the roof, group show at Tabula Rasa, Beijing; Song without an ending, solo show at Le Quai Monte Carlo; The Wave, public mural in Athens, produced by Onassis Foundation (2022); Touch, 16:9 billboard, Kingsgate Project Space, London (2022), Meeting House, duo show with Rachel Howard at Galeria Pelaires, Palma (2021), the somnambulists, solo show at Alma Zevi Gallery, Venice (2021), we don’t have to learn something new, solo show at Pippy Houldsworth, London (2019), turning forty winks into a new decade, solo show at the BALTIC museum, Gateshead, UK, (2018), lizzie & laura, solo show at The Breeder gallery, Αthens (2017), The Equilibrists– Benaki Museum, Athens, co-organised with the New Museum in New York and DESTE Foundation,curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Helga Christoffersen (2016).She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).

SOFIA STEVI
WHEN WE START TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
March 23, 2023–April 29, 2023
The Breeder, Athens

Sofia Stevi_When We Start to Understand the World

The Breeder is pleased to present “Not Allowed for Algorithmic Audiences”, Kyriaki Goni’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Kyriaki Goni’s practice is rooted in digital interventions, spatial installations and moving image and interrogates alternative networks of care and community, as well as human and other-than-human relations through new technologies.

Taking over The Breeder Feeder, “Not Allowed for Algorithmic Audiences” is a video installation also incorporating tangible objects like drawings on paper and a rare earth elements collection. In the video a fictional virtual assistant under the wake word name ‘Voice’ exhibits an odd behaviour. They borrow an avatar and appear in front of their users. The virtual assistant goes into seven monologues for seven consecutive days during a hot August, before their patent expires and they get kicked out from the Athenian apartment to an e-waste dump.

While active, Voice has managed to scan the entire contents of the Internet and gather all sorts of information, information that they long to share. The virtual assistant uses their seven brief monologues as an opportunity to introduce themselves. They talk about their skills, their ancestors, the rare earth elements they are made of, as well as voice and its significance. They reveal information regarding the listening infrastructures as well as the social dysfunctions and stereotypes, on which their programming and operation are based. Listening infrastructures, surveillance and the climate crisis are also part of the narration. Just before they reach the end of their monologues, in a final effort to reconcile humans and machines, they share tips with humans on how they can manage not to be heard by algorithms online.

The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti describes voice as “a unique audio footprint of a human’s soul”. Speaking is an integral part of everyone’s individual identity, it carries the past and present. What are these voice assistants to us? How are they trained to detect our physical and emotional states in order to predict our desires, fears, sickness and needs, harvesting at the same time our behavioural surplus? How do voice user interfaces and listening infrastructures reflect the past in the gender and race bias that they carry in them?

The virtual assistant’s avatar is modelled on the face of the Greek actress Sofia Kokkali, who also lends them her voice.

This artwork was developed within the framework of the Ars Electronica ArtScience Residency enabled by Art Collection Telekom in partnership with the Johannes Kepler University. The installation is part of the Art Collection Telekom.

Kyriaki Goni is a media artist based in Athens. Recent solo shows were presented at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds (2023); Drugo More, Rijeka (2023); SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen; KVOST Art Collection Telekom, Berlin; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Drugo More, Rijeka; Aksioma, Ljubljana. Group exhibitions include 2nd Warsaw Biennale, 8th Gherdeina Biennale, Ars Electronica, Modern Love, 24th Thessaloniki Photobiennale, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale2020, 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, Trondheim International biennale, NVG Triennial Melbourne. Her work is part of several collections (Yerassimos Yiannopoulos, Art Telekom, Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative etc).

She has been commissioned by organisations including the Shanghai Biennale, the Gherdeina Biennale, the Warsaw Biennale, the Onassis Foundation, PCAI, Ars Electronica, Art Collection Telekom. Her work received prizes and fellowships from Allianz Kulturstiftung and Bertelmanns Stiftung and Telekom, the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, Greece, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. She has participated in art residencies of Ars Electronica and Delfina Foundation, among others.

She often lectures, writes and gives talks. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts (Athens School of Fine Arts). Prior to that she obtained graduate and postgraduate degrees on Social and Cultural Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens and Leiden University, Netherlands.

special thanks to @backtothefuture_furniture

KYRIAKI GONI
NOT ALLOWED FOR ALGORITHMIC AUDIENCES
March 23, 2023–April 29, 2023
The Breeder Feeder

Contemporary sculptor Augustus Veinoglou presents “Crossbreeds”, an exhibition that invites viewers to reflect on relics/remnants that will be revealed in the future as defined through processes of transformation and hybridization.

The exhibition features a series of new sculptures and drawings that simulate the process of fossilization through the use of porcelain, paper mâché, and different plastic parts from the
automobile industry and other machinery. His sculptures appear as relics or dug-up findings, using disparate materials and forms to create crossbreeds between skeletal structures, architectural furnishings, and mechanical objects. The objects present a haunting yet alluring vision of a dystopian or dreamlike future, where objects from different time periods and technologies have merged to create a material hybrid universe.

The drawings in “Crossbreeds” explore the transformation of natural forms through the incorporation of minerals, microplastics and uncanny architectures. They create an ecosystem of this future, providing a structural impression of what our natural environment could become. The drawings are floating worlds, isolated in paper, drawing attention to elements of plasticity and perplexity. Through “Crossbreeds”, Veinoglou presents a world where the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the past and the future, and the animate and the inanimate blur and ultimately dissolve. The exhibition challenges viewers’ preconceived notions of what is natural and artificial and forces us to confront the possibility of a future where its monuments will also include
curious hybrid findings composed of parts from our present time.

*Augustus Veinoglou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2018)

CROSSBREEDS
Augustus Veinoglou
30 March – 6 May 2023

Address: Andrea Metaxa 25, Exarcheia, Athens
Info: [email protected] & www.potentialproject.gr
Opening: Thursday 30 March, 19:00-22:00
Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday 18:00-21:00 & Saturday
12:00-17:00

Natalia Papadopoulou’s solo exhibition entitled “Entrails” is a combined work of visual and sound fragments, emerging through fluid and liquid bodies of the mind. She herself creates a situation that deals with multi-layered and delicate veils of displacements of an existential vortex, in which she aspires to absorb the viewer into the subtle and gentle rawness of the self. Kaleidoscopically, with larger and smaller fractions, she pulls out pieces and throws them fiercely on the rocks, where they dissolve and wash out like a light wave at our feet, as a unique experience.

Faidra Vasileiadou
museologist – curator

*Natalia Papadopoulou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020)

ENTRAILS
A solo show by Natalia Papadopoulou
OPENING: 27/04 | 19:00 – 22:00
DURATION: 28/04 – 27/05
VISITING HOURS: 28-29/04 19:00 – 22:00, ΤUE 17:00 – 21:00, Sat 13:00 – 17:00 and by appointment

One Minute Space
Marathonos 71, Athens 10435

www.one-minute-space.org
T: +30 6949085521
[email protected]

“nοthing good lasts”
Adam Christensen, Sophio Medoidze, Louisa Ntourou, Paola Revenioti, Driant Zeneli
Curated by Panos Fourtoulakis

Wednesday April 26, 20.00
Vatsaxi 6, terrace
Athens

Sophio Medoidze, Xitana ხითანა, 5’53”, 2019
Sophio Medoidze, Jackals and Drones (Chronicles of A Summer), 16′, 2018
Driant Zeneli, The firefly keeps falling and the snake keeps growing, 11’46”, 2022
Louiza Ntourou, Chronicle, 4’09”, 2022
Paola Revenioti, TikTok diaries, 5′, 2023
Adam Christensen, The Last Fucking Rave, 12’03”, 2012
Adam Christensen, Death by Mystery II, 15’21”, 2020

Thankful to Ηaus N

*Panos Fourtoulakis is SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2021) in curating.

Katerina Kotsala’s artistic practice revolves around the troubled relationship between nature and human, the manifestation of universal issues such as birth and death in the natural environment, and the coexistence between human and non-human living beings. The exhibition ‘Moving a Mountain’ features her works from the last three years, a largescale painting, sculptural installations and mosaics.

In Kotsala’s universe, tropical forests, exotic birds, strange creatures meet, clash, adapt, and regenerate in otherwise complex relationships. Her works function as fragmentary narratives across species, suggesting imaginative, almost dystopian futures. Humans and non-humans are bound together, they contaminate each other, they necessarily adapt in need of survival, they move forward despite the challenges.

Katerina Kotsala joins the current discourse around critical climate change, focusing on the urgency of a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness between nature and humans, and through her works a series of questions arise. How can we as humans experience and visualise the nonhuman? What alternative, non-human stories are to be told amid climate catastrophes? How does adaptability, resilience and survival reveal itself in a context of a climate emergency across species?

The conceptual framework is deeply inspired by the anthropologist Anna Tsing’s important contribution in contemporary ecological thought, particularly concerning the notion of “contaminated diversity”, which gives prominence to humble non-human, ecological narratives, and highlights the necessity of entanglement and adaptation in precarious conditions.

Kotsala’s painting practice overflows with deceptively idyllic landscapes, at times overwhelmingly euphoric, which despite the intense and mesmerizing colours, reveal an uneasy, almost ominous atmosphere. In her work ‘Moving A Mountain’ the brushstrokes consisting of a variety of contrasting textures, structures, patterns and bold colour combinations, conjure up a simultaneously paradisal, other-worldly and menacing landscape. Appropriating exoticized representations of nature, Kotsala disrupts the promise of harmony we experience in nature, while commenting on how the natural landscape today is more consumed, rather than experienced.

In her sculptural works, she brings together mostly natural materials, which she manipulates through the arduous, meditative and tactile process of mosaics. The creatures that arise after such an improbable collision of materials and techniques seem to have escaped from imaginary non-anthropocentric narratives, as in the work ‘CREATURES | How Can A Blind Bird Fly’. In her sculptural work, she often works with found objects, particularly from the natural environment, with which she experiments with concealing and revealing them. Interestingly, she employs natural materials, usually pistachio shells, glass and stone which are intrinsically difficult to be manipulated and to adapt.

The exhibition develops as a reflection around human and nature relationship, and at the same time as an intimate contemplation on motherhood; an ever-evolving mixture of tenderness and ferocity, nourishment and threat.

Dimitra Tsiaouskoglou Athens, 2023

Katerina Kotsala | “Moving a Mountain”
ΑΚ38, Αrmatolon & Klefton 38, 11471, Athens
Opening: Thursday May 4 , 19.00-22.00
Duration: 04/05/23 – 03/06/23
Thursday, & Friday: 18.00-21.00, Saturday: 12.00-15.00

Nicole Economides and her work Illusion of home, as a memory (Ενθύμιο από το Πάσχα / Keepsake from Easter) will be the second presentation of the one work show series opening on May 9. Economides is a painter working and living in Athens and in the US. Through the use of semiotic elements, she explores feelings of nostalgia, home and finding one’s identity while crossing the Atlantic bidirectionally. Her conceptual paintings remind the spectator of longing as well as recollecting.

Nicole Economides (b.1992) is an artist based in Athens and New York. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York (2019) and a BFA from the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina (2016). Her practice explores the notions of heterotopic spaces and migration mainly through painting installations. Through nostalgic symbols and imagery, she interrogates the expressions of national and personal identity memory.

Nicole Economides is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2022

Νicole Economides | “Illusion of home, as a memory”
09 May – 03 June 2023
Opening day: 09 May 2023, 7 pm – 9 pm

On Thursday, May 4 th from 19:00 to 22:00, Fotini Palpana ‘s first solo exhibition titled “View of Us”, curated by Dimitris Foutris, opens at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center. The exhibition will be on view until 22.07.2023.

Continuing a long-term processing of our relationship with the natural world and the landscape genre, Foteini Palpana invites us to wander within a fractured environment of
masses and surfaces that unfold in space and carry the characteristics of geological formations and human bodies alike. The present exhibition is a development of her work shown at the first Ios Art Residency, in the island of Ios, in August of 2022. In this work, entitled Islands grow – Islands fluctuate, Palpana deals with the perpetual shaping and constant transformation of the landscape, where the possibility of access, viewing the beauty of the environment and contact with this common good, is intercepted and delimited by the human factor.

Through her latest work, she turns to claiming the ground/environment as the natural space of our [common] senses. Her work expands on the floor as well as vertically in a sculptural installation which combines coarse construction materials, drawings sewn up in fabric and video. Rocky configurations shaped out of intense painterly gestures together with slender hollow forms and abstract shapes, introduce a narrative about issues as fundamental and familiar as our bodies or our geological surroundings.

The moving image element of the video View of Me, has a special role in this exhibition. Created back in 2017, this work is yet another initiating point for the whole installation, referring to the mechanics and the bodily rhythms that are involved in the making of the sculptural object. Going back to the body and the ground as form and matter, while maintaining the reminiscence of landscape contemplation, Palpana provides us access to a place of primordial connections, where geological, human and manufactured bodies surround, compress, strain, crush, in other words coexist in a symbiotic relationship of exchanging attributes and properties.

FOTEINI PALPANA | View of Us
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
Curated by Dimitris Foutris
Opening May 4, 19:00 to 22:00
Until 22.07.2023.

“It’s only when we look with the eyes of love that we see what the painter sees.”
-Henry Miller

The Breeder is pleased to present “Looking with the Eyes of Love”, a group exhibition curated by Aristeidis Lappas with works by Athens based artists Claudio Coltorti, Lydia Delikoura, Iasonas Kampanis, Bety Krňanská, Konstantinos Lianos, Ioanna Limniou, Lara Nasser, Alexandros Simopoulos, Stephani x Irini, Kyvèli Zoi.

The exhibition sheds light on different aspects of the painting process, aspiring to introduce the viewers to the inner dialogs that artists experience when engaging in their practice. The works on show present the process of dialoguing with the paintings, which become the outcomes of those internal conversations.

Framed as the mental space where these conversations take place, the exhibition is seen as a room filled with energies constantly transforming, that shift in and out of recognizable images. Taking the form of memories, haunting thoughts, and intimate moments, they present each artist’s distillation of these sensations into pictorial subjects.

Consumed by their emotions, a painter must be able to understand and redirect their trajectories toward a place of equilibrium. Find their voice in them, feel comfortable with them, and thus learn to coexist.

These energies manifest themselves in everything an artist faces – their desires for belonging and affection, confrontations with history, as well as the challenge of giving form to that which does not yet have one. Asking these questions, the painter tries to find their own truth within the medium and in this act, materializes the essence of their own existence.

In this interchanging current of emotions, they find honesty towards a greater beauty, surfacing the pulse in the beating heart of creativity. This is the act of love in painting.

Participating Artists:
Claudio Coltorti, Lydia Delikoura, Iasonas Kampanis, Bety Krňanská, Konstantinos Lianos, Ioanna Limniou, Lara Nasser, Αlexandros Simopoulos, Stephani x Irini, Kyvèli Zoi.

Opening: Thursday 11 Μay, 19:00 – 22:00
Exhibition Dates: 11 Μay – 30 June 2023
The Breeder, Feeder

*Aristeidis Lappas, Iasonas Kampanis, Alexandros Simopoulos and Kyvèli Zoi are visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

On Saturday, May 13, opbo studio presents Janis Rafa’s first solo exhibition in Greece, curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. Under the title “Riddles for resilient tongues”, the exhibition includes a new series of drawings and sculptural works by the artist where the mouth is perceived as its main axis for exploring issues of power, dominance and submission, and their psychosocial and political cartography, not only among humans but also among all species. Along with these works, Lacerate (2020), the short film by Rafa presented at the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2022, will be presented for the first time in Athens. The exhibition will last until June 17.

“Riddles for resilient tongues” launches opbo studio as an art space with a series of exhibitions curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. The program includes a series of solo shows focusing on the political and poetic qualities of seduction as a means of exploring issues of collective and individual identities.

Curatorial Text:
“Riddles for resilient tongues”

I read a quote I liked the other day. It’s by James Baldwin and it goes: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” Yet, what happens when words don’t come as clear as bones, when the complexity of history, trauma, power, but also desire, affect, tenderness, generosity and empathy, doesn’t allow for singular approaches and meanings, but instead makes things scattered and giddy and unable to be uttered by the already existing means that language provided us with?

“Riddles for resilient tongues”, the solo exhibition of Janis Rafa, through a new series of drawings and sculptural works coming along with her film Lacerate (2020), traces the mouth as its main axis to speak about power plays, dominations and submissions, mechanisms of control, the undoubted value of consent, the indisputable significance of agency and along with them, their psychosocial and political cartographies; not only among us, human beings, but among all species

Shrieking whispers lingering over the unspoken words of tongues once tamed, love letters composed for grievances and losses, still waters echoing the thirst of carrying the weight of existence, or of a labour unwanted or unwaged, they all come together asking the question: What’s the sound of a multiverse where all of the world’s oxymora reside?
The piercing silence revealing the oscillations of exploitations of animals, the high-pitched chasm disclosing the wounds of mistreatments of humans, co-exist with a polyphony of voices praising interpersonal, consensual, libidinal forces and pleasures lived or imagined; these are the subtle poetics and politics of Rafa’s work. Through this series of gestures, Riddles for resilient tongues does not aim to aesthetize objects that have been used as controlling tools, but to instead emphasize on the subtle or abrupt, temporal or perpetuated, exercises of deceptions and entrapments; her gestures aim to speak about their problematic, uncanny nature when consent can’t be spoken, when voices are muzzled or unheard.

Through encountering these qualities, the exhibition brings in the forefront subjects thinking through gender roles and dynamics, domestic and non-domestic environments, impositions of hierarchical structures occurring in spaces, supposedly safe. It longs to make us, audiences, active observants of a spatial choreography that requires an unlearning of the domineering, canonized gaze. And through this subversion, others times and spaces and worlds are unleashed, exposing that which hides under the phenomenically pleasing, speaking the story of unwilling suppression and wounding hierarchy.

Yet, these worlds, find themselves in parallel with their opposites, with omniverses some call dirty and untamed, which yet, do allow the space for empowerment, growth and self-advocacy, when built in mutuality. How can these controlling, manipulative tools, symbolically disclose other longings and belongings when used in interpersonal, consensual, pleasurable acts? How close can we look at this other hedonism, without criticizing it, without appending demonic connotations on it, without letting our entitlement to exclude it as vulgar? By touching, looking with and listening through these contradictory schemes, Riddles for resilient tongues is an invitation towards resisting and fighting against oppressive mechanisms, whilst licking our wounds, loving our otherness, owning our raptures.

— Ioanna Gerakidi

Janis Rafa (b.1984, Greece) lives and works between Amsterdam and Athens. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie (NL, 2013/14) and a Fellow at ARTWORKS (GR, 2020). Her work was presented last year at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022). Her body of work combines film, video installation, sculpture and drawing, in which the nonhuman, non-logocentric agency is recognised in order to reveal political and ethical dimensions, as another kind of archaeology. Her recent work has been supported by ART for the World, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Mondriaan Fund, Netherland Film Fund and Greek Film Center.

Info:
opbo studio, 86 Filonos, Piraeus, 18536
Exhibition Opening: 13 May 2023, 19.00
Duration: 13 May – 17 June 2023
Opening hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 18.00 – 20.00
Free entrance
opbostudio.com | Instagram | Facebook

Myrto Xanthopoulou – Panos Iliopoulos
“εδώ μέσα εκατοικούσε”
Video art / Music
May 8 – 14 2023, Athens & Epidaurus Festival Instagram & Facebook
–

*Myrto Xanthopoulou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020)

The collective performance “I heard them singing in the mountains” consists of a walk through the public spaces of the Kairi Arcade – and the gunsmithing shop of Thodoros Papaioannou – in the center of Athens, intending to temporarily appropriate and contemplate it through the multiple stories it reveals. The arcade functions simultaneously as an empty shell and as a microcosm of the city’s commercial triangle, incorporating in visible or more discreet ways the echo of the changes that the latter constantly undergoes. Its architectural space acts as an occasion for a group tour framed by imaginative elements that touch on concepts and comment on situations such as touristification, nostalgia, expectation, geography, the city as a countryside in constant evolution, the coexistence of past and future, and the potential of collectivity.How can a place and its history be transformed into one or more narratives in order for them to resonate in a range that exceeds its geographical boundaries?

The performance is the result of a methodology of collective creative process and co-direction that began in October 2022 with the participation of all artists. Part of the process includes researching the history of the arcade and working with the owners of the commercial shops in the arcade, whose narratives were the trigger and inspiration for the realization of the project. Thus, the process itself is both a methodology and an artwork presented in the form of a video in the basement of the arcade.

The collective project “I heard them singing in the mountains” is a continuation of the group exhibition I heard it from the valleys4 that took 3 / 4 place at Haus N (on the 2nd floor of the Kairi Arcade) in October 2021. Both actions are the results of Eva Vaslamatzi’s curatorial research around manifestations of everyday traditional and folk elements through the production of visual artworks.

The project would not have been possible without the support of the owners of the arcade, Alexandros Drakopoulos and Kostas Papaioannou, as well as the manager of the arcade, Eleni Petrekas.

With the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development.

Collective performance “I heard them singing in the mountains”*
11-14.05.2023 6pm, 7pm
Kairi Arcade, Athens

With: Larissa Araz, Filia Dendrinou, Anastasia Douka, Dimitra Kondylatou, Evi Souli, Eva Vaslamatzi, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas, Kostas Tzimoulis)
Concept/Curation: Eva Vaslamatzi

*Reference to the track “The Valleys” by the indie rock band Electrelane which is inspired by the poem “A Letter Home” by Siegfried Sassoon. The song refers to waiting for a lost loved one who through dreams may return, focusing on the power of the dream to bring him back (“We know such dreams are true.”).

Eva Vaslamatzi is an SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow (2019).

Toni Brell and Angeliki Tzortzakaki will tell stories of socio-geo-ecological entanglements through the fictionalised setting of a night boat, inspired by the multilayered history of the Finlandia cruise ship that between 1975 and 1988 sailed around the Baltic Sea under different identities. Wrapped into the format of a ghost sea-vessel story, they will research and speak about the changing landscapes and scenarios that we are haunted by due to a perennial planetary crisis. Brell and Tzortzakaki are artists-in-residence of Research Pavilion #5.

Toni Brell (DE) and Angeliki Tzortzakaki (GR) have been working and thinking together for some time now. Their trajectories crossed when they started collaborating for the performance collective Scores for Gardens, blending interdisciplinary research with performance. Both spending most of their time in Amsterdam, they have been working together in other circumstances as well such as the collaboration with visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta.

The night boat project
In the vastness of the night and the deepness of the ocean, a floating body traverses. Slow but steady, accompanied by the lingering hum of its engine. This body-vessel is unlike any other boat: it’s an obscure mechanic configuration whose destination is uncertain and can only be seen or heard after sundown. It carries dreams or nightmares, faded out memories, fictions, illusions and origin stories around the ever-evolving seas. This very ocean, whose darkness comes in waves, or calm velvet surfaces, is another not unrelated story. It bears the exhausted geographies and marine ecologies of the Baltic, but also exceeds the normativity of a contained body of water. Thus, the night boat’s journey is not linear. It is this anti-narrative that the vessel helps us to pass through: Its capacity to carry and be carried enables a different way of thinking through temporalities, storytelling, proximity, scale and the self. If a night boat is a body in search of something lost, how do we navigate our (un)human geographies and fleeting states of existence?

Toni Brell’s and Angeliki Tzortzakaki ‘s Research Pavilion residence will take place in Saari Residence from 16 May to 28 May 2023.

More info: https://blogit.uniarts.fi/en/post/night-boats-the-case-of-golden-princess/

Angeliki Tzortzakaki is an SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow (2021).