Author: gourgourini

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday, December 15 at the Old Oil Mill Factory during the closing ceremony of 2023 Eleusis, Mystery 1 CLOSING: OPENING, A Ceremony.

The installation touches upon the environmental destruction that the planet is experiencing today,starting from the coastal zone of Elefsina. Continuing her artistic work on the myth of Medea, Stefania Strouza chooses as a reference point Heiner Müller’s three-part play Verkommenes Ufer − Medeamaterial − Landschaft mit Argonauten [Despoiled Shore – Medeamaterial – Landscape with Argonauts] (1982). In this text, Medea is perceived as a “place” where memories and traumas of a violent patriarchal and consumerist world are embedded. The artist makes use of this interpretation and proceeds to identify Medea with Nature and with the land of Elefsina, taking into account the consequences of heavy industry as well as the corrosion of abandoned ships in the area.

The work is a sculptural installation in three distinct yet connected parts following the structure of Müller’s text. These parts are developed in space as islets and parts of a coastal area such as the bay of Elefsina.

Despoiled Shore refers to a “landscape with nature in decay”, as Müller himself describes it, where the traces of human pollution and destruction are visible. A floor-standing work as a conglomerate and an amalgam of natural and industrial materials suggests a landscape almost abandoned, with references to erosion, pollution and the overexploitation of nature.

Medeamaterial focuses on gender identity and inequality, but also on the agency and transformation of matter. A garment-sculpture made of transparent plastic with oxidized parts evokes the wedding dress with which Medea killed Glauce. It refers to the danger of invisible pollution and the socio-political atmosphere that surrounds and threatens entities and communities around the world.

Landscape with Argonauts is a reference to the collective unconscious of a modern society confronted with exploitation, destruction and its own responsibility. Aluminium sculptures refer to the mythological Argo, to the carcasses of decommissioned ships and to technological remnants. The landscape functions as a commentary on the desire for unchecked technological progress and forms of colonisation from the past to this day.

In this visual triptych, Medea as a place traumatised by human activity allows the relationships between nature and culture, resilience and decay, myth and reality to become visible, so that their connection and interdependence can be seen. Balancing between them as a techno-physical force, her character reveals, according to the artist, how myths can speak to the ruined landscapes of the Anthropocene and activate practices of collective knowledge and action through materiality itself.

Concept, Artwork: Stefania Strouza
Curatorial direction: Zoi Moutsokou – Director of Contemporary Art 2023 Eleusis
Exhibition Curator: Daphne Dragona
Detailed design & implementation: Ioannis Panagiotidis, qoop metalworks – Nikos Soulis
3D model design: qoop metalworks – Christos Gyftopoulos
Metal supporting structures: qoop metalworks
Project construction & supervision: Ioannis Panagiotidis
Lighting / electrical installation: Nikos Stamatopoulos
Project Coordination: Zoi Moutsokou, Zoi Drakopoulou
Production Assistants: Tsampika Kotoula, Simone Niarou
Production Management: DIADROMES POLITISMOU NPC
Materials sponsorship: Municipality workshops of Elefsina, EVOMAT – Pipilis Lime products

Mystery 87 I My Sea Journey, I My Land Claim
Dates 15.12.2023—11.02.2024
From December 15 to February 11, 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture presents Mystery 87 I My Sea Journey, I My Land Claim, the new sculpture installation by the acclaimed visual artist Stefania Strouza honoured with this year’s Art Athina Prize for young artists.

Information:
Duration: December 15, 2023 – February 11, 2024
Opening hours:
Wednesday to Friday, 17.00 – 20.00
Saturday & Sunday, 13.00 – 20.00
Location: Old Oil Mill Factory

Opening:
Friday, December 15 – 18.00 [during the closing ceremony of 2023 Eleusis, Mystery 1 CLOSING: OPENING, A Ceremony]

*Stefania Strouza is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2018

The entirety of a museum collection can never be permanently on show, as its size invariably exceeds the available exhibition space. Changing the presentation of the collection is necessary to renew the works, to showcase those that have not been seen before, and to demonstrate that a museum, as well as its collection, are lively entities, and not moribund apothecaries of the past. Moreover, as history is neither fixed, nor singular, the acquisitions policy of a museum of contemporary art should reflect this.

The exhibition, WOMEN, together, is the first re-hang of the museum’s collection in its permanent home, the former FIX brewery, since the initial presentation in 2019.

To address a major issue confronting all museums today: the under-representation of women and the urgency regarding gender equality – one of the main shared concerns underlying all ‘waves’ of feminism over the years, no matter how different – EMΣΤ has decided to make a bold statement with this exhibition and highlight exclusively the work of women artists in its collection.

Curated by Katerina Gregos and Eleni Koukou, WOMEN, together features works from EMΣΤ’s collection, including the first presentation of a number of works from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift to EMΣΤ, the most important and generous donation in the museum’s history.

There are a total of 49 works by 25 artists of different generations, ten of which are Greek. Twelve artists and 24 works are from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift, while twelve artists and 25 works are from the existing collection of ΕΜΣΤ. The exhibition also includes seven new acquisitions, as well as a new long-term loan of a major work by Etel Adnan (Lebanon), courtesy of the Saradar Collection (Paris/Beirut).

Although there is no single thematic narrative, as that would be restrictive within the framework of a collection exhibition, there are many common points of reference and dialogue as well as conceptual and aesthetic affinities between the works on view. The artists are preoccupied with a variety of issues, both related to gender and identity, as well as to social and political issues, and the entanglements between them. They also predominantly share an interest in materiality and the handcrafted, and the ephemeral nature of all things.

There are several works that incorporate and re-signify objects and materials extracted from the domestic/everyday environment which are transformed through meticulous manual sculptural processes, and fragile gestures. A preoccupation with the complexity of human existence is evident in several works, as is an interest in entropy, breakdown, decay, and fragility, reflecting the current state of uncertainty widely prevalent today. There are enquiries into the body as a site of contestation and the multiple renderings of its meaning in relation to domesticity, work, sexuality, and self-representation. While the majority of works are not focused on the female condition per se, there is an underlying preoccupation with questions of equity or oppression and difference.

Finally, there are artists who probe issues regarding history, memory and collective/cultural identities centring around the critical geopolitical position of Greece and its immediate geographic surrounds in the Mediterranean, Southeast Europe, the Middle East and the former Levant. These are the territories of the former Ottoman Empire and with them come a multitude of suppressed or marginalised histories that lay dormant in the wake of new nation building. The legacy and current history of this wider region with its rich historical, cultural, and socio-political narratives lie at the heart of EMΣΤ’s renewed collection policy.

Artists featured in WOMEN, together include: Etel Adnan (1925, Beirut, Lebanon), Diana Al-Hadid (1981, Aleppo, Syria), Ghada Amer (1963, Cairo, Egypt), Helene Appel (1976, Karlsruhe, Germany), Bertille Bak (1983, Arras, France), Karla Black (1972, Alexandria, UK), Hera Büyüktaşciyan (1984, Istanbul, Turkey), Christina Dimitriadis (1967, Thessaloniki, Greece), Marina Gioti (1972, Athens, Greece), Eleni Kamma (1973, Athens, Greece), Maria Loizidou (1958, Limassol, Cyprus), Tala Madani (1981, Tehran, Iran), Despina Meimaroglou (1944, Alexandria, Egypt), Annette Messager (1943, Berck-Sur-Mer, France), Tracey Moffatt (1960, Brisbane, Australia), Eleni Mylonas (1944, Athens, Greece), Rivane Neuenschwander (1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Cornelia Parker (1956, Cheshire, UK), Agnieszka Polska (1985, Lublin, Poland), Christiana Soulou (1961, Athens, Greece), Aspa Stassinopoulou (1935–2017, Athens, Greece), Maria Tsagkari (1981, Piraeus, Greece), Paky Vlassopoulou (1985, Athens, Greece), Aleksandra Waliszewska (1976, Warsaw, Poland), and Gillian Wearing (1963, Birmingham, UK).

This is not a feminist project is a collaborative artistic/curatorial scheme between 2 women (Vasia Ntoulia & Mare Spanoudaki) based in Athens, with a focus on feminist issues. Through the combination of different practices, it highlights neglected histories and memories, while amplifying voices of contemporary femininities in order to subvert deep-rooted stereotypes and dominant narratives associated with patriarchy.

The exhibit presents the course of the feminist movement in Greece from 1979 until today. It is based on the existing digital timeline of the online platform of This is not a
feminist project and includes archival material from the following institutions, initiatives, individuals and groups: Women's Archive “Delfys”, the General Secretariat for Family Policy and Gender Equality, the Center for Gender Studies of Panteion University, Kiouri@, Beaver, Gender Panic, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Emantes, Queer Ink, Ntizeza, Sex Harass Map, Orlando LGBT+ mental health beyond the stigma, Assembly for the 8th of March, Strap-On Unicorns, G – All, Historians on Research in the History of Women and Gender, Center of New Media and Feminist Public Practices.

WOMEN, together
New collection presentation
Curators: Katerina Gregos and Eleni Koukou
Level 3 Opening: Thursday 14 December 2024

*Maria Loizidou, Maria Tsagkari, Paky Vlassopoulou and Mare Spanoudaki are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

Shifting
shifting adjective UK /ˈʃɪf.tɪŋ/ US /ˈʃɪf.tɪŋ/ always changing or moving

Curated by Florent Frizet

w/
Despina Charitonidi

Leo Chesneau

Nadja Geer

Agata Ingarden

Katerina Komianou

Danai Kotsaki

Anna Lascari

Nicolas Melemis

Dimitris Tampakis

Eleni Tomadaki

Marios Stamatis

Camille Yvert

Opening Saturday 20/01/2024, 7-10pm

Until 17/02/2024

Opening hours Wed to Sat 4-8pm

One Minute Space
Marathonos 71, Athens 10435

T: +30 6949085521
[email protected]

*Katerina Komianou, Eleni Tomadaki & Marios Stamatis are SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellows

Despina Zacharopoulou (SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow  2021), Georgia Paizi (SNF ARTWORKS Dance Fellow 2021) and Dr Steriani Tsintziloni (member of the dance selection committee for the 3rd SNF Artist Fellowship Program by ARTWORKS) are the three finalists  in the Culture and Creativity Award category of the UK Alumni Awards in Greece.

For more information on the UK Alumni Awards 2024 in Greece, please visit:
https://www.britishcouncil.gr/en/study-uk/alumni-awards

For more information on this year’s finalists, please visit:
https://www.britishcouncil.gr/sites/default/files/alumni-awards-2024-greece-finalists.pdf

Despina Zacharopoulou’s (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2021) text “Contracts as Protocols of Governmentality in Performance Art” is now available as an Open Access article in Performance Research Journal ‘On Meeting’ Vol. 28, Issue 2 (2023), edited by Simon Bayly and Johanna Linslay. Cover Image: Mark Robson.

Abstract
This essay raises questions regarding meeting protocols as a form of art practice. Drawing on recent examples from my performance works, I initiate a discussion about how contracts in performance art might operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures towards other ways of ‘meeting with’. The term ‘governmentality’ is used to designate all those ‘regulatory apparatuses (dispositives)’ that exercise power via protocols of economy and circulation, to engender new subjectivities (Foucault 2007), whereas the term ‘morphogenesis’ is employed to describe processes where the genesis of forms follows a sensuous logic of structural disposition or tendency that organizes disparities of potential events. One could argue that in the 1970s, several performance artists adopted contractual methods of negotiating their meeting with an audience in order to critically expose the power dynamics existing within everyday hierarchical relations (O’Dell 1998). In so doing, contracts often demarcated the roles of the artist and the audience from the outset of the live work, as already fixed, separate subjectivities, thus sustaining binary essentialist categories (for example subject vs. object, and so on) as met within the philosophical tradition of dialectics (Golding 2021). However, in my performance works brought forward, contracts operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures governing the thickness and the porosity of boundaries within the ways that people come to meet with one another, without pre-determining any final outcomes or assigning specific roles to the parties involved. Contracts in this case establish a set of meeting protocols that generate and distribute intensities through the organization of areas of possibilities for the emergence of potential events. And it is within this shifting topography of events that subjectivities emerge through the ways that bodies affect and are affected by other bodies via processes of use.

For a full PDF version of Despina Zacharopoulou’s article, please visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13528165.2023.2260705?needAccess=true&fbclid=IwAR2acYHFiB-oWwzIMMv5OJtS35xA-vC9a_oyOJgGXmFdBHR_a21dEt3ICCw

For the whole Issue of Performance Research ‘On Meeting’, please visit:
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rprs20/28/2

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)