Category: Fellows/Grantees

When was the last time that you inadvertently broke out a little smile? Or felt warm inside, albeit fleetingly? Or your body and mind were moved, even if just by a tiny bit? When was the last time that you observed or obsessed with a fragment that points somewhere else but is so powerful in and of itself? Anxious about its sweeping force, we often forget the love that is in the details. Unruly, ungovernable, radical, delirious, transformative love inhabits everything that it is part of, no matter how small. These fragments, details of an ever expansive, changing cosmic flow, once released and observed, are capable of raising waves. Beyond the categories of the human, beyond attempts to define or control it, love is a catalyst of change, perhaps the most powerful. Its pieces, like transgressive undercurrents, set the pace, they track the movement, like the bass hitting the body allowing for the melody to travel, change and express itself.

The artists who are part of this initiative are asked to send their details of love, to share a piece that perhaps has been operating alone somewhere, which, once in focus, can emanate new light and foster new connections, by becoming part of a networked expression of love in all its forms, registers and channels.

Moving like vessels in the sea, details of love produce waves that can travel its expanse until the shore feels their impact, big or small. Aware of the depths of the world beneath them and of its currents, they precipitate like foam that fleetingly marks its vast, fluid surface. The inaugural SECCMA Trade, curated by Kostas Stasinopoulos, looks at the details of community, solidarity, collectivity and of loving. Details of Love forms a collection of different things that are important to those who love and a connection across shared principles that have allowed their existence.

Text by Kostas Stasinopoulos

All profits of SECCMA Trade: Details of Love will be donated to Emantes International LGBTQIA+ Solidarity , a charitable social cooperative enterprise that provides psychosocial support to LGBTQIA+ refugees/migrants.

With works by Chioma Ebinama, Adham Faramawy, Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Pennie Key, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Karolina Krassouli, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Spyros Rennt, Giles Round, Sin Wai Kin, Himali Singh Soin, P. Staff, Bones Tan Jones, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen.

SECCMA Trade is an initiative of SERAPIS & SECCMA Trust* that expresses a vision of synergy and community through art projects based on exchange and support. It forms a network or a hub port of collaboration in order to establish a method of ever-expanding openness.

*SECCMA Trust is a creative venture of SERAPIS that aims to form an alliance supporting the growth and expansion of contemporary art locally and internationally.

Preview: Saturday 2 April, 4-9pm at SECCMA Trust, Likomidon 13, Athens GR

Pennie Key, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Karolina Krasouli and Spyros Rennt are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows. 

The weather is a dynamic system of pressure, temperature and humidity. It manifests through maps, media, and simulations while it touches the skin. Weather is felt unevenly, from extremes to mundane mildness of a breeze. Some are exposed, some are sheltered; weather wears some down, some gain profit.

“Weather Engines” is an art exhibition and a program of talks, performances and workshops taking place at ONASSIS STEGI and the National Observatory of ATHENS (Thissio). It explores weather as a complex system, as observation and control, and as a lived experience. The projects and events refer to natural phenomena and climate change, past and contemporary strategies of engineering the weather, as well as to different sociopolitical atmospheres related to breathing and living. Approaching the models and systems of art as techniques of knowledge, “Weather Engines” addresses the need for climate justice, and for embracing the surrounding more-than-human world(s).

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication “Words of Weather: A glossary” that maps terms for a political ecology of experience.

EXHIBITION PARTICIPANTS
Kat Austen, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Felipe Castelblanco, Kent Chan, Coti K., Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, DESIGN EARTH, Matthias Fritsch, Geocinema, Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Hypercomf, Lito Kattou, Zisis Kotionis, Manifest Data Lab, Barbara Marcel, Matterlurgy, Petros Moris, Sybille Neumeyer, Afroditi Psarra & Audrey Briot, Susan Schuppli, Rachel Shearer & Cathy Livermore, Stefania Strouza, Superflux, Paky Vlassopoulou, Thomas Wrede

CURATORS
Daphne Dragona & Jussi Parikka

* Hypercomf (Paola Palavidi, Ioannis Koliopoulos), Petros Moris, Stefania Strouza and Paky Vlassopoulou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

More info here

With the exhibition Waste/d Pavilion, episode 1, the Temporary Academy of Arts (Elpida Karaba, Yota Ioannidou, Vangelis Vlahos, Despina Zefkili) inaugurates its collaboration with State of Concept Athens, by taking over its artistic directorship for a year and presenting Waste/d Pavilion, a project which comprises exhibitions, public events, performances, educational activities, screenings, lectures, workshops, discussions and readings around the thematic axes of waste, surplus and abject

Participants: Nikos Arvanitis, Ege Berensel, Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, Peggy Zali and Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Jumana Manna, Dimitra Kondylatou, Fred Lonidier, Armando Lulaj, Tatiana Mavromati and Laura Maragoudaki, Tina Pandi and Marina Markellou.

At the opening, composer Georgia Kalodiki will present a 45′ real time soundscape performance, live electronics.
The performance starts at 21:00.

Waste/d Pavilion unfolds through a series of “episodes,” focusing on different thematics: labor, body, ecology, and language. Artists, researchers, and scientists from Greece and abroad have been invited to present different conceptualisations of the notion of Waste/d, through various ways of viewing, circulating, and developing methodologies for an anti-Waste/d front.

“For Work, about Work, by Work.” These words, used by American artist Fred Lonidier – a core member of the San Diego group that adopted the methods of conceptual art for the purpose of social documentation in the 1970s – to describe the essence of his work, could serve as a leitmotif for the first episode of the Waste/d Pavilion. Although Waste/d does not focus on a strictly delimited theme, episode 1 revolves around different waste/d bodies and places and their claims. Looking at labor in the cultural sector itself, such as the violent occupation of the National Theater in Tirana, where art became a front for the controversial real estate projects of former artist and current Prime Minister Edi Rama.

What are the new wastes of the ongoing “crisis,” with the current war bringing to the fore how expendable and exhaustible human lives are and reminding us once again of the urgency of the energy-related crisis. Can we attempt to write a new social contract? And what can be the role of art and culture in that?

The opening text “Europe after Eurocentrism?” by Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, included in the publication accompanying episode 1, invites us to rethink the European project in a global context, characterized by mass migration, the challenges of establishing new forms of citizenship, and the new forms of oppression produced by war and climate change.

Waste/d Pavilion is part of State of Concept Athens’ new research chapter ‘Coalition of the Care-full’, a project of the European Pavilion, an international programme of the European Cultural Foundation in collaboration with Camargo Foundation, Fondazione CRT, and Cultura Nova Foundation, in which six cultural organizations from Europe participate: Studio Rizoma Palermo, Arna Vombsjösänkan, Iniva London, L’Internationale, Brunnenpassage Vienna and State of Concept Athens.

Τhe European Pavilion enables cultural spaces to experiment and reflect on Europe. To question, discuss and define what Europe is and what it could become in the future. To tell stories, to imagine, to question. Is there a more appropriate venue for such an undertaking than the European Pavilion?

The Coalition of the Care-full research chapter is funded by the European Cultural Foundation.

Waste/d is an ongoing art and pedagogy research project on social and artistic potential in times of extended crisis, by the Temporary Academy of Arts, PAT (Elpida Karaba, Despina Zefkili, Yota Ioannidou, Vangelis Vlahos). Waste/d involves research and production of new theory and artistic projects, creating alliances among practitioners from different localities, as well as art and scientific fields and taking various forms (books, lectures, interviews, seminars, performances, live events).

The Temporary Academy of Arts was initiated by Elpida Karaba in 2014. PAT (the abbreviation of Temporary Academy of Arts / Προσωρινή Ακαδημία Τεχνών) is a mobile academy of arts and at the same time an art project of experimental education that adopts mechanisms from various systems of knowledge and art practices for the production and transmission of artistic programs and the construction of their historicity. PAT is a para-institution engaged with a range of activities involved in different levels of institution affiliations. It depends on an ‘expanded’ curating, incorporating exhibitions, events and publishing projects persistently addressing the relationship of art and its institutions, the labour involved and the public.

The Academy is working upon different educational, artistic and social models and adopts a research based and multidisciplinary approach to knowledge production, in order to investigate the boundaries, permeabilities and repressed contradictions that underlie public spaces. Rather than being merely an educational platform or an art school, PAT functions as an analytical tool, concentrating on spatial and institutional criticism. PAT’s projects, combine the symbolic with the mediated and the tactical in order to examine art and its production, inquire on the status and potential of art to address the urban condition and to question the mechanisms of producing and framing knowledge.In each project of the Academy, different artists and theorists are invited as educators, visitors or as consultants to organize and carry out the outcome of the project while different modes of art and educational practice are used, such as workshops, discussions, interviews, performances, (re)enactments etc.

April 7th – May 21st, 2022, State of Concept Athens
Opening : Thursday April 7, 6 – 10 pm

Ileana Arnaoutou is awarded -jointly with Ismene King- the 2nd G&A Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize for their work “Tender shell geophilia”

Ileana Arnaoutou (b.1994) graduated in 2017 from the Slade School of Fine Art, and in 2018 from University College London from the MA Art History programme. She focuses on painting, drawing and sculpture. Recent exhibitions include ‘ATHENSYN II: Going Viral’, Steinzeit gallery, Berlin (2022), ‘21! Contemporary Greek Painting’, Archeological Museum of Agios Nicholaos, Crete (2021), ‘APOTROPAION’, 16 Fokionos Negri – The Felios Collection, Athens (2021). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).

Plural Landscapes is an artistic research project that aims to locate the points where the transition and the fundamental antinomy between the scale of the digital and “material” within the representations of spaces and landscapes emerges. It emphasizes the primacy of the aesthetic as a pivotal field for new forms of understanding the planetary as an ecologic and conceptual whole, through artworks that explore the coexistence of the digital with the “material”. Through multimedia installations the project highlights the medium itself as critical to how scale is experienced in a visual way, and on its function within the construction of a wider aesthetic, a vision of the future of the human.

Participants :
Aris Anagnostopoylos
Kyriaki Goni
Konstantinos Lianos
Theo Triantafylidis

Curated by Aris Anagnostopoulos & Konstantinos Lianos

*Kyriaki Goni is SNF ARTWORKS Fellow

Duration:
Friday 1st of April (opening) 6pm to 11pm
Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd of April from 5pm to 9pm
Wednesday 6th to Sunday 10th of April from 5pm to 9pm
Wednesday 13th to Sunday 17th of April from 5pm to 9pm
Kalimnou 38, Athina, 112 51

KEIV
Kalimnou 38, Athina, 112 51

Funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture

‘…we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others’.
—Julia Kristeva

The Deep End draws on the anguish of being cut off, estranged, and exiled. It deals with moments when humans experience themselves as separate, tapping into a state of disconnectedness from earth or from one another. The deeper one sinks into this disorienting mood, the more inaccessible the world around them becomes. When even a return to everydayness and the guise of familiarity fail as inauthentic attempts to evade our ‘thrownness’, we find ourselves hovering over the weight of our own existence.

Humans move away from the state of awareness of their environment, thoughts, and sensations due to actions that render the world they live in uninhabitable. This experience is an underlying existential or ontological condition of humankind. It can lay bare the subjugation of the individual, reconciling oneself to the uncanniness of the world. This group show investigates the ways in which this speculative sense of outsiderness can be generated by specific modes of artistic practice that reciprocate a certain kind of encounter.

Without strictly speaking a specific set of stylistic techniques, the exhibition brings together richly varied works by artists who employ diverse material and aesthetic strategies across a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture and photography.

Some of the exhibited works confront the viewer because they are predicated upon a sense of collective uncertainty, while others allow space for the viewer to step into a zone of destabilization and defamiliarization through the confrontation with an unknowable vanishing point. These mechanisms become integral to the works’ psychological impact, probing the complexities of selfhood and identity and producing evocative and enigmatic narratives.

Curated by: Dinos Chatzirafailidis
Participating artists: Ellie Antoniou, Dario Carratta, Laetitia de Chocqueuse, Konstantinos Giotis, Johan F. Karlsson, Dimitris Kontodimos, Karolina Krasouli, Lulù Nuti, Yorgos Papafigos, Rudolf Steiner

*Konstantinos Giotis and Karolina Krasouli are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

THE DEEP END
Opening: 01/04/22, 19:00-22:00
Duration of exhibition: 01/04-16/04
Gallery hours: Tues, Wed, Fri: 17:00-21:00, Sat: 11:30-14:30

Two Thirds Project Space
Themistokleous 42, Exarchia, Athens
5th floor, #2

ARCAthens 5th Virtual Residency (AVR5) hosts the cross-cultural conversation between Le’Andra LeSeur, Maria Sideri (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow) and Lydia Matthews.
The residency will begin on March 7th, culminating with the Synopsis, a public event on Zoom on Sunday April 3rd.

You can find more info here.

NOTE: Two years since their last production Lucy. tutorial for a ritual, the collaboration between Martha Pasakopoulou and Aris Papadopoulos is in its essence put under the microscope and is examined as an attempt to perform friendship on stage. The two interpreters, but also friends, collaborators and artistic partners, delve into a common archive of movement material, dance practices and notes, which while drawing from the past is being constructed on stage. In the process of finding out what really matters, they re-shape it, reintroduce themselves and bring to surface that intangible in-between space. “The property of neither, the potentiality of both”. The audience is present as yet another viewpoint, a reflector of the duo’s friendship and its need to be witnessed.

arisandmartha is the creative collaboration between dancers, performers and markers Aris Papadopoulos and Martha Pasakopoulou. Based in Athens they work in the crossroads of dance, performance and site-specific exploring togetherness, friendship and otherness on stage, while experimenting on movement and performative tools under different conceptual ideas. Flexible and open to the double identity of performer – maker their work explores the ever-occurring question of discovering new creative grounds with each performative encounter. Together they have created the works touching.just (Aerowaves 2018 selection), 5 Steps to Save the World (Athens & Epidaurus Festival 2018), and Lucy. tutorial for a ritual (Athens & Epidaurus Festival 2019, 25th Kalamata International Dance Festival 2019). They have been supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (2018-22), FLUXUM Foundation – Geneva, KLAP Maison pour la danse – Marseille and Duncan Dance Research Center – Athens.

CREDITS
Concept-Choreography-Performance: arisandmartha | Aris Papadopoulos & Martha Pasakopoulou
Dramaturgy Consultant: Anastasios Koukoutas
Sound, Set & Costume Design: arisandmartha
Lighting Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Press-Communication: Evangelia Skrobola
Photography: Alaa Ghosheh
Production: arisandmartha
Kindly supported by the Duncan Dance Research Center – Athens With the financial support of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (2020-21) I

ΙNFORMATION Dates: 31 March, 1, 2, 3 April, 20:00pm Duration: 40′ Location: Former Industrial Park PLYFA, Koritsas 39, Votanikos

Tickets: https://www.ticketservices.gr/event/arisandmartha-all-that-matter/

http://www.arisandmartha.org/

*Martha Pasakopoulou is a dance SNF ARTWORKS Fellow

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