Category: Fellows/Grantees

Giorgos Zois – member of our selection committee for the Moving Image – goes to Cannes! His new movie Third Kind will premiere at Semaine de la Critique 2018.

Earth has been abandoned for a long time and humanity has found refuge in outer space. Three archaeologists return to Earth to investigate the origin of a mysterious five tone signal…

Yorgos Zois is a Greek director and producer. His body of work has been acknowledged at festivals worldwide (Venice, Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, Palm Springs, among others) winning various awards and distinctions. His first short film Casus Belli premiered in Venice in 2010 and travelled in more than one hundred film festivals, while it won in Greece the 2011 best short film award from the Greek Film Academy. His second short film, Out of Frame premiered at the 69th Venice Film Festival in 2012 and won the European Film Academy award. His first feature film Interruption made its worldwide premiere at the 72th Venice Film Festival in section Orizzonti. The film raised highly acclaimed reviews all around the world about its meta-aesthetics and daring narration, while praised European directors such as Ruben Ostlund and Roman Gavras have expressed their admiration for the film. In Greece, it received nine nominations from the Greek Film Academy and  it won the best newcomer director award. His latest short film called 8th Continent had its premiere as a special screening in the 74th Venice Film Festival, while Zois was also member of the Official Jury Best Debut Film – Lion of the Future.

ARTWORKS Fellows 2018 Stefania Strouza, along with Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos and Dimitra Dimopoulou from Serapis Maritime Corporation, participate in The Diary of a Seamstress; An imaginary biography curated by Effie Falida. The show runs through 26.05.2018.

Art meets fashion. Catalyst for this encounter of contemporary Greek artists, fashion designers and “craftsmen of fashion” has been the Notebook (dated 1958) of a seamstress, who studied at the Couture House of Tsopaneli.

The exhibition re-examines the Notebook of Marika Handji as starting point for the 18 invited artists and fashion designers, because it has the characteristic of “written fashion”, namely of fashion that is translated into language and design, with identifiable elements of new behavior (at savoir faire) and decorative abolition (at the patterns).

Participating artists: «A Whale’s Architects», Bespoke Athens (Vassilis Bourtzalas), ΦΙΡΜΑ GYPSY GLOBALES, Angelos Frentzos, Elias Kafouros , Demi Kaia, George Kalivis, Irini Karayannopoulou, Sophia Kokosalaki, Maria Mastori, Olga Miliaresi – Foka, Leda Papakonstantinou, Eva Papamargariti, Alexandros Psychoulis, Nana Sachini, Serapis Maritime Corporation, Stefania Strouza, Kostis Velonis, Zeus & Dione, Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation (from the archive with clothes by Tsopanelis’ House )

Members of Arbit City Group and ARTWORKS Fellows 2018, Dimitra Dimopoulou, Natasa Efstathiadi and Manolis D.Lemos, as well as the creative duo Hypercomf (Paola Palavidi & Ioannis Koliopoulos) participate in Gold und Liebe, Liebe für Gold group show, curated by Amalia Vekri. The show takes place at Haus N and runs through 21.04.2018.

Gold und Liebe, Liebe für Gold

It’s a Saturday night and I am at a basement club in Athens dancing to Liebe Auf Den Ersten Blick by the German band D. A. F. Everything is so smoky and dark. The dance floor is so crowded that everybody is pushing you around. I try to move but the smoke is so deep that I loose my sense of place. As I try to come out of the smoke I turn around and I see a man with a golden head. I move closer and I see an old inscription on his forehead: ‘You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold’. According to alchemical thinking body and soul should reach unison. Through gnosis gold finds a canal to a higher state, symbolically creating the philosophers stone. Gold the most precious of materials, its benevolence abide materiality and wealth. Its capital evokes the pursuit of happiness and satisfaction through possession. Love a feeling of lust simulating a higher goal in life, one that in accordance can lead to true happiness or denial. Life without love. Can one go on without it? To love and feel loved is a step closer to spirituality and perfection. Can love exist without gold? Do they feed each other or do they devour each other?

Curator: Amalia Vakri

Participating artists: Arbit City, Margarita Bofiliou, Manolis D. Lemos, Dora Economou, Sokrates Fatouros, Hypercomf, Stelios Karamanolis, Harrie Kourkoulis, Panos Papadopoulos, Ilias Papailiakis, Sofia Stevi, The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas, Iris Touliatou.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki’s solo exhibition THEY KEEP CHEWING WALLS opens 03.02.2018 at Netwerk in the city of Aalst (Belgium). Chrysanthi is one of the SNF Fellowship Awardees for 2018.

Attractive architectural masterplans visualising harmonious public spaces, new housing complexes, and carefully restored heritage sites portray a city yet to come. The real-life counterpart of this image, however, is a city under constant construction. What, then, do progress and change actually look like?

Chrysanthi Koumianaki plans, renders, draws and compiles mood boards, much like urban planners and architects do. Rather than projecting into the future, however, she works with the urban architecture we encounter, use and even co-produce in our real-time city.

The artist designs a stage where traffic signs, roadblocks, graffiti tags, gum, and stickers gradually turn into props, or abstract elements of a drawing of a developing city. Construction workers in orange outfits, skaters and strollers become actors in a play we all take part in, rehearsing the future of our urban environment.

The show runs through 29.04.2018.

Creative duo Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi aka Hypercomf (ARTWORKS Fellows 2018) will present their work at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center in Athens. Soft Spot runs through 31.03.2018.

Hypercomf is a newly funded, fictitious company profile, producing installations of hybrid, soft and discomforting art, functional objects and poetry.

The company examines the notions of the useful and the useless, comfort and discomfort, personal and collective experience and material and emotional consumption.

Soft Spot is Hypercomf’s first pop-up store, designed in order to be experienced both as an art installation and a store specializing in oversized wall to wall tapestries, purposeful totes, cotton poetry with wool attachments, hats of soft lectures and video shoes.

The raw material used for this installation is predominantly second hand fabrics and blankets, clothes, hats etc., which are sourced through donations, thrift purchases and quests through chests and closets of Greek houses. The materials are chosen for their rarity or banality, their ability to express a personal story, a time period or culture and for its comforting or discomforting qualities. Many of the items express individual character, others collective culture and collective trends, and all define a historic cultural time line.

The produced objects are the materialisation and union of fragmented collective experiences and memories.

Poetry is similarly stitched and sewn using second hand words and phrases. Then, it is woven using an industrial loom and wrapped around ones neck when it’s cold.

The video shoes come in any size.

The company operates in a landscape of overabundance and hyperbole of material, skills, levels of being, technological conveniences and comforts.

Hypercomf is a new utopian business and production model, yet another imagined reality, investigating the economy of the individual, using humour, observation and the possibilities of constant cultural reinvention.

Hypercomf invites you to float comfortably in the hyperbole of word and material.

You found our Soft Spot!

Katerina Kotsala, visual artist and ARTWORKS Fellow 2018,  is presenting her work at a solo show organized by Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center in Athens. Sisyphys runs through 31.03.2018.

Exhibition text, Alexios Papazacharias (2018):

Katerina Kotsala’s painting is both placed and places between transparency and surface. She is interested in a light that reveals and is revealed, by passing through refractive materials, instruments that act simultaneously as compact images and as blurry reflections. At the same time, she is interested in the reflection as it appears on the surface. The point at which any blurred reflection is stabilized as a photograph and which is so explicitly and abstractly called light, is realized in colors, shapes, paint and gestures.

Her works seem to form borders of two kinds. Those which constitute a goal, the point after which there is nothing, and are generally her large canvases on which the end of the light path is marked. And those in which the border is semi-permeable. You can see through them, the light continues to travel even if it has been altered enough or sometimes so much that the one side of the border is radically different from the other. As different as the upper and the lower world in the myth of Sisyphus, the mythological hero with whom the light in the artworks of Katerina Kotsala seem to share two common points. On the one hand, the path that starts from the same source (from the light) and ends with its imprinting on the canvases (the top of the high mountain of Sisyphus where the rock is going up with great effort, only to plunge into the depths of Hades). On the other hand the cold colors, which despite their charm constantly undermine the concept of “happiness”. Her painting, however, does not attempt to dictate emotions, but prefers to create a dynamic, rather than a dramatic atmosphere. It does not focus on punishment, but on the reason of this vain punishment, and on the fact that he actually managed, and twice, to escape the will of the gods with trickery. So, it can be done.

Katerina Kotsala’s works resemble those tricks of Sisyphus. They are attempts to accomplish something elusive, in her case to give shape to something that does not have one, to light. And these efforts are not evaluated as successful or not -the stone rolls back to the start anyway-, but as occasions. And each case constantly provides one more answer to the question of art: How else?