Category: Fellows news

The exhibition series Ammophila aspires to become a new event in the South of Greece, and prepare the ground for new networks and discussions between the local community, audiences and artists. Taking place on the picturesque island of Elafonisos, just off the coast of the Peloponnese, the first exhibition in the series signals a beginning, but also refers to the myth of a deer giving birth on the island, thus giving it its name (elafi is the Greek word for deer). Ammophila on the other hand is a kind of plant that grows in the local sand dunes, which stabilises the sand with its roots and prepares the soil for other kinds of plants to grow. The exhibition presents an impressive roster of no less than thirty one visual artists and texts by ten writers. If you happen to be in the Peloponnese, Kythera or anywhere near, this might be worth the detour.

Participating Artsits: Manolis Babousis, Dionisis Christofilogiannis, Stella N. Christou, Panagiotis Daramaras, Christina Dimakogianni, Eva Giannakopoulou, Christos Giannopoulos, Zoi Gaitanidou, Andreas Ragnar Kasapis, Panagiotis Kefalas, Stavroula Kostakou, Sofia Kouloukouri, Renata Metheniti, Persephone Nikolakopoulou, Ilias Papailiakis, Anna Papathanassiou, Evi Roumani, Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, Kostis Stafylakis, Alexandros Tzannis, Nikolas Vamvouklis, Kostis Velonis, Poka-Yio, Xenia Vitos, [Kostis Damoulakis, Domna Degaita, Paulo Doda, Pegy Zali, Vasilis Zacharakopoulos, Panagiotis Lianos, Ilias Mokas]

Participating writers: Anna Chatzinasiou, Stephanos Giannoulis, Takis Koubis, Sofia Kouloukouri, Christina Papoulia, Kostis Stafylakis, Theophilos Tramboulis, Nicolas Vamvouklis, Maria Xypolopoulou, Kostis Zouliatis

Info
Ammophila Vol.1 Birth
Curated by Evi Roumani
22-25 August 2020

Elafonisos School
Elafonisos, Greece
Hours 19:00-21:00
Free entry, only with face mask

Four ARTWORKS Fellows, Georgis Grigorakis, Anastasia Kratidi, Neritan Zinxhiria and Jacqueline Lentzou winners at 26th Sarajevo International Film Festival.

Vangelis Mourikis won the Heart of Sarajevo for best actor award for his performance in “Digger”, the first feature film of Georgis Grigorakis in the Competition Programme for Feature Film.  DIGGER is a contemporary Western about a native farmer who lives and works alone in a farmhouse in the heart of a mountainous forest in northern Greece. The sudden arrival of his young son, after a twenty-year estrangement, will make the two enemies under one roof and confront each other head-on, with nature as their only observer.

“In her Steps”, a short film by Anastasia Kratidi won a Special Jury mention in the Competition Programme for Short Film. The film is about Lena who, while attending a reintegration programme, she finds a job that gives her access to the rural jail for minors, where her son is serving his sentence. Born in Volos, Greece, in 1983 Kratidis lives and works in Athens. She studied in various artistic fields: ceramics, drawing, sculpture, and art history. She obtained her Master’s degree in Cinema and Audiovisual from the University of Paris VIII, with a specialization in Film Direction.

For «The Gospel According To Kimon», a film about redemption directed by Neritan Zinxhiria, producer Vasilis Chrysanthopoulos won Eave + AwardIn the Cinelink Co-Production Market Awards 2020. Vasilis Chrysanthopoulos is the co-founder and head producer of the Greek production company PLAYS2PLACE. His credits include the award-winning festival hit MISS VIOLENCE (Silver Lion for Best Director and Coppa Volpi for Best Actor in Venice IFF 2013). Vasilis is a member of EAVE, EDN and Cannes Producers Network. He is an alumnus of the training initiatives EAVE Producers, EAVE Marketing, EAVE Best, MFI Script 2 Film, and MIDPOINT TV Launch workshops and has participated in more than 30 co-production and pitching forums. He was awarded the Midpoint C21 Award during Cinelink 2017.

Jacqueline Lentzou’s first feature “Moon 66 Questions” won Cinelink Iridium Award in Cinelink Work In Progress Awards. The award consists of in-kind post-production services worth 20,000 €. Multi-awarded writer and film director Jacqueline Lentzou was born in Athens, in 1989. Her work revolves around unconventional family constructs, coming-of-age, intimacy, and the dream. Her cinematic language involves finding poetry in seemingly mundane premises. She is a London Film School graduate (Distinction, 2013), a Sarajevo (2014), and Berlinale (2015) Talents alumna. Her semi-feature’s “Fox” has won over 20 awards worldwide, including Best Short from PanHellenic Critics’ Association, Best European Short at Film Du Femme Creteil, and the upmost prestigious Award in the Memory of Ingmar Bergman. Her latest short, “Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year” (2018), premiered in Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique and won the prestigious Leica Cine Discovery Award.

Sarajevo Film Festival: 14-21 August

Our Fellows Paky Vlassopoulou and Virginia Mastrogiannaki take part in Island Hopping II along with Dora Economou.

There are ways to tell a story. Start from the beginning, middle or end. Narrate events in chronological order, offering them their literal time, or blend them, evaluate and order them according to their importance for the outcome and mood of the story. You can designate characters, decide on one or multiple narrators, choose to tell the story in 1st or 3rd person, and insert dialogues and anecdotes.

Island Hopping departed from Nisyros in 2019 having as a final destination the island of Kastelorizo, the actual final destination of the boat line, with 5 passengers; the five artists and the island of Nisyros as a main character. Along the way, 2 more passengers joined the group, the two cars carrying the artwork created on the island to the next stops, in a sense, bearing gifts from one place to the next. In the course of the story, the two cars took on the role of the narrator. Photos of the two cars in landmarks on the various stops provide evidence of the action before and after the camera click.

In 2020, Island Hopping II, will start its voyage from the port of Piraeus, the actual departure point of the boat line to Nisyros. Spatially, the action in this second part of the story is placed before the action in the first part. Conceptually, this time the participants will recreate scenes of the experience that have brought each one of them to Nisyros. It can be compared to a prequel of a story, where the second part of the story precedes chronologically the first.

The journey will begin with a video presentation of the Island Hopping 2019 artworks on the boat to Nisyros. This will be the first sequence of this new narrative, having as a reference point the first scene of the film “I know what you did last summer”. The new pieces will be installed in various places around the island from the 3rd to the 30th of August.

The project Island Hopping II is taking place with the support of NEON.

The work Factitious Imprints (2016) by Eva Papamargariti (Fellow 2019) is selected from the New Museum to be screened online at the Screen Series program!

In 2016, the New Museum inaugurated a platform for the presentation of new video works by emerging contemporary artists titled Screens Series. Encompassing a combination of screenings in the New Museum theater and on monitors in the Lower Level walls, the series has presented artists working with a range of media—from 16mm film to computer-generated imagery (CGI). While the Museum remains closed due to heightened concerns around the spread of COVID-19, we will feature selected videos by Screen Series artists on a weekly basis, bringing art to the public at home.

Factitious Imprints (2016) features images of landscapes ranging from imagined settings that have been constructed with digital tools to real places that have been transformed through landfills and other human attempts to combine the artificial and the synthetic with the natural. Conflating processes of digital and organic transformation, Papamargariti looks at how surfaces can obscure these processes and questions how nature’s imprint will exist or endure in the future. What will a fossil from our time look like, for example? Incorporating perspectives and camera imagery taken from navigation tools such as drones, Google Maps, and handheld recording devices, Factitious Imprints courses through a distorted landscape of overlapping surfaces—from the artist’s own skin to food containers to simulations of plants and oceans—that shifts and changes form as we move through it.

https://vimeo.com/440333226

Pavlos Tsakonas (Fellow 2018) participates in the group show ‘They Are Already Here, You Are Next’ at Allouche Benias Gallery along with Filippos Kavakas, George Tourlas, and Giorgos Tserionis.

These four artists have been working through a challenging period of self-isolation. Having witnessed social and political changes that result in violently expressed emotions of anxiety, fear and anger, they chose to put on display ironical renditions of everyday situations. Through a broad spectrum of media such as acrylics, color pencils and spray paint, the artists manage to create colorful diversions. Pastel colors, sharp lines, sculptures and pop culture references create a surreal and even comical atmosphere.

Allouche Benias Gallery, 1, Kanari str., Kolonaki, Athens | Duration: July 23 – August 1, 2020

Petros Moris (Fellows 2018) and Lito Kattou on a a two-person exhibition at Galeria Duarte Sequeira in Portugal.

Formed by theories of non-anthropocentric points of view, Lito Kattou develops a new series of aluminum hybrid figures, a combination of bodily, mechanical and ethereal appearances, that question the idea of how contemporaneity thinks about bodies and its relationship with the natural environment. The works engage with the sculptural potentiality of flatness, processes of embodiment and the transfigurations of material properties within the margins of time and space. Imagery on their aluminum surface hints to their inner world, origins and characteristics. These entities extend through the space, accompanied by various elements frozen in time via thermochemical elaborations that represent a physical reminder of nature, or what used to be.

Petros Moris presents a series of geological landscapes that explore the stratifications of the material, the technological and cultural environments, along the fateful interrelations between natural and social phenomena. Stimulated by symmetrical structures, abstract compositions that resemble faces or masks weave together the social construct of time with geological materiality and digital fabrication. Working with marble sourced from quarries in Aliveri, Ritsona, Tinos and Volos, the artist utilizes archaic techniques and contemporary technologies to develop wall-based inlay works that employ the painterly aspects of marble in order to assemble word-based palindromes and anagrams. Embedded into geological matter, these language-constructs reconfigure and fracture perceptions of meaning, materiality and time.

Lito Kattou and Petros Moris create works in dialogue that explore the entangled and transformative relationships between geological matter, language, bodies and subjectivity. Configured through both the embracing and the distancing from anthropocentric perspectives, the exhibition narrates a nonlinear account of juxtapositions and assemblages of cultural and material time.

Duration: 11.07 – 12.09.2020
Galeria Duarte Sequeira: Rua de Galeria, 129, Portugal

Our Fellows Apollon Glykas takes part in the exhibition ‘Overmorrow’ at the Ekfrasi-yianna grammatopoulou gallery along with the artists: Annita Argyiliopoulou, Michalis Arfaras, Kornilios Grammenos, Marion Igglesi, Antigoni Kavvatha, Juliano Kagli, Panagioti Baxevani, Niko Papadimitriou, Ilia Sipsa, Aggelo Skourti, Kosta Tsoli, Panteli Chandri.

Opening : Thursday June 25, 12.00 – 21.00
Until July 24

Ekfrasi-yianna grammatopoulou gallery: Valaoritou 9a, Athens, 10671

The artists Amalia Vekri and Valinia Svoronou (Fellow 2019) create an imaginary environment at P.E.T. Projects, using the Avalon of the Heart as a metaphor for an activated space.

Avalon of the Heart is a book by British occultist and ceremonial magician Dione Fortune. The book refers to Glastonbury as a mythical place of transcendental experiences and spiritual encounters. Discovering where the heart resides, the writer develops a love affair with the landscape and its emotional counterparts.

The viewer travels through narratives of female identifying characters elevating themselves into super heroes through the use of potions, and ritual; while listening to old love songs, they groom as preparation to unveil a mysterious encounter. As a place inhabited by the heart, that is only revealed to its lovers / mystics, the Avalon is not a literal spatial manifestation but rather the nucleus of an ethereal atmosphere; an enchanting experience similar in nature to the ephemeral essence of an extraordinary perfume. The set up of the works alludes to bodily female desires and anxieties, simultaneously longing for spiritual transcendence. Through the interplay of their works, the artists aim to invoke and reconfigure the legendary environment of the Avalon of the Heart, oscillating between references to new age, popular culture, storytelling and the overpowering construct of romanticism in a contemporary technological landscape.

Vekri and Svoronou’s installation comprising of paintings, sculptures, digital prints, sound and light, invites the audience to confront their internal dialogue, where one meets the heart and by extension the internalised lover.

Once the Avalon is activated, your other half is just around the corner.

During the exhibition, a series of participatory performances will take place resembling a blind date, utilizing the installation itself as a working set. These performances will be formed by invited small groups.

P.E.T. TREAT

The 3rd commission on the facade of P.E.T. is presented entitled P.E.T. Treat with a work by Amalia Vekri and Valinia Svoronou. The project serves as an invitation, found meditation, and daily positive affirmation for passers-by on Kerkyras street. Perfumes travel across time and space re-affirming events and evoking memories, sending a message. This message can be a trigger for a long lost encounter or for a new one to begin.

Opening 23rd of June 16:30 – 22:00 (covid 19 measures apply)*
24th of June – 12 October 2020: by appointment only

* Taking into consideration all the safety health measures,
– the number of visitors will be controlled in the entrance
– a 2mt distance is mandatory
– wearing a mask is highly recommended.

On the occasion of World Refugee Day, Flux Laboratory Athens presents the dance project ‘WHAT IF IT WAS YOU?” on Saturday June 20, 2020.

Performed by artists Joanna Toumbakari and Andi Xhuma (Fellow 2019), and choreographed by Markella Manoliadi, the piece has been inspired by Imany’s song “Take Care”, aiming at conveying through dance a call for unity and encouragement among people.

The project has taken the form of a video dance directed by Andi Xhuma and will be openly disseminated through international social platforms and channels on Saturday, June 20. On the same day, the dancers will perform live with the participation of the audience in various, symbolically significant places in the center of Athens as well as Flux Laboratory Athens.

Video directed by: Andi Xhuma
Choreography: Markella Manoliadi
Dancers: Joanna Toumbakari & Andi Xhuma
Music: ‘Take Care’ by Imany. From the Album ‘The shape of the broken heart’ (2011), Time Records
Production & Artistic Direction: Cynthia Odier, founder and artistic director of Fluxum Foundation and Flux Laboratory

Camera operator: Klaus Shehaj
Camera assistant: Fotini Xhuma

Please note: In compliance with the safety guidelines pertinent to social-distancing in the pandemic, our audience is kindly asked to follow the performances, wearing a mask or scarf. During the performance at Flux Laboratory Athens, the participants are encouraged to stand around the perimeter of the building, enjoying the piece through its open doors.

Soap by Francis Ponge feels more pertinant than ever. What does an artist have to say about wax, wood, clay, skin and ashes? What can materiality tell us about its existence? Christoforos Marinos talks with Anastasia Douka (Fellow 2019), Malvina Panagiotidi (Fellow 2018), Kostas Roussakis, Maria Tsangari (Fellow 2019) and Paki Vlassopoulou (Fellow 2018) about the multiple possibilities of materiality and the importance of matter in their work. The invited artists will be asked, amongst other things to comment on Giuliana Bruno’s assertion that, “materiality is an archive of interrelations and transformations.”

Info:
Wed., 17 June
free entrance
the conversation will be held in Greek
following the updated instructions, up to 160 people can enter the space
Curated by:
Christoforos Marinos
Access:
Anaxagora 33, (1st floor), Tavros.
Tavros Μetro station

During the unsettling times of a global pandemic and national lockdowns, which seem to have emerged out of dystopic fiction, what does it mean for earth and the anthropocene to remain on hold? Which are the challenges and the environmental concerns that are raised for an artist? How can social distancing and quarantine reshape artistic practices and environmental narratives? In which ways can covid-19 impact environmental crisis and our general perception of the issue?

In response to this unprecedented and urgent situtation and its toll on the planet’s well-being and safety, PCAI, on the occasion of the “Anthropocene On Hold” exhibition, has invited 20 international visual artists to address the gravity of a global pandemic and its impact on art engagement and production as well as earth’s resilience and sustainability. Our Fellows Kyriaki Goni, Hypercomf (Paola Palavidi & Ioannis Kolliopoulos), Evi Kalogiropoulou and Kosmas Nikolaou, and James Bridle, Ionian Bisai & Sotiris Tsiganos, Matthias Fritsch, Lito Kattou, Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, Rindon Johnson, Bianca Kennedy and the Swan Collective, Marcin Liminowicz & Trang Ha, Charly Nijensohn,  Ira Schneider, Andrew Norman Wilson participate with new works in PCAI’s first online group exhibition curated by Kika Kyriakakou; an ongoing digital project that will be hosted on PCAI’s YouTube Channel from May 14 to December 31, 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3PQrka5So1idol6w0VM91bV-x6kP3rcB

The short film  “The sky will migrate with this cup of water” created by Neritan Zinxhiria (SNF Fellow 2018) was at the Corona Short Film Festival – the first International Pandemic Short Film Festival.  The Festival is a newly launched online competition for short films initiated as a reaction to the current COVID19 developments. Neritan’s film was selected among  1250 submissions from more than 70 countries

You can view the film at Corona Short Film Festival (number 33) and vote for the best short film by May 25th.

Our Fellows, Christina Dimakogianni and Vera Chotzoglou, participate in the exhibition ‘Resides and work in Athens’.

A three-storey house in the heart of Exarcheia in Athens, becomes the field of action for a group of ten artists who explore and transmute their environments as sites of psychic-mental processes and states of affectedness (disorders, traumas, oscillations, modes of recovering and rebalancing etc.), through the use of photography, video and sound. The artists involved in the project all reside and work in Athens. In their fragmented everyday life, they inexorably yield to “multitasking”, in full accord with the dominant socio-economic and behavioral model of their era. Their daily activity is split into diverse forms of production. They live as internal “nomads” moving amidst a closed existential landscape of multiple ever-changing speeds and imploded time. Every once in a while they slow down unexpectedly. They pause, set up their equipment to “document”. They abandon the prey for the shade. The selection and arrangement of their works as a unity did not result from topic-based criteria (such as: the city, art in public space, urban culture etc.), but from a purely ergo-centric approach, emerging from the specificity of each individual work of art. All works involve projections on two-dimensional surfaces, forming a mosaic-like overall composition, rich in morphological and contextual qualities, textures, sensitivities, tonal values, degrees of introvertedness/extrovertedness, varying significantly in each project.

Participating artists: Vicky Betsou, Vera Chotzoglou, Taxiarchis Diamantopoulos, Christina Dimakogianni, Gabriella Gerolemou, Yannis Karpouzis, Marietta Kavvadia, Vladimir Necakov, Alfredo Pechuan, Michaelangelo Vlassis-Ziakas.

Lectures and presentations of the artists’ work will take place during the exhibition.

Duration: 28.02 – 13.03. 2020

Bernier-Eliades Gallery presents works on paper created from 1972 until today, by the older and younger generation of artists that have been collaborating with the
gallery.Our Fellow Alexandros Tzannis is participating in the exhibition with a series titled ‘Blue Black Layers Over the White Cities’ that has been
ongoing from 2015 until today. It concerns mapping of areas of cities, particular details or specific places of those. Drawings made of ink and pen, in multiple layers of black and blue covering the white paper in a correlation to the layers of melancholy and darkness which cover the cities.

Artists: Alexis Akrithakis, Stephen Antonakos, Delia Brown, Michael Buthe, Lionel Estève, Hannah Greely,
Dionysis Kavallieratos, Jannis Kounellis William Kentridge, Richard Long, Valérie Mannaerts, Brice
Marden, Marisa Merz, Mario Merz, Annette Messager, Juan Muñoz, Nikos Navridis, Tony Oursler,
Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Richter, Thomas Schütte, Jim Shaw, Christiana Soulou, Wayne Thiebaud,
Alexandros Tzannis, Monique Van Genderen, Kara Walker, Lawrence Weiner, Sue Williams, Robert
Wilson, Gilberto Zorio.

Duration: 20 February – 2 April, 2020

Can we capture our lives overturned by a crash?

Three of our Fellows – Evi Kalogeropoulou, Eva Papamargariti, and Valinia Svoronou – participate with their works in the exhibition Cra(u)sh. Or how you made me kiss the pavement the pavement., which examines the other side of the accident. Streets, routes, vehicles, encounters, crashes, are revisited through the new materialist agenda and pop culture. Twelve young artists study drifts and wounds, isolate and re-construct the entanglement of matter and flesh, the absolute fusion of machine, landscape and man, within the premise of organic and inorganic world.

With reference to J.G.Ballard’s literary work Crash from the 70s and the notion of the fetishistic desire erected by he crash, the body as anatomy and sign encounters emotions and the inorganic. The wound, as the engraved trace upon the skin, becomes a mouth or a vagina, revealing love for the inorganic. The exhibition’s space stimulates the scene of the crash.

Through different mediums and practices, the artists unfold different sides of crash and crush. The artworks include image bendings of an automotive legacy, interpretations of erotic symbols, exhausting trials of hard/soft materiality, perfomative reductions of conflict, techno-bio-philic studies of the hybridal boy and docu-fictove formulations of archival material.

Who’s next to cra(u)sh?

Artists:
Phaidon Gialis, Konstantinos Giotis, Christos Delidimos, Evi Kalogeropoulou, Byron Kalomamas, Orestis Karalis, Konstantinos Lianos, Eva Papamargariti, Marios Stamatis, Valinia Svoronou, Marina Velisioti, Iria Vrettou.

Curator:
Vassiliki-Maria Plavou.

Exhibition Duration: 14 February – 08 March.
Opening: 14 February, 20:00.

Our Fellow Evi Kalogiropoulou shows sculptural works in addition to a filmic work by examining the connections between mythology, patriarchal social structures and notions of femininity in her first solo exhibition in Germany.

Evi Kalogiropoulou is concerned with ancient feminist concepts and myths relevant to the female body. How were they perceived in the past and how are they represented in today’s society? Can new cultural identities arise from the emancipation of the female body in the context of technical developments?

In her examination of post-feminist theories, the Greek artist not only questions patriarchal historiography, she also inscribes her view in a speculative and questioning continuation of the ancient myths.

​Curator: Lotte Puschmann

Georgis Grigorakis‘ (Fellow 2018) first feature ‘Digger’, won the CICEA Art Cinema Award at the 70th Panorama of Berlin Film Festival. The movie world-premiered at Berlinale on February 24th 2020.

Digger is a contemporary western about a native farmer who lives and works alone in a farmhouse in the heart of a mountain forest in Northern Greece. For years now, he has been fighting against an expanding industrial monster digging up the forest, disturbing the lush flora and threatening his property. Yet the greatest threat comes with the sudden arrival of his young son, after a 20-year separation. They turn into enemies under one roof. Father and son confront each other head-on, with nature as their only observer, a showdown that ultimately yields an unexpected redemption for both.

Georgis Grigorakis studied Social Psychology at the University of Sussex and obtained his Master’s degree on Directing Fiction at the National Film and Television School (NFTS, London). He has written and directed 8 short films that have been screened in more than 100 international festivals winning at least 20 prizes. They have also been shown on TV and distributed in movie theaters or as VODs. ‘Digger’ is his feature debut, a production of Haos Film, co-produced by Le Bureau (France) and Match Factory (Germany).

More info:  https://www.berlinale.de/en/programme/programme/detail.html?film_id=202004783

http://www.georgisgrigorakis.com/

Our Fellow 2019 Aggeliki Bozou designs live cinema shows and art workshops for children inspired by Pablo Picasso’s paintings at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC).

Vlefaro Live Cinema lands at the SNFCC in February to present original productions based on Pablo Picasso’s life and work. A series of screening shows and art workshops will take place, based on handmade moving images and paper constructions that produce patterns of movement.

In the first part of each session, children and their adult chaperones attend a screening in which images are being painted and composed before their eyes, accompanied by live music. Following the screening, they participate in a sound and image art workshop, in which they process the screened material creatively.

Kids Lab
Saturday 08/02
11.00-12.30
Meeting point: NLG Lobby

For children aged 7-11 years old and their adult chaperones
Up to 15 children and 15 adult chaperones
Free admission by online preregistration (the workshop is conducted in Greek) ηλεκτρονική προεγγραφή

Music Collages
Saturday 15/02
11.00-12.30

For children aged 3-6 years old and their adult chaperones
Up to 15 children and 15 adult chaperones
Free admission by online preregistration (the workshop is conducted in