Category: Fellows news

The exhibition “Does it Matter?” held under the auspices of the Embassy of Greece in Riga brings together works by 11 Greek visual artists from different artistic media; dedicated to the Centenary of diplomatic relations between Greece and Latvia, it is inaugurated on the occasion of the official visit to Latvia of H.E. The President of the Hellenic Republic Ms Katerina Sakellaropoulou. The exhibition, curated by the artist Chloe Akrithaki, focuses on the artists’ relationship with the medium of photography, a relationship that reveals itself as one of simultaneous dependence and admiration, an endless dynamic or the only way to realize the work. At the end, it is an approach to photography based on its material dimension. An attempt to underline the importance of matter and material, which are of great importance because in the case of art, matter and meaning are inseparable and decisive. The artists participating in the exhibition are active in Greece and abroad and apart from photography they work with different media such as sculpture, performance, painting, video and installations.

Outdoor exhibition 24/7

The site-specific installation enveloping the vessel Diversity’s Ark by Tolis Tatolas, as well as the three-channel video installation Beckett Rain by FilipposTsitsopoulos, on display at the deck, will remain on view until September 2022.

The exhibition is held under the auspices of the Embassy of Greece in Latvia.

Participating artists:
Chloe Akrithaki, Martha Dimitropoulou, Efi Haliori, Athina Ioannou, Lizzie Calligas, Marianna Lourba, Alexios Papazacharias, Georgia Sagri, Tolis Tatolas, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Katerina Zacharopoulou

*Αlexios Papazacharias is SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2021

DOES IT MATTER?
Group exhibition at NOASS Art Center

ADDRESS: AB dambis 2, Riga LV-1048, Latvia
Contact: Gita Jankovska [email protected]
Opening: 03.06.22 at 18.00
Exhibition duration: 03.06 – 01.07.2022
Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday 15.00-22.00

The Breeder is pleased to present Oikonomia, Georgia Sagri’s new solo exhibition.

Performance lies at the center of Georgia Sagri’s work. Through the years, the artist has developed a practice of care she terms IASI, in reference to the Greek word ίαση for recovery. This was born out of her need to prepare and recuperate from demanding performance pieces. IASI has since shifted into ongoing research on conditions of the body, which Sagri calls “performance pathologies”.

For her solo exhibition Oikonomia at the Breeder, IASI (recovery) is practiced onto her own works. Sagri narrows her attention on the reorganization of practices, materials and objects that have been produced and presented in the past -that share common qualities: most were damaged and retrieved from the art circulation, reaching a state of vanishing. Some were damaged while being exhibited, others by being used in performance works or being displayed in public space or were destroyed due to mistreatment, during deinstallation and transportation.

The exhibition includes three performances, which are also currently in a state of invisibility, because they were never documented. Part of their recovery is the search for testimonies and archival fragments, on the basis of which the artist reconstructs the performances, remembers them and mnemonically re-enacts them.

This process is economic in the sense that Sagri creates new artworks by invoking and validating artworks that already exist.

However, the main economic dimension lies in the conceptual reorganization of the works. Although they may have meritorious courses in different times and places, they have reached a state of seemingly irreparable damage. The deterioration they have suffered is a situation that Sagri wishes to reverse. Following an eclectic method of repair, preservation and reinvention, the artist comments on the body per se and the way it is wounded and healed.

With this exhibition, Sagri states that IASI (recovery) is the most fundamental form of economy.

GEORGIA SAGRI
OIKONOMIA
January 12, 2023–February 5, 2023

Opening: , Thursday 12 January, 19:00-22:00
The Breeder

Curated by Danai Giannoglou & George Bekirakis

Performances:
● Breathing (2003): Saturday 21 January 2023, 12-5pm
● Deep Listening (2001) : Saturday 21 January 2023, 7pm
● Rent (2009): date to be confirmed, subject to menstruation fluctuations

*Danai Giannoglou is a curatorial SNF ARTWORKS Fellow

IONE & MANN is delighted to present Rhizome, a three-person exhibition bringing together the work of Irini Bachlitzanaki (b. 1984), Shannon Bono (b. 1995) and Thomas Langley (b. 1986). In kinship with the natural world, traditional craft practices as well as individual and collective cultural and emotional anchors, the artists explore the inter-connected, ever-evolving structures of the places we inhabit physically and spiritually and the deeply entangled nature of identity, perception and being.

Much like rhizomatic structures, Bachlitzanaki, Bono and Langley’s work appears to have no end points; bold, unapologetic yet tender, it emerges as a material expression of consciousness with a pared-down linearity that connects the internal with the external and defines a space that allows for individuality and belonging, rootedness and growth.

Inspired by material culture, artisanal traditions, nature and the biographies of objects, Irini Bachlitzanaki builds upon re-contextualising recognisable forms to examine our relationship with the world around us and ourselves. Within a practice that is primarily sculptural she plays with two and three-dimensionality and explores the object as image, signifier and continuation of the body and the self.

Drawing on cultural, geographic and historical references she offers us renditions of familiar forms: a traditional clay pot (in this case a ‘stámna’ or ‘kryologos’ found in her native island of Skyros) becomes flattened and moves into a new plane, its distinctive shape operating as a different type of container enveloped in an image-based narrative; the emblematic and ubiquitous opuntia cactus, a symbol of resilience encountered all across the Mediterranean and in dry, rocky areas around the world, reclaims its power as it rises from a concrete base and invites us to interact with it directing our movements in the space around it. The body, visually notably absent, feels undoubtedly present and so is the mind, assigning and re-evaluating meaning.

There is a linear, reductive, diagrammatic quality to Bachlitzanaki’s shapes but the simplification of forms does not seem to detract from their essence nor from their power to elicit an emotional response. Her sculptures, reductive yet dense with meaning, lend themselves to a multiplicity of narratives in a dialogue between cultural specificity and universality, informed by the associations and experiences of both artist and viewer.

Shannon Bono’s paintings embody an afrofemcentrist consciousness, sharing muted narratives and projecting black women’s lived experiences. She is invested in producing layered, figurative, compositions embedded with symbols and scientific metaphors that centralise black womanhood as a source of knowledge and understanding. Drawing on African spirituality, Christian iconography and Renaissance art, she consciously employs a purpose of cultural impact, liturgy and instruction for an improved society within her works. At the same time, she turns to her own experiences and beliefs to define and express black womanhood from her own unique perspective.

Her latest body of work, entitled ‘To Summers End in Gambia’ follows an intimate journey that explores themes of love, loss, healing and awe, as well as the power and traditions of West African divination. Working with a mix of acrylic, oil and spray paints, she uses the structure of her paintings to bridge seen and unseen worlds, the internal body with the external. The background, consisting of repetitive patterns reminiscent of Dutch wax fabrics but also biological and organic structures, appears both distinctive and integral; the body, depicted or implied, emerges seamlessly in the foreground as a powerful signifier, alongside elements of still life in the form of plants or mystical objects used in rituals of magic.

Bono uses figuration in an attempt to tell relatable stories, make sense of and peace with personal and shared experiences, but the power of her work urges us to look beyond the imagery and explore its symbolism and truth. Her world is rich and colourful but there is nothing superfluous about it; underneath it all, there is a simplicity that permeates it completely and authentically, a solid structure connecting and supporting the variegated elements of society, identity and selfhood.

Thomas Langley works within an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Through a lens that is often self-referential he is keen to explore universal themes in the human and artistic condition and the concept of what he describes as material thought, how consciousness makes its way into an object or a work of art. Born into a family of basket makers he has an affinity with traditional craft practices and the natural world both as a source of inspiration and raw material. Always seeking new territories for artistic comment, he tends to work in series with the works functioning as modular components of a wider narrative or sentiment.

His latest body of work sits at the intersection of painting and drawing; the series’ title, ‘Bodger’s Hovel’, references the highly-skilled itinerant craftsmen practicing a form of wood turning in nature, a practice dating back to medieval times. Using a mix of charcoal (a bodging by-product), wax and oil paint, he creates bold, monochromatic works derived from observing plant life, resulting in a loose yet dynamic botanical abstraction. The natural world emerges as a protagonist but, in reality, the imagery is inseparable from the material, the intention and the act of creation itself.

The artist’s hand is very much present as he creates raw, bold rhythmic compositions that function almost as language, conveying simultaneously the urgency of a call and the softness of a whisper. Langley’s entangled, expressive, undulating lines and the texture of the painted elements imbue the works with an energy that renders them more than a representation of botanical forms but an expression of a state of being.

RHIZOME
17-29 January 2023
Irini Bachlitzanaki · Shannon Bono · Thomas Langley

IONE & MANN Arc Gallery | 4 Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 6 pm, Sunday 10-4 pm and by appointment.
For additional information, images, or interview access to the artists please contact us at: [email protected]
Website: www.ioneandmann.com | Instagram: @ioneandmann

*Irini Bachlitzanaki is a visual art SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2022

A solo show by Kyriaki Goni at Blenheim Walk Galler,  Leeds Art University.

A story of small secret communities unfolds throughout the exhibition revealing their efforts to protect the plants whilst experimenting on new technologies of storing data in the plants’ DNA. Almost as if Haraway’s cyborg becomes a fusion of plant/machine in a revolutionary process of converting plant life into memory devices, disrupting hegemonic surveillance practices and processes of extractivism.

Data centres, one of the main digital ecosystems, allow us to store and share information, providing access to applications and data at great environmental costs. As the number of technological mega-infrastructures is constantly increasing across the world, so is the impact of digital activity on the natural environment; energy and water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, waste, land use and biodiversity are some of the areas affected. Today’s climate emergency brings into question the growing demand of data centres to sustain our current techno-dependent practices, seeking for alternative solutions. Thus, the data garden communities advocate not only on privacy and informational self-determination but also on environmentally conscious and effective data management.

The mountain islands shall mourn us eternally (Dolomites Data Garden) 2022, presents the latest Data Garden community and a plant; a hybrid of Ortiseia leonardii, a conifer fossil 260 million years old, and Saxifraga depressa, a rare white flower that grows only on the summits of the Dolomites between 2000 and 2850 meters. The Dolomites, an ecosystem of high plant biodiversity in the Alps, has been recognized as one of the richest areas of endemism; they are also one of the most intensively exploited regions in the world. Mass tourism infrastructure continues to present a threat to the landscape resulting in habitat change and pollution. Excessive development, over-exploitation of land and climate warming necessitate the migration of plant species from lower altitudes to the summits, shifting to new territories in pursuit of more suitable and colder microclimates.

The installation begins with a CGI video in which the hybrid plant addresses humanity on behalf of its entire species. Information stored in plants’ DNA advocates for non-human communication protocols and technoshamanic interspecies communities spread across the Earth. Through an alluring simulation the transmission shares a planetary chronicle of deep time, geological transformations, and plant history along with an ominous future of forced migration. The mountain top then becomes the end of this journey, the last destination before extinction. Seemingly to an extraterrestrial transmission in reverse. The message demonstrates the diversity of life and technological achievements on Earth only this time from a plant’s non-anthropocentric perspective. It endorses human signals and language as a means of communication. Alongside the film, there is a sculpture; a wooden representation of the hybrid plant, produced in collaboration with local makers in the Ortisei region. And a set of four screen prints that depict digital drawings and notes documenting the artist’s creative process.

A way of resisting (Athens Data Garden) 2020 focuses on the first Data Garden and the plant Micromeria acropolitana, a small and humble perennial species, considered extinct for almost a century until its rediscovery in 2006. Endemic to the Acropolis hill – an archaeological site with more than sixteen thousand visitors per day, human disturbance becomes the plant’s greatest threat. Kyriaki Goni takes the species’ vulnerability as a point of departure to present a fictional story of a secret community’s efforts to preserve plant life and data privacy. In doing so the artist invites us to imagine a network of plant/machines operating as data storage devices, utilising experimental scientific methods that allows for information to be stored into a plant’s DNA. The installation’s fractured storyline does not unfold as a precise linear sequence, but rather reveals the interconnectedness, inseparability, and synthesis of natureculture.

In Kyriaki Goni’s Data Garden fiction and scientific facts are intertwined in an attempt to provide alternative futures and forms of resistance. Prints, videos, interviews with scientists, a sculpture, a polyphonic sound installation, and an Augmented Reality application are coming together to offer the potential for new insights into multi-layered, socio-eco-technological relationships. Data Garden invites us to critically evaluate the climate impact of digital technology with particular focus on the growing demand for data storage and the expansion of data centres’ infrastructures. Potential alternative storage solutions are proposed by the artist as imaginaries of a sustainable future. The exhibition brings together the two data gardens for the first time as a proposition of glocal, eco-technological networks of human and plant life promoting synergy, care, and solidarity.

KYRIAKI GONI | DATA GARDEN

Preview & Panel Discussion: Thursday 19 January 2023
4:30-5:30pm Panel Discussion (Auditorium)
5:30-7:30pm Preview (Blenheim Walk Gallery)
Leeds Arts University, LS2 9AQ
Free entry. Booking not required.

20 January – 1 April 2023
Monday to Saturday, 10am-4pm
Blenheim Walk Gallery, LS2 9AQ

*Kyriaki Goni is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2018

On Thursday, January 26th, from 18:00 to 21:00, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Alkistis Mavrokefalou’s first solo show, curated by Galini Lazani.

About his work An end – A beginning, Nikos Alexiou said: “This design, these lines, stand on the threshold. They are death and birth at the same time. They are both the end and the beginning”. This phrase could very well describe the entire artistic work of Alkistis Mavrokefalou. Because, even though at a first glance you may think that her work is all about nature or sensitivity or even romanticism, it entails some of the most profound existential questions that tantalize the human species. Life and death, pain and love, our place in the world and the connection between all its components, the continuity of existence.

In the exhibition tithoni* the artist presents a new series of micro-sculptures, continuing to gather most of her materials from nature. Exoskeletons of cicadas and shellfish, flower petals, fruit cores and nut shells co-exist with dry colour pigments, threads, lace and resin, in order to create environments and characters which define and claim the space around them. She builds up her installations in the space or confines them in transparent plexiglass boxes, complementing them with laborious drawings on millimetre paper, which often depict patterns of the human anatomy. For, within this natural environment, Mavrokefalou places herself and every human being, both as an observer and a participant, acknowledging the ironic contrast between fragility and resilience in the cycle of life.

Galini Lazani

January 2023

*the title of the exhibition paraphrases the name of the mythological hero Tithonus. The gods granted him eternal life, but not eternal youth. To liberate him from eternal old age after all, they transformed him into a cicada.

———–

ALKISTIS MAVROKEFALOU
tithoni
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
26.01.2023 – 24.03.2023

.

Bagaki’s work in painting, sculpture, drawing, text, sound and videos revolves around a persistent development of auto-fiction. Through the reconstruction of personal experiences or the creation of imagined events, Bagaki explores issues surrounding erotic relationships, sexuality, gender representations, and the precarity that many of the younger generation experience in Greece. Central to her artistic practice is nomadic wandering and flight as an existential condition in the quest for a sense of belonging.

The exhibition at EMΣT, the artist’s first major museum presentation, features a series of paintings with compositions of human figures standing alone or interacting in natural landscapes. The starting point for these works is desire: Bagaki’s dreamy paintings are produced, as she emphasizes, by and for desire. Intimations of physical attraction and erotic observation shape the artist’s relationship with the depicted bodies and their environment. The exhibition Something like a poem, a nude, and flowers in a vase unfolds as a kind of dreamlike wandering and observation on desire, sexuality, and erotic quest.

Eleni Bagaki was born in Chania, Crete; she lives and works in Athens.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες εδώ

ELENI BAGAKI. SOMETHING LIKE A POEM, A NUDE AND FLOWERS IN A VASE28.01-07.05.2023
National Museum of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ)
Project Room 1- 3ος όροφος

*Eleni Bagaki is SNF ARTWORS Fellow (2020)

OKAY initiative space
presents

OKAY initiative space invites you to “DANDELION SEEKERS”. A collaborative curation by Zoe Metra & Captain Stavros, bridging two European capitals, Athens and Paris, with the intention of starting a dialogue between the artistic communities of the two cities, tonight 02/02, at 19:00, 7 Kefalliniaia Street, Kypseli.

A peculiar nostalgia for an ominous future seems to constitute the new, hyperlocal identity of origin of our generation. The multi-narrative setting that is composed in the OKAY highlights the artists’ interest in exploring new ontological classifications; capturing the unmetabolized anxieties of our collective unconscious and depicting the murkiness of the humanitarian crisis we are currently experiencing.

Curation: Zoe Metra & Captain Stavros

with

Vasilis Galanis
Katerina Dania
Konstantinos Mouchtaridis
Myrto Patramani
Phoebe Koutselos

Celia Boulesteix
Constance Tabourga
Augustin Katz
Clara Cimelli
Matthias Odis
Zoe Metra

*Vasilis Galanis is SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2022

Visual ID: Alexandra Karaolanov

DANDELION
SEEKERS
a group show curated by
Zoe Metra & Captain Stavros
Athens / Paris

02/02-19/02/2023
Opening 02.02.2023 7 PM – 10 PM
Opening Hours THURSDAY-SUNDAY 5 PM – 9 PM

Bestiaries were medieval encyclopaedias of mythical and real animals, containing illustrations, allegories and moral lessons. These manuscripts were enriched with a large number of imaginative entries whose images and symbolism have had a lasting influence on our collective imagination in relation to animals. Inspired by these bestiaries, the exhibition explores and brings together a series of contemporary artistic practices that refer to animals in terms of mythologies, histories and their relationship to humans, with the ultimate goal to record topical readings around their symbolic status in contemporary art.

Humans have never lived independently of animals, both at times when they feared them and today, where they tend to annihilate them. As a result, the animal themes in art remain inexhaustible. This intertwining of human and animal is fatal: very often the human condition can resemble an animal hybrid. There have always been times when we our hearts felt like lions’ hearts, our feet like goats’, and our teeth a little sharper. But who is the “beast” today in a nature relentlessly persecuted and menacingly shrinking because of human activity? What are the allegories and lessons we ought to identify in our cultural production that is taking place within an environmental collapse?

Works of the exhibition refer to languages, postures and imitations that refer to our connection to the animal world, to old and modern mythologies, psychoanalytic interpretations and symbolisms, to new animal hybrids of our contemporary world, waiting to be transcribed. The exhibition presents an anthology of approaches, a new classification that expands and activates our admiration for a mysterious and fascinating world, of which we are a part.

Participating artists:
Maria Antelman, Calliope Bekou, Guy van Bossche, Katerina Christidi, Ιsabelle Cordemans, Bryony Dunne, Nicole Economides, Alexis Fidetzis, Thanos Foudas, Dimitris Fragakis, Vangelis Gokas, Renate Graf, Anestis Ioannou, Andreas Kalli, Kapurani Bros, Panagiotis Kefalas, Kosmas Kosmopoulos, Stephanie Lagarde, Varvara Liakounakou, Caroline May, O.lala, Stavros Papagiannis, Ilias Papailiakis, Fotini Poulia, Evi Roumani, Nina Saunders, Pieter van der Schaaf, George Stamatakis, Kostas Tsolis, Sarah Vanagt, Brian Whiteley, Katerina Zacharopoulou

*Nicole Economides, Alexis Fidetzis and Anestis Ioannou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

BESTIARY: ARTEFACTS, ALLEGORIES, REPRESENTATIONS
09 FEBRUARY – 25 MARCH 2023

Crux Gallery
Sekeri 4, Athens 106 74, Greece

BESTIARY: ARTEFACTS, ALLEGORIES, REPRESENTATIONS

“And all of the sudden I was taking my friend to the hospital. My friend smiled at me, put her fist in the air and entered through the glass door. My friend is a very strong person. My friend is a fighter. My friend is Beate and this is dedicated to her.”

In the frame of a circle of friendship, nineteen femininities come together to address the notion of receiving and providing care in order to survive in environments that challenge their very existence. Going beyond the fixed notion of the family and the recent commodification of wellness via life coaching and individualist self-care app trends, they focus on affectivity, solidarity, relationality and interdependence over charity, self-indulgence, self-preservation and resilience. They push back against disadvantages by bringing forward vulnerability and codependence, as ways to go through the world with one another, in a spirit of radical kinship and hope.

With works by Eva Anerrapsi, Maria F Dolores, Anastasia Douka, Dora Economou, Selma Köran, Irini Miga, Rallou Panagiotou, Nina Papaconstantinou, Natasha Papadopoulou, Nana Sachini, Georgia Sagri, Beate Scheder, Sofia Touboura, Marina Velisioti, Kyveli Zoi and 1992 (Ioanna Mitza & Pegy Zali); codependent curatorial by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and Olympia Tzortzi

*Eva Anerrapsi,  Anastasia Douka,  Irini Miga, Marina Velisioti, Kyveli Zoi and Pegy Zali are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows in visual arts

we tell ourselves stories in order to live
17 February – 11 March 2023
Opening day: 17 February, 7 pm – 10 pm

European Short Pitch, initiated by NISI MASA – European Network of Young Cinema, is an annual program aimed at discovering and supporting young European talents in the development of their short films, and fostering coproduction and collaboration between industry professionals from all over Europe.

European Short Pitch combines mentoring on short film development with a pitching and networking event, our Coproduction Forum.

This year, 3 Fellows join with their short movies

SAJBIJA 
Director: Carmen Baltzar
Producer: Danai Anagnostou
https://www.europeanshortpitch.org/sajbija

THE UNRELIEVED WEIGHT OF AN INERT MASS
Director: Eirini Vianelli
Producer: Danai Spathara
https://www.europeanshortpitch.org/the-unrelieved-weight-of-an-inert-mass

HONEYMOON
Director: Alkis Papastathopoulos
Producer: Maria Hatzakou
https://www.europeanshortpitch.org/honeymoon

*Danai Anagnostou, Eirini Vianelli and Alkis Papastathopoulos είναι SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

Palimpest Landcapes
Film Program and Q&A
Thu, 02 Mar 2023
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London

‘Sprouts of a dragon’s teeth’, the latest short film by Danae Io, will be screening at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London on March 2nd, along with Jean-Marie Straub’s ‘à propos de venise’ and Marianna Christofides’ ‘Days in between’.

Like palimpsest pages on which new writing has been superimposed on the traces of old, this programme of short films looks at landscapes as sites where multiple histories have been inscribed and overwritten on the physical terrain. In their varying filmic languages, the selected works explore landscapes not just as backdrops to narratives but as devices partaking in historical processes.

The selection of films ties in with Danae Io’s research during her residency at Delfina Foundation into ways of depicting landscapes through film as spaces where different histories co-exist over time, blending social and physical spheres. The programme operates by bringing her work in relation to filmmakers that explore the connection between people and land as well as the ways dominant narratives are formed in adjacent locations to her research.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Delfina Foundation artist in residence Danae Io and Viviana Checchia, Residency Curator at Delfina Foundation.

Find more information about Palimpest Landcapes Film Program and Q&A here.

Considering an inner urge to collaborate with every artist and estate without any obstacles on the way, Callirrhoë is happy to introduce a new curatorial series under the (sub)title ‘one work show series’, which will be presented in a section of the main exhibition space. All participants will have a 10m2 exhibition space, a 25 days long presentation time frame and they are going to showcase either one work or an in situ installation. The purpose of these short exhibitions is to work closely with selected artists that, besides their importance to the program of Callirrhoë, play a significant role in the contemporary art scene either in Greece or internationally.

Nikolas Ventourakis and his work “The sound is never instantaneous to the flash” will be the first presentation of the series. He explores within the medium of photography the ambiguity of the image and the relation (in-)between generations. With [discontinued] instant film Ventourakis seeks to capture conclusive portraits of individuals grouped together. How does the collective narrative shape the personal narrative and the other way around?

one work show series
The sound is never instantaneous to the flash
Nikolas Ventourakis

15 March – 08 April 2023
Opening day: 15 March 2023, 7 pm – 10 pm

Callirrhoë
Kallirrois 122
Athina 117 41
Greece

Eleni Bagaki, Jean-Damien Charmoille, Florent Frizet, Konstantinos Giotis, Iasonas Kampanis, Katerina Komianiou, Karolina Krasouli, Lapin-Canard, Charlotte Nieuwenhuys, Louis-Philippe Scoufaras, Erica Scourti, Dimitris Tampakis, Iris Touliatou, Paky Vlassopoulou

Curated by Eric Stephany

Lapin-Canard was founded in Paris Belleville on the 1st of May 2015 and does artists’ posters. It offers visual artists it enjoys carte blanche on a single A0 format (840 x 1188 mm). The posters are pigmented inkjet prints on 189g/m2 matt paper. They are released in affordable editions of 10 alongside 1 exhibition print and 1 artist’s proof. The prints are made on demand by Atelier Martin Garanger in Paris. Lapin-Canard is non-lucrative and remits 60% of profits to the artist. Releases are always celebrated with music, libations and dances, in Paris or elsewhere.

*Eleni Bagaki, Konstantinos Giotis, Iasonas Kampanis, Katerina Komianou, Karolina Krasouli, , Iris Touliatou, Paky Vlassopoulou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

Opening
Friday 17th of March / 7pm – 10pm

One Minute Space (OMS)
Marathonos 71, Athens 10435
T: +30 6949085521
[email protected]

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

Berlin, Kunstquartier Bethanien, February 2023

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

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

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

BLUE BEYOND (2022)

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

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

Trailer:

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

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

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

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

Trailer:

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

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

www.per-dance.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free admission with pre-booking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sofia Stevi_When We Start to Understand the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

special thanks to @backtothefuture_furniture

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

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

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

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

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

CROSSBREEDS
Augustus Veinoglou
30 March – 6 May 2023

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