Category: Fellows news

Nicole Economides and her work Illusion of home, as a memory (Ενθύμιο από το Πάσχα / Keepsake from Easter) will be the second presentation of the one work show series opening on May 9. Economides is a painter working and living in Athens and in the US. Through the use of semiotic elements, she explores feelings of nostalgia, home and finding one’s identity while crossing the Atlantic bidirectionally. Her conceptual paintings remind the spectator of longing as well as recollecting.

Nicole Economides (b.1992) is an artist based in Athens and New York. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York (2019) and a BFA from the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina (2016). Her practice explores the notions of heterotopic spaces and migration mainly through painting installations. Through nostalgic symbols and imagery, she interrogates the expressions of national and personal identity memory.

Nicole Economides is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2022

Νicole Economides | “Illusion of home, as a memory”
09 May – 03 June 2023
Opening day: 09 May 2023, 7 pm – 9 pm

On Thursday, May 4 th from 19:00 to 22:00, Fotini Palpana ‘s first solo exhibition titled “View of Us”, curated by Dimitris Foutris, opens at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center. The exhibition will be on view until 22.07.2023.

Continuing a long-term processing of our relationship with the natural world and the landscape genre, Foteini Palpana invites us to wander within a fractured environment of
masses and surfaces that unfold in space and carry the characteristics of geological formations and human bodies alike. The present exhibition is a development of her work shown at the first Ios Art Residency, in the island of Ios, in August of 2022. In this work, entitled Islands grow – Islands fluctuate, Palpana deals with the perpetual shaping and constant transformation of the landscape, where the possibility of access, viewing the beauty of the environment and contact with this common good, is intercepted and delimited by the human factor.

Through her latest work, she turns to claiming the ground/environment as the natural space of our [common] senses. Her work expands on the floor as well as vertically in a sculptural installation which combines coarse construction materials, drawings sewn up in fabric and video. Rocky configurations shaped out of intense painterly gestures together with slender hollow forms and abstract shapes, introduce a narrative about issues as fundamental and familiar as our bodies or our geological surroundings.

The moving image element of the video View of Me, has a special role in this exhibition. Created back in 2017, this work is yet another initiating point for the whole installation, referring to the mechanics and the bodily rhythms that are involved in the making of the sculptural object. Going back to the body and the ground as form and matter, while maintaining the reminiscence of landscape contemplation, Palpana provides us access to a place of primordial connections, where geological, human and manufactured bodies surround, compress, strain, crush, in other words coexist in a symbiotic relationship of exchanging attributes and properties.

FOTEINI PALPANA | View of Us
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center
Curated by Dimitris Foutris
Opening May 4, 19:00 to 22:00
Until 22.07.2023.

“It’s only when we look with the eyes of love that we see what the painter sees.”
-Henry Miller

The Breeder is pleased to present “Looking with the Eyes of Love”, a group exhibition curated by Aristeidis Lappas with works by Athens based artists Claudio Coltorti, Lydia Delikoura, Iasonas Kampanis, Bety Krňanská, Konstantinos Lianos, Ioanna Limniou, Lara Nasser, Alexandros Simopoulos, Stephani x Irini, Kyvèli Zoi.

The exhibition sheds light on different aspects of the painting process, aspiring to introduce the viewers to the inner dialogs that artists experience when engaging in their practice. The works on show present the process of dialoguing with the paintings, which become the outcomes of those internal conversations.

Framed as the mental space where these conversations take place, the exhibition is seen as a room filled with energies constantly transforming, that shift in and out of recognizable images. Taking the form of memories, haunting thoughts, and intimate moments, they present each artist’s distillation of these sensations into pictorial subjects.

Consumed by their emotions, a painter must be able to understand and redirect their trajectories toward a place of equilibrium. Find their voice in them, feel comfortable with them, and thus learn to coexist.

These energies manifest themselves in everything an artist faces – their desires for belonging and affection, confrontations with history, as well as the challenge of giving form to that which does not yet have one. Asking these questions, the painter tries to find their own truth within the medium and in this act, materializes the essence of their own existence.

In this interchanging current of emotions, they find honesty towards a greater beauty, surfacing the pulse in the beating heart of creativity. This is the act of love in painting.

Participating Artists:
Claudio Coltorti, Lydia Delikoura, Iasonas Kampanis, Bety Krňanská, Konstantinos Lianos, Ioanna Limniou, Lara Nasser, Αlexandros Simopoulos, Stephani x Irini, Kyvèli Zoi.

Opening: Thursday 11 Μay, 19:00 – 22:00
Exhibition Dates: 11 Μay – 30 June 2023
The Breeder, Feeder

*Aristeidis Lappas, Iasonas Kampanis, Alexandros Simopoulos and Kyvèli Zoi are visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

On Saturday, May 13, opbo studio presents Janis Rafa’s first solo exhibition in Greece, curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. Under the title “Riddles for resilient tongues”, the exhibition includes a new series of drawings and sculptural works by the artist where the mouth is perceived as its main axis for exploring issues of power, dominance and submission, and their psychosocial and political cartography, not only among humans but also among all species. Along with these works, Lacerate (2020), the short film by Rafa presented at the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2022, will be presented for the first time in Athens. The exhibition will last until June 17.

“Riddles for resilient tongues” launches opbo studio as an art space with a series of exhibitions curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. The program includes a series of solo shows focusing on the political and poetic qualities of seduction as a means of exploring issues of collective and individual identities.

Curatorial Text:
“Riddles for resilient tongues”

I read a quote I liked the other day. It’s by James Baldwin and it goes: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” Yet, what happens when words don’t come as clear as bones, when the complexity of history, trauma, power, but also desire, affect, tenderness, generosity and empathy, doesn’t allow for singular approaches and meanings, but instead makes things scattered and giddy and unable to be uttered by the already existing means that language provided us with?

“Riddles for resilient tongues”, the solo exhibition of Janis Rafa, through a new series of drawings and sculptural works coming along with her film Lacerate (2020), traces the mouth as its main axis to speak about power plays, dominations and submissions, mechanisms of control, the undoubted value of consent, the indisputable significance of agency and along with them, their psychosocial and political cartographies; not only among us, human beings, but among all species

Shrieking whispers lingering over the unspoken words of tongues once tamed, love letters composed for grievances and losses, still waters echoing the thirst of carrying the weight of existence, or of a labour unwanted or unwaged, they all come together asking the question: What’s the sound of a multiverse where all of the world’s oxymora reside?
The piercing silence revealing the oscillations of exploitations of animals, the high-pitched chasm disclosing the wounds of mistreatments of humans, co-exist with a polyphony of voices praising interpersonal, consensual, libidinal forces and pleasures lived or imagined; these are the subtle poetics and politics of Rafa’s work. Through this series of gestures, Riddles for resilient tongues does not aim to aesthetize objects that have been used as controlling tools, but to instead emphasize on the subtle or abrupt, temporal or perpetuated, exercises of deceptions and entrapments; her gestures aim to speak about their problematic, uncanny nature when consent can’t be spoken, when voices are muzzled or unheard.

Through encountering these qualities, the exhibition brings in the forefront subjects thinking through gender roles and dynamics, domestic and non-domestic environments, impositions of hierarchical structures occurring in spaces, supposedly safe. It longs to make us, audiences, active observants of a spatial choreography that requires an unlearning of the domineering, canonized gaze. And through this subversion, others times and spaces and worlds are unleashed, exposing that which hides under the phenomenically pleasing, speaking the story of unwilling suppression and wounding hierarchy.

Yet, these worlds, find themselves in parallel with their opposites, with omniverses some call dirty and untamed, which yet, do allow the space for empowerment, growth and self-advocacy, when built in mutuality. How can these controlling, manipulative tools, symbolically disclose other longings and belongings when used in interpersonal, consensual, pleasurable acts? How close can we look at this other hedonism, without criticizing it, without appending demonic connotations on it, without letting our entitlement to exclude it as vulgar? By touching, looking with and listening through these contradictory schemes, Riddles for resilient tongues is an invitation towards resisting and fighting against oppressive mechanisms, whilst licking our wounds, loving our otherness, owning our raptures.

— Ioanna Gerakidi

Janis Rafa (b.1984, Greece) lives and works between Amsterdam and Athens. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie (NL, 2013/14) and a Fellow at ARTWORKS (GR, 2020). Her work was presented last year at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022). Her body of work combines film, video installation, sculpture and drawing, in which the nonhuman, non-logocentric agency is recognised in order to reveal political and ethical dimensions, as another kind of archaeology. Her recent work has been supported by ART for the World, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Mondriaan Fund, Netherland Film Fund and Greek Film Center.

Info:
opbo studio, 86 Filonos, Piraeus, 18536
Exhibition Opening: 13 May 2023, 19.00
Duration: 13 May – 17 June 2023
Opening hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 18.00 – 20.00
Free entrance
opbostudio.com | Instagram | Facebook

Myrto Xanthopoulou – Panos Iliopoulos
“εδώ μέσα εκατοικούσε”
Video art / Music
May 8 – 14 2023, Athens & Epidaurus Festival Instagram & Facebook
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*Myrto Xanthopoulou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020)

The collective performance “I heard them singing in the mountains” consists of a walk through the public spaces of the Kairi Arcade – and the gunsmithing shop of Thodoros Papaioannou – in the center of Athens, intending to temporarily appropriate and contemplate it through the multiple stories it reveals. The arcade functions simultaneously as an empty shell and as a microcosm of the city’s commercial triangle, incorporating in visible or more discreet ways the echo of the changes that the latter constantly undergoes. Its architectural space acts as an occasion for a group tour framed by imaginative elements that touch on concepts and comment on situations such as touristification, nostalgia, expectation, geography, the city as a countryside in constant evolution, the coexistence of past and future, and the potential of collectivity.How can a place and its history be transformed into one or more narratives in order for them to resonate in a range that exceeds its geographical boundaries?

The performance is the result of a methodology of collective creative process and co-direction that began in October 2022 with the participation of all artists. Part of the process includes researching the history of the arcade and working with the owners of the commercial shops in the arcade, whose narratives were the trigger and inspiration for the realization of the project. Thus, the process itself is both a methodology and an artwork presented in the form of a video in the basement of the arcade.

The collective project “I heard them singing in the mountains” is a continuation of the group exhibition I heard it from the valleys4 that took 3 / 4 place at Haus N (on the 2nd floor of the Kairi Arcade) in October 2021. Both actions are the results of Eva Vaslamatzi’s curatorial research around manifestations of everyday traditional and folk elements through the production of visual artworks.

The project would not have been possible without the support of the owners of the arcade, Alexandros Drakopoulos and Kostas Papaioannou, as well as the manager of the arcade, Eleni Petrekas.

With the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development.

Collective performance “I heard them singing in the mountains”*
11-14.05.2023 6pm, 7pm
Kairi Arcade, Athens

With: Larissa Araz, Filia Dendrinou, Anastasia Douka, Dimitra Kondylatou, Evi Souli, Eva Vaslamatzi, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas, Kostas Tzimoulis)
Concept/Curation: Eva Vaslamatzi

*Reference to the track “The Valleys” by the indie rock band Electrelane which is inspired by the poem “A Letter Home” by Siegfried Sassoon. The song refers to waiting for a lost loved one who through dreams may return, focusing on the power of the dream to bring him back (“We know such dreams are true.”).

Eva Vaslamatzi is an SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow (2019).

Toni Brell and Angeliki Tzortzakaki will tell stories of socio-geo-ecological entanglements through the fictionalised setting of a night boat, inspired by the multilayered history of the Finlandia cruise ship that between 1975 and 1988 sailed around the Baltic Sea under different identities. Wrapped into the format of a ghost sea-vessel story, they will research and speak about the changing landscapes and scenarios that we are haunted by due to a perennial planetary crisis. Brell and Tzortzakaki are artists-in-residence of Research Pavilion #5.

Toni Brell (DE) and Angeliki Tzortzakaki (GR) have been working and thinking together for some time now. Their trajectories crossed when they started collaborating for the performance collective Scores for Gardens, blending interdisciplinary research with performance. Both spending most of their time in Amsterdam, they have been working together in other circumstances as well such as the collaboration with visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta.

The night boat project
In the vastness of the night and the deepness of the ocean, a floating body traverses. Slow but steady, accompanied by the lingering hum of its engine. This body-vessel is unlike any other boat: it’s an obscure mechanic configuration whose destination is uncertain and can only be seen or heard after sundown. It carries dreams or nightmares, faded out memories, fictions, illusions and origin stories around the ever-evolving seas. This very ocean, whose darkness comes in waves, or calm velvet surfaces, is another not unrelated story. It bears the exhausted geographies and marine ecologies of the Baltic, but also exceeds the normativity of a contained body of water. Thus, the night boat’s journey is not linear. It is this anti-narrative that the vessel helps us to pass through: Its capacity to carry and be carried enables a different way of thinking through temporalities, storytelling, proximity, scale and the self. If a night boat is a body in search of something lost, how do we navigate our (un)human geographies and fleeting states of existence?

Toni Brell’s and Angeliki Tzortzakaki ‘s Research Pavilion residence will take place in Saari Residence from 16 May to 28 May 2023.

More info: https://blogit.uniarts.fi/en/post/night-boats-the-case-of-golden-princess/

Angeliki Tzortzakaki is an SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow (2021).

Between may 22nd and July 16th 2023, Myrto Vratsanou will be participating in the AiR program hybrida.space in Älvsbacka, Sweden. At the end of her stay, she will exhibit her new work as part of Hybrida Fest 2023. Ηybrida.space is supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Region Värmland, Swedish Arts Council, City of Karlstad, IAPSIS: The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

Ηybrida space is an art & curatorial initiative, launched in 2020, focusing on creating virtual/physical ground & open-ended curatorial frameworks, where artists can develop and show new work.

During her residency, Myrto Vratsanou will develop a series of drawings, using the deity of the dawn, Eos, as a narrative device to map out the landscape of Älvsbacka and follow the traces, symbols and networks of its past industry and energy infrastructure.

More info:
https://hybridafest.info/Exhibition
https://hybrida.space/about

Μyrto Vratsanou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2022).

“Ancestral Futures” investigates practices of futuring through care, collectivity and intertwined temporalities as a response to crisis, and as an avenue for dreaming and practicing the otherwise. The selected visual artists include Teo Paaer, Gabriella Presnal and Eirini Tiniakou. Artists: Eirini Tiniakou, Teo Paaer, Gabriella Presnal Co-curated by: Martina Šerešová, Mana Tashakorinia, Amy Merig, Lau Kaker, Erika Cárdenas Manzanilla, Jade Lönnqvist, Rebekka Yallop.

“On Sacrifice” is part of “Stomachoma”, an artistic research and work series dedicated to heritage, soil, folk stories and olive trees based on the traditions of Lesvos Island. In this work, Eirini Tiniakou deals with the spiritual connection of the olive tree, the female pickers, and references to rituals of sacrifice in pagan Greece where women were primal agents of such processes. Cooking of the sacrificial animal in special pots and commensality symbolized the passage of life, transgression and survival.

“Fog is a cloud that touches the ground” is a transdisciplinary event that brings together five curatorial projects presenting work in response to the shared theme of crisis. Event is co-curated by Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) MA students participating in the Curating from Theory to Practice course. Opening event on Thu 18.5., 6-9 pm Featuring: We Didn’t Start the Fire Numb The Heiress Ancestral Futures The United States of Finlandica www.fogisacloud.com Visuals by: Pihla Lemmetyinen

Exhibition: “Ancestral Futures”
“Fog is a cloud that touches the ground” Event | Exhibitions | Performances
Thu 18.5. – Sun 21.5.2023
Vuosaarentie 7, Helsinki | Free admission

Eirini Tiniakou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2022).

Honey Moon, the short film directed by Alkis Papastathopoulos – filmmaker and SNF ARTWORKS Moving Image Fellow (2019)  has been selected with other 6 projects worldwide to take part at the Focus WiP of Cannes Film Festival 2023.

The Focus WiP (Work in Progress) aims to highlight short films currently in production or post-production to key decision-makers, such as international festival programmers, distributors, institutions, producers and buyers.

FOCUS WIP PRESENTATION
Tuesday, May 23rd, 10:00am @Palais Stage
The pitch session Focus SCRIPT is followed by the presentation of the Focus WiP and one-to-one meetings.

Find below more information about the six chosen projects for this 2023 edition
https://cinemadedemain.festival-cannes.com/en/2023/focus-wip-2023/

Celebrated during Eleusis’ Mysteries, Persephone revives in the city as a red carpet unfolded and moved in the public space of the European Capital of Culture.

The antic myth of Persephone seeks to inspire contemporaries to heed the disturbed cycle of the seasons and our indefectible interdependence with earth. Embodied as a red carpet, Persephone becomes the city’s common ground to reflect on its present and envision its future.

The idea of rolling out a red carpet on the street, as a set-up for inhabitants to meet, eat, sing, play on it, in short, to make it their own, was born during the lockdown’s lack of places to be together. It will be realized during the well-named Festival Synoikoismos, mysteriously enchanting the everyday life throughout the city.

Persephone, the red carpet is a living sculpture shaped by the protagonists and the dynamics of each neighborhood. To the sound of Andreas Polyzogopoulos’ trumpet she will be led in
procession from a neighbourhood to the other by the inhabitants-artists. During these mysterious transitions different worlds meet…

The different stages of Persephone, the red carpet’s life will become the homonymous movie shot by Joshua Olsthoorn and the Collectif MASI.

The 28th of May 2023, at 18:00 pm on Plateia Eleftherias, the red carpet unfolds and evolves from an aristocratic symbol into a democratic one on a public stage where residents and artists create together, discovering that each of them is a Very Important Person and an artist at the same time. The red carpet first stage, in Plateia Eleftherias, is dedicated to the birth of the contemporary Persephone between the cement’s factory and the sea…

Opening: Sunday 28/05/2023 Birth of modern Persephone
18.00-19.00 Event for the start of the project in Canteen Square / Platform
The transitions of Persephone, the red carpet take place on the following dates:
Thursday 01/06/2023 Innocence (happiness, joy, naivety)
17.00-17.30 Canteen Square / Platform — Kanellopoulou 64-56
Monday 06/05/2023 Death
18.00-18.30 Railway lines
Friday 09/06/2023 Rebirth
18.00-18.30 Railway station — Youth Park
Tuesday 13/06/2023 Fertility
18.30-19.00 Youth Park — Nicomedia Street (Refugees)
Saturday 17/06/2023 Confrontation
18.00-18.30 Nikomedia Street (Refugees) — Agia Markella Square
Wednesday 21/06/2023 Connection of the lower and upper worlds
18.00-18.30 Agia Markella Square —Nikolaidou Street
Sunday 25/06/2023 Forever between two worlds
19.00-19.30 Nikolaidou Street — Ormos Vlychas

Each transition is followed by an event at the place of destination.
Contributors
Conceived & Realised By: Collectif MASI (Madlen Anipsitaki, Simon Riedler)
Documentary Creation & Direction: Joshua Olsthoorn
Music: Andreas Polyzogopoulos
Sound Engineer: Yiannis Antipas
Production Management: Goodheart Productions

The exhibition “A Scattering of Salts”, opening on May 26, 2023, presents works of painting, sculpture, video, performance, and dance at Deree – The American College of Greece. It brings the art collection of The American College of Greece into dialogue with contemporary artists from Greece and abroad.

The narrative thread traversing the exhibition stems from a photograph which is part of the art collection. The acclaimed American Poet James Merrill looks at the life mask of fellow poet Kimon Friar. Multiple references emerge from the petrified gaze. Projections of desire, the form of the Medusa, citations and comparisons, sedimentation, the nexus of life and death. Merrill’s last poetry collection¹ of the same name lends the exhibition its title, imposing its underlying leitmotifs. The scattering of salts is a poetic invocation, binding and situating at the same time, a magic circle, a spell. The scattering of salts serves as a metaphor for the scattering of memories and the accumulation of time.

Merrill’s séance is proposed in “A Scattering of Salts” as an exhibition-making tool. The occult, spiritual communications the poet anecdotally held are playfully converted into a way of engaging with art history and reconstructing historical works. These uncanny conversations become a source of both poetic and spatial inspiration.

The invocation of magic helps us become aware of our preexisting metaphysical assumptions. As the range of the possible keeps shrinking, contemporary rituals try to move beyond prescribed rules and reach out to what cannot be captured in descriptive language. They reveal the relationship between artistic practice and the transcendental through the counter reflection of the “technical”². Historical works surface alongside contemporary artists and erratic dance performances and occupy unexpected spaces, while lost works are re-animated or developed further, creating scattered connections.

Privileging scattering over organization, dispersion rather than systematic arrangement, the exhibition presents fragments of imagination dissolving into something else. Salts become a lens through which to contemplate the present and scattering emerges as a methodology, thus creating the illusion of symmetrical, kaleidoscopic patterns. Minerals and parts of our tissues facilitate the transmission of nerve impulses across the human body, crystallizing into precious materials, a process of becoming and unbecoming—prisms in a contingent flux which enable us to contemplate the past and the future.

Salts crystallize and dissolve; layers of calcium carbonate accrete to form a pearl, which in time is dropped back into the sea; molecules under heat and pressure are rearranged to form gemstones, and the same forces decrystallize marble to chalk³.

Participating artists: Yannis Bouteas, James Bridle, Eleni Christodoulou, Jimmie Durham, Nicole Economides, Evangelia Fouseki, Ioanna Gouma, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Gkikas, Rowena Hughes, Theo Hios, Astrid Kokka, Bety Krňanská, Jack McConville, Irini Miga, Michael Michaelides, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Kosmas Nikolaou, Aemilia Papaphilippou, Pavlos Nikolakopoulos, Malvina Panagiotidi, Rallou Panagiotou, Cezary Poniatowski, Chrysanne Stathacos, Takis, Lina Zedig

Performances by: Konstantina Barkouli, Ermira Goro

Architectural design: Anastasis Papadakis
Exhibition and ACG Art Collection Senior Manager: Ioanna Papapavlou
Curatorial assistants: Clio Georgiadis, Maria Kollia, Athina Lasithiotaki, Katerina Milesi,
Elena Pitsilka (Deree Art History Program students)
Graphic design: Athina Lasithiotaki, Katerina Milesi
Graphic Design Supervision: Marios Stamatis
Organized by the Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts at Deree – The
American College of Greece as part of the Arts Festival 2023.
In collaboration and supported by the Art History, Graphic Design and Visual Arts
programs and ACG Art Collection.
Special thanks to the Dance Area for their contribution and collaboration.

About The American College of Greece
The American College of Greece (ACG) is a private, independent, non-profit educational organization founded in 1875 and the oldest and largest American-accredited educational institution in Europe. Today, ACG comprises three educational units: Pierce (secondary education), Deree (undergraduate and graduate programs) and Alba Graduate Business School. Faithful to its mission of providing equal access to high quality education, ACG supports its students through a €8 million financial aid program. Deree, its undergraduate and graduate division, offers 38 innovative programs of study, accredited by NECHE (New England Commission of Higher Education) and validated by the OU, 6 cooperative programs with Clarkson University, 58 minors, and 9 graduate programs in Communication, Psychology, Education and Data Science.

¹ Merrill, James. A Scattering of Salts. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
² Campagna, Federico. Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
³ “A Scattering of Salts: Kaleidoscopic Innocence.” James Merrill: Knowing Innocence, Routledge, New York, 2007, p. 158.

*Nicole Economides, Kosmas Nikolaou, Malvina Panagiotidi and Konstantina Barkouli are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows. Panos Giannikopoulos is the Program Coordinator of ARTWORKS.

Kontantina Barkouli’s dance performance, a new production for the exhibition, titled “Pool,” takes a reservoir for water as a point of departure, embodying notions of accumulation, stability, and the convergence of diverse elements within a shared space. In her response to the “Scattering of Salts” group show, Barkouli delves into the materiality of salt, evoking associations with idyllic summer scenes and moments of leisure. However, she deliberately selects the swimming pool as the central symbol for the physical evolution of her work, highlighting its role as a human-made container typically devoid of salt. A melodic song interweaves with the soundscape, accompanied by fragments of dialogue from the film “The Way We Were,” evoking an atmosphere of nostalgia while simultaneously challenging it. Exploring themes of memory, the past, and their processing, Barkouli incorporates salt as a defining space and movement material, with qualities of preservation and dissolution, also connected to pleasure—shaping the trajectory of motion. The spatial data, visual materials, architectural elements, and artworks coalesce, and become embodied. As the performance unfolds, a swimmer engages in warm-up exercises, setting the stage for what lies ahead.

Konstantina Barkouli (b. 1994, Athens) graduated from the National School of Dance in Athens and the American College of Greece (2021), where she acquired her BA in Communication and Film Studies with the support of a Harvey C. Krentzman scholarship. As a dancer, she has collaborated with many artists and dance companies. She has performed in several international festivals, including: International Contemporary Dance Festival of the Canary Islands, Athens Biennale, Aerowaves Festival, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Fast Forward Festival, Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival and Dance Days Chania. As part of her SNF ARTWORKS fellowship, she showcased her first solo work-in-progress titled ‘Nobody Wants Your Dance’.

More info about the exhibition

4 FELLOWS @ ΤΗΕ ΕΧΗΙΒΙΤΙΟΝ “A Scattering of Salts” curated by Panos Giannikopoulos

‘Mythical Truths’, the site-specific artistic research that Yorgos Maraziotis is currently executing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, spans between archiving, social sculpture and institutional critique. Drawing on the understanding of space through embodied memories and over a methodology that includes story-telling, human relations and visual arts, Maraziotis provokes the canon of academic knowledge and envisions an alternative school model where decision making occurs on the authority of its own people.

During the autumn of 2022, students, professors, technicians, administrative personnel and others that constitute the Academy, were invited to share their everyday experiences while walking through and around the school buildings. Their narratives touch, among others, notions on apprenticeship, spatial agents, representation and identity structures, everyday-life joys and burdens. And they highlight the Academy as a unique and diverse community. The recorded stories have been edited according to personal narrative and literacy criteria into a written archive which upon its publication shall work as a portrait of the school in the 21st century.

Parts of the aforementioned archive gain momentum through their sculptural, design and sound translation in space. More specifically, from April to July 2023, selected oral narrations will be turned into language-based neon, metal and marble sculptures, printed matter and sound projections, and will be exhibited in numerous indoors and outdoors spaces of the Academy; the garden, the Orangerie, the Wintertuin, various halls, the Research Room and the Library. This way a polyphonic landscape will be created where personal truths blur with collective myths and shape the identity of the institution.

‘Mythical Truths’ stems from Maraziotis’ necessity to look into the school model as an educational, pedagogical and cultural ecosystem where his vision of sculpture and archiving can amplify or sustain its social diversity.

https://ap-arts.be/en/event/yorgos-maraziotis-mythical-truthsmaraziotis.com

Yorgos Maraziotis
Mythical Truths
A multidisciplinary intervention throughout the Royal Academy of Fine Arts
27 April – 7 July 2023

DEO Projects in collaboration with Chios Ephorate of Antiquities presents My Past is a Foreign Country, a group large-scale exhibition presented between two historical monuments within Chios Castle, the Temenos* Hamidiye and the Ottoman Baths, both inherited by the Ottoman Empire. The exhibition invites twelve artists from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, and Cyprus to reflect on the palimpsest histories of the island and examine borderland cultures, collective traumas, and forms of iasis**.

Eight of the twelve participating artists were commissioned to create new works for the exhibition drawing inspiration from the venues’ history, the island’s collective memory and the linkage between the Eastern Mediterranean peoples’ histories and the global community. Through eight in-situ new works, four existing works and a plurality of mediums –including sculptures, paintings, textiles, ceramics, installations, and photography– the invited artists touch upon the conflicted historical imaginations and the memory that they construct. Resisting geo-political anxieties, the artists form cross-cultural intimacies and highlight collective solidarity and kinship while strengthening forms of representation and inclusivity within the diverse social fabric of Chios.

The exhibition pays tribute to the monuments’ genealogy and explores historical incisions and connections with current socio-political events in the neighbouring regions of south-eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Temenos Hamidiye (or Mbairakli mosque) was rebuilt to honour the victims of the Chios earthquake of 1881 and its devastating effects, which heavily impacted the whole island, including the two exhibition venues. Inevitably the recent destructive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria create associations with the island’s past, by drawing connections between these natural disasters and their socio-political aftermaths. The exhibition highlights the enduring impact of such events on vulnerable communities across time and borders and offers a space for grief, mourning and reflection on the human condition which unites us all with the past, with each other and with the here and now; while at the same time it sheds light to the resilience of the human kind and the powerful story telling of local communities which enhances the narrative of the global community. On the other side, The Baths served as a site of cultural and social exchange and a place of cleansing in the lives of Chios Castle’s inhabitants during the Ottoman Empire. In the 20th century, both venues, the Baths and the Temenos, were used as sanctuary for refugees from Asia Minor during the exchange of populations. Today, the activation of the Eastern Mediterranean pathways, led to refugees being temporarily hosted in the Castle’s entrance located in a walking distance from the venues before settling in the hot spot facilities outside the city of Chios.

The exhibition borrows its title from the opening phrase: the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, in the novel the Go-between by L.P. Hartley, published in 1953. The phrase has extensively been used in other publications, screenings, films, talks, music albums including Zeba Talkhani’s memoir on growing up in Saudi Arabia and her quest for freedom through education in India, Germany and England. The multiplicities of the title’s origin, and the specificity into the Chios context, provide new strands of meaning into how we deal with the past, the overlooked, and the forgotten.

*Temenos: From Ancient Greek τέμενος (témenos). A piece of ground surrounding or adjacent to a temple; a sacred enclosure or precinct.
Temenos in Greek is mostly used as a reference to a Mosque.

**Iasis: Originally from Ancient Greek ἴασις (íasis). A Latin word-forming element meaning “process” or “morbid condition”. Ancient Greek word for Healing.

My Past is a Foreign Country
Group exhibition
8 July – 28 August
Chios Castle, Chios (Chora), 82 100
Exhibition Venues: Temenos Hamidiye & Ottoman Baths

Participating artists:
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (TR), Stelios Faitakis (GR), Nikomachi Karakostanoglou (GR), Avish Khebrehzadeh (IR/USA), Maro Michalakakos (GR), Petros Moris (GR), Dala Nasser (LB), Yorgos Petrou (CY), Aykan Safoğlu (TR/DE), Mounira al Solh (LB), Maria Tsagkari (GR), Abbas Zahedi (UK/IR)

Curated by Akis Kokkinos, Founder of DEO Projects.

Exhibition Venues’ Location: Temenos Hamidiye and Ottoman Baths, Chios Castle, Chios (Chora), 82 100, Greece
Opening hours
Ottoman Baths: daily 8:30 – 15:30 except for Tuesday
Temenos Hamidiye: daily 10:00 – 15:30 except for Tuesday

Free admission

Opening reception: 8 July, 18:30 – 21:00
Live performance on 8 July at 19:30 at the courtyard of the Ottoman Baths by DEO Commission Series artist, Saskia Calderón.

INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXHIBITION VENUES

Temenos Hamidiye or Mbairakli Mosque
The Hamidiye or Mbairakli Mosque was founded in 1892 as a tribute to the victims of the catastrophic earthquake of Chios in 1881. It is located in the centre of the Chios Castle and was built in the place of a Christian church. A Minaret used to stand at the west corner of the square building but unfortunately has not been restored. The current monument is a single-hall building, covered with a tile roof on the exterior, and a blind, timber-framed plastered dome on the interior. Inside the Mosque there is also a Mihrab indicating the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying. On the roof top there is the Crescent Moon symbolizing Islam. Above the entrance there is a marble Ottoman founding inscription. The Mosque has been declared a monument worthy of preservation and has been restored by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios in order to be used as a cultural space and to house cultural events. The DEO Projects exhibition is the first event to be hosted in the Mosque upon completion of restoration.

Ottoman Baths
The Ottoman Baths, the largest hammam in the Castle of Chios, are a living proof of the Ottoman occupation even though there are sources to testify to their existence even from the Byzantine Empire era. The great earthquake of 1881, however, caused a great damage in the largest part of the island including the Baths. At the left side of the venue there is the entrance, the welcoming area and the “changing rooms”. Next, the visitor faces the grand hall with the central dome, decorated with cornices and other elements emitting the glory of the Ottoman era. On the dome there are holes, through where the sun light comes in while there is a third room, where the water springs are to be found. Restoration brought to light about 800 coloured and decorated tiles. Since the completion of restoration, the Baths are open to the public as a monument.

DEO and its 2023 Summer Program have been generously supported by:
Major Donors: Stamos J. Fafalios, Theodore Fatsis & Maria Apodiacos, Yiannis Skoufalos & Maria Kalomenidou, Patron: Constantine & Christina Logothetis, Supporter: Irene Panagopoulos, Young Patrons: Tina Livanos, Constantin Pavleas and Eugenia Vandoros.
Complimentary support by Alex Haidas and Angelicoussis Foundation.

With the support of: OUTSET

Sponsors: THE FABULOUS GROUP

*Petros Moris and Maria Tsagkari are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows in visual arts. Akis Kokkinos is a curatorial SNF ARTWORKS Fellow.

 The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses.

— Anne Carson

“Volcanic Identity” is Iria Vrettou’s on-going research art project, which begins from the narrative grounds of a volcanic island to unfold between the real and the imaginary, the entanglement of various time modalities. While it draws from the attributes and nature of familiar volcanic islands, it deviates in terms of the lives that inhabit it. It constitutes a wild terrain of speculative fabulation where queer ecologies and more-than-human species erupt, mix, fl ow, melt, seethe, are being vaporized and dissevered, thus conjuring and altering unexpected forms of kinship.

In this work, volcanoes are not viewed as isolated geological formations, but as dynamic bodies, already and always present in myths of origins, catastrophic historical events and sociopolitical symbolisms. They are formative, lethal, shapeshifting entities, composed by chthonic and celestial elements, hidden materialities and yet-unexplored quantum natures. Entities which belong to the state that Karen Barad has described as “nature’s queer performativity.”

Iria Vrettou chooses to investigate this particular state, and by naming it “volcanic identity” she critically questions common understandings of identity, the limits of representation, the potential of performative, multisensorial thinking, the real possibility of a «metaphor,” i.e. the transportation of the self to the other.

In this first episode of the project, titled Volcanic Identity: States of Eros, the artist approaches the endlessly emerging and transforming nature of erotic love, its victorious, emphatic but not rigid, transgression of boundaries and intuitions.

In the performative, indomitable nature of the volcano, Vrettou’s work acknowledges similarities to Eros, born from the union of Chaos and Gaia. They are both states of a certain kinship, powers of annihilation and regeneration, energies of abundance and ambiguity, beautiful, terrible, feminine, refl ecting one another. With reference to Anne Carson’s work Eros the Bittersweet (Dallas, Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2022) this exhibition invokes the mysterious links that express the volcanic identity as erotic identity; explosions, magma, heat and ashes, desert and fertility, iridescent colors and toxic gases, time warps, multifaceted expressions, plural reformulations beyond the human; the state where hybrid and chimeric bodies are possible, desire and pleasure are liberated from the capitalistic imaginary, its racist and colonial necropolitics.

The “demons,” the painted and animated bodies of this exhibition are otherworldly apparitions of tentacular reach, insurgent sexuality and symanimagenic complexity; untamable witnesses to this reality, sudden and true embodiments of a metaphor. These bodies haunt the exhibition space that is turned by Iria Vrettou into an odd diorama of a certain volcanic/erotic plot.

Painting, animation, soundscape and live performances flirt with the “subconscious state of the explosion” and tease the “deep time” of volcanic identity. Contradictions, ideas, intensions run along in a dizzying effervescence, towards the volcanic explosion, the release of the magma, the creation of the first ground. Upon this ground, geological formations are ever fluid. Everything is changing, all is ephemeral, ever suggestive even in its most terrifying, volcanic roar.

***
Volcanic Identity: States of Eros
Solo Exhibition by Iria Vrettou
Curated by: Vassiliki- Maria Plavou
Organized by: Sfigga 45
Duration: 9th – 18th of June 2023
Opening: 9th of June 20:00
Visiting Hours: 20:00 – 23:00 Monday to Sunday
Sound Design and Sound Installation by Dimitris Kalamaras
Activities: Performative response to the work by invited artist Valinia Svoronou, June 18 @ 21:00.

*Iria Vrettou and Valinia Svoronou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

*Eva Anerrapsi is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2022)

UCL’s Faculty of Brain Sciences is delighted to welcome Sam Albatros for a discussion of queer experience and their debut novel, faulty boy.

Sam Albatros (UCL PhD & best-selling author) will perform a stand-up number on being a queer artist, novelist & scientist. They will then be joined for a discussion by Patricia Felisa Barbeito (Professor of American Literatures), to talk about Sam’s novel faulty boy, the first novel in Greece to be written in the voice of a gender non-conforming character who comes of age in the early 2000s. The event marks the launch of faulty boy as audiobook (available at apple books, google play, audiobooks.com and libro.fm)

Sam Albatros is an academic at King’s College London, writer, poet, translator and an internationally-acclaimed performance artist based in London, with a strong social-media presence in the Greek-speaking world. Their work has been supported by prestigious writing residencies in Berlin (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin) and Leipzig (Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, HALLE 14, Edit), and they have been the recipient of a Stavros Niarchos Foundation & Artworks Fellowship for young artists. Their debut novel faulty boy is currently translated into English and Spanish.

Patricia Felisa Barbeito has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and an acclaimed translator of Greek fiction and poetry. Her full-length translations include Menis Koumandareas’s Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry (Birmingham Modern Greek Translations, 2004); Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation (Birmingham Modern Greek Translations, 2013), which was short-listed for the 2014 Greek National Translation Award and granted the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize; Tatiana Averoff’s:Portrait of the Politician as a Young Man (Peter Lang, Byzantine and Neohellenic Studies, 2018);M. Karagatsis, The Great Chimera (Aiora, 2019); Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife (Dalkey Archive, 2019), which was short-listed for that year’s National Translation Award in the US. She is the recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate M. Karagatsis’s Junkermann. Her translation of Christos Chomenidis’s Niki is forthcoming from the Other Press.

All welcome. The event will be followed by refreshments and an opportunity for further informal discussion.

Free tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/faulty-boy-sam-albatros-stand-up-discussion-with-patricia-barbeito-tickets-652363836797

How does the body in pain move and communicate? Where are the boundaries between pain and pleasure in an era where the alternation between those two takes place instantly? The performance painfully painless seeks a sensory, pre-linguistic, unspeakable language, one that focuses on the mobility changes of a person in pain.

The ensemble approaches this subject matter through methods invented by humans for pain management, and develops the piece along two basis axes, one kinetic and one sonic. On the one hand, it focuses on the sensation of bodily pain. A body in pain moves in such a way as to always pursue and complete what is not there. It lives, organizes and regulates itself through memories from the time when it was “complete” and healthy. Its movement, presently elliptical, is realized every moment along with whatever is omitted. On the other hand, it guides us to listen to the particular language in which the phantom of pain expresses itself. Performers on the microphone recite mantras, words, instructions on pain management; they laugh, cry, breathe and everything is recorded, played back and gradually converted into audio frequencies. In this piece, the two aforementioned axes cross paths in multiple ways and instantly illuminate connections highlighting social, religious and cultural mandates on pain.

Let’s say: “a dance for pain”

dance research & choreography Androniki Marathaki • dance research & performance Elton Petri, Sofia Pouchtou, Despoina Sanida Krezia, Despoina Chatzipavlidou• dramaturgical contribution Steriani Tsintziloni• sound design | live electronics Jannis Anastasakis • sculptural installation | design & construction Natalia Manta • embedded systems Giorgos Roustas • lighting design Nysos Vasilopoulos • Costumes artwork: Frantzeska Mpoutsi • Light designer assistant Tzini Sakaloglou • artistic collaborator Eleni Mylona • collaborators Filippos Vasileiou, John Britton, Lida Diochnou, Mersianna Elefteriadou, Kostis Kallivretakis, Giorgos Sioras Deligiannis • developmental consultant Rallou Avramidou • production & management Delta-Pi • production Cloudsdonthaveshape • supporters of the dance practice “Let’s be comfortable in our own skin” Mykonos Biennale, Island Connect, Duncan Dance Research Centre, Unplugged Dance

Androniki Marathaki & Cloudsdonthaveshape
painfully painless
Piraeos B
1 – 3 July

A production of Cloudsdonthaveshape with the co-production of Athens Epidaurus Festival.

With the financial support of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports / With the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development.

Within the platform grape – Greek Agora of Performance

More information and tickets: https://aefestival.gr/festival_events/epodyna-eykolo/?lang=en

Natalia Manta is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2022)

Angelos Papadopoulos and Elpiniki Saripanidou present their works in a double bill!

The Gravity Between Us & Burst Forth

– Thursday 22nd of June at 21.00
– Friday 23rd of June at 21.00
– Saturday 24th of June at 21.00

M54/54 Menandrou Street, Athens, Greece (entrance from the side, go down the alley)

The Gravity Between Us
‘The Gravity Between Us’ is a choreographic work for 2 performers. The piece has been created to explore the human desire to connect and looks at the complexity of what individuals do to see, hear and understand them. In this work, the dancers talk before they begin to dance, creating various contexts for reading their dance. Creative research and development began by exploring how gaze and the desire for reciprocity act as an initial catalyst for connection or rejection. Desire can be in one moment highly focused and singular to its goal and then become distracted, frustrated and re-motivated to find another target for its focus. This constant state of desire is often manifested through different ways of seeing and perceiving.

With the support of the Duncan Dance Research Center.
‘The Gravity Between Us’ has been presented at the Act International Festival for Emerging Performing Artists 2022, after Angelos Papadopoulos was awarded the Act Residency Award 2021 for his first choreographic duet presented at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum.

Conception-choreography: Angelos Papadopoulos
Interpretation-co-creation: Danae Pazirgiannidi, Thanos Ragousis
Music: ECATI
Lighting design: Tzanos Mazis
Make-up: Emmanuel Kamakaris
Photography: Dimitra Tzanou
Acknowledgements: Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Steve Purcell and Elsa Siskou for their external look.

Burst Forth

A choreographic work for 1 performer. Burst Forth presents a meteoric space between inertia and action, placing a creature at the difficult point of transition.
Switched-on electrical appliances, animals grunting, objects breaking and disintegrating, harsh and sudden noises are sonicly and visually stimulating a somatic approach to feelings of discomfort, embarrassment and confusion. The performance space is treated as a dashboard with individual spaces that function as stages of transformation of the creature’s emotional state, forcing it into a process of displacement and self-confrontation. Burst Forth is an attempt to manage the constant mood shifts, from unbearable stagnation to the desire for action; A state in which the ultimate outburst seems necessary, even if it implies collapse.

Credits:
Conception-performance: Elpiniki Saripanidou
Sound design : Giorgos Stavridis , Giorgos Stenos-Frantzios, Elpiniki Saripanidou
Choreographer’s assistant: Alexandros Laskaratos
Prop design: Dionysis Kavallieratos
Lighting design: Tzanos Mazis
Photography: George Athanasiou, Dimitra Tzanou
poster design: George Athanasiou
Acknowledgements: Christina Skoutela, Pagona Mpoulmpasakou, Sophia-Danae Vorvila

The Gravity Between Us & Burst Forth
Angelos Papadopoulos & Elpiniki Saripanidou

– Thursday 22nd of June at 21.00
– Friday 23rd of June at 21.00
– Saturday 24th of June at 21.0

Entrance at the box office 12 €
The venue does not have POS.

Seat reservation is required online at the following links:
Thursday 22nd of June at 21.00
https://fienta.com/it-s-a-double-bill-angelos-elpiniki…
Friday 23rd of June at 21.00
https://fienta.com/it-s-a-double-bill-angelos-elpiniki…
Saturday 24th of June at 21.00
https://fienta.com/it-s-a-double-bill-angelos-elpiniki…

*Angelos Papadopoulos is SNF ARTWORKS Dance Fellow (2020)