Category: Fellows news

The Hellenic Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family Affairs, completing its “Art, a silent revolution” program, presents an exhibition and a conference on 5, 6, and 7 December 2023 at the Athens Conservatoire.

It presents ten young artists and collectives from all over Greece selected through an open call to express how their work (visual arts, moving image, performance) can serve as a dynamic tool of social transformation and change. The program creates a forum for discussion on how to address violence, abuse, harassment, and bullying. By acknowledging and examining similar traumatic cases, the artists present their perspectives, suggesting ways to heal and prevent them individually and collectively. Their works transmit messages against oppression, stereotypes, prejudices, and inequalities.

How can young people build a new framework of empowerment that fosters visibility and inclusivity for all individuals? What is their role in awakening and shaping an egalitarian society where culture is the central drive for development? A parallel conference will bring together professionals from art and culture, representatives of the university community, politicians, educators, sociologists, and psychologists.

Participating artists: Dimitra Stavropoulou, Dimitris Kapetanou, Virginia Russolo, Eleanna Balesi, Sia-Efstathia Koutli, Elina Demirtzioglou & Aristeidis Lappas, Georgette Alimperti & Niki Theodoridi, Fotini Tatsi, Giorgos Palaeologos, Angelos Papadopoulos.

The program is curated by Nicolas Vamvouklis / K-Gold Temporary Gallery.

Opening: Tuesday 5/12, 19:00, Ω2 Complex, Athens Conservatoire
Exhibition opening hours: 6-7/12, 10:00-20:00
Conference opening hours: 6-7/12, 10:00-18:00

*Aristeidis Lappas, Angelos Papadopoulos and Nicolas Vamvouklis are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

THAT WHICH WAS IS NOW NO MORE

On Tuesday December 5th 2023, from 18:00 until 21:00, the group show titled That which was is now no more opens at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center.

Participating artists:
Chronis Botsoglou, Nikos Komiotis, Natalia Manta, Eva Mitala, Doreida Xhogu

Curated by Galini Lazani

The exhibition will be on view until 27.01.2024

—
Some issues are hard to talk about. Probably because they are hard to comprehend. And some concepts are hard to narrow down. The title of this exhibition encloses everything that changes around us and shakes us up. Animate and inanimate beings, our environment, the people that surround us and ourselves. Things that perish, change, are reborn. That which was is now no more. Yet, it is something new.

The artists that present their work in this exhibition each deal, through their own thoughts and means, with these notions of change and loss, but also with the creation that eventually results from them.

Doreida Xhogu’s video, accompanied by a series of small wooden sculptures reminiscent of relics, depicts the personal ritual created by the artist in order to come to terms with her father’s death, which occurred during her absence. In his workplace, a mine in Albania, the artist constructed a huge human effigy out of straw and tar, which she then bedded for one night in her house and finally burned. The way she came up with to process this painful feeling of loss turned out to be her own personal creation after all.

Τhe new series of Eva Mitala‘s silkscreen prints also debate loss, in a sense. A loss of a completely different kind though, not so permanent and stagnant, but rather one that points to a shifting condition. Through her research on Chile’s Atacama Desert and the life of the indigenous inhabitants of the region, she incorporates in her work, through a mixture of digital and traditional techniques, issues that concern us all. Issues that become tangible in a “world in transition”, as she calls it, such as the extinction of traditional practices, languages, natural habitats. However, through extinction comes rebirth in the form of new, different ways of creation, as culture always finds its way to express itself.

Furthermore, the works presented by Natalia Manta, which always give the viewer the feeling that they come from or are intended for some kind of ritual, also deal with the life-giving power of loss and danger, since they take the form of sculptural totems in which one can recognize the bearing of some new life, yet at the same time of some unidentifiable threat as well. “Essentially, the entire installation reflects a prolonged suspension, in which existential anguish is established and defined as hope”, the artist mentions.

These thoughts, which contemplate the agony of human existence and its transfiguration into creation, lead to Chronis Botsoglou‘s series of works in which he portrays his mother during the days of her sickness. Their association to the exhibition is not about old age and death, but about the dementia that afflicted her amid her final years and everything that comes along with it; the deterioration of a person’s consciousness, personality and identity. “The disintegration of the face”, as Botsoglou described it referring to his mother, subsequently relates to Nikos Komiotis’ painting.

The main morphological element of Komiotis’ work is the disfiguration of human characteristics, due to which the figures he depicts appear to fluctuate between a lifeless and an animalistic condition of being. His frequent inspiration from the sequence of film frames, where for split seconds the features get mixed up, jumbled and lost, reminds us once again that subtle changes can ultimately lead to a new spectacle, a new creation.

Galini Lazani
November 2023

Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center / 48, Armatolon & Klefton Street, Athens 114 71
tel: +30 210 6439466 / fax:+30 210 6442852 / www.art-tounta.gr / [email protected]

Visiting hours: Tue – Thu: 15:00 – 20:00, Wed – Fri: 12:00 – 20:00, Saturday: 12:00 – 16:00

*The title of the exhibition was inspired by a phrase from Thomas Hardy’s novel A pair of blue eyes: “…she that was is now no more”.

The title of the new evolving project is ‘The Meaning of Queer Ritual Fusion 1’, arising from the shared need of four individuals to coexist. Is there a meaning in making art today? The goal is for this sharing with the audience to be the first of many.

2,3,4,9,10 December 2023, 21.00
Location: Μ54
Μενάνδρου 54, Αθήνα
https://goo.gl/maps/HkLxuPEtYDYSWM7k8

Creation-Participants: Pagona Boubasakou, Angelos Papadopoulos, Elpiniki Saripanidou, Elsa Siskou
Concept – Directorial Supervision: Angelos Papadopoulos
Music: Nikos Antonopoulos
Costume Design – Construction: Dynno Dada
Lighting Design: Janos Mazis
Dramaturgical Contribution: Elena Novakovic
Trailer, Poster: Katerina Tsakiri
Make-up Art: Emmanuel Kamakaris
Special Thanks: Kosmas Lapidis, Fay Tzouma, Charlotte Virgile

Shifting
shifting adjective UK /ˈʃɪf.tɪŋ/ US /ˈʃɪf.tɪŋ/ always changing or moving

Curated by Florent Frizet

w/
Despina Charitonidi

Leo Chesneau

Nadja Geer

Agata Ingarden

Katerina Komianou

Danai Kotsaki

Anna Lascari

Nicolas Melemis

Dimitris Tampakis

Eleni Tomadaki

Marios Stamatis

Camille Yvert

Opening Saturday 20/01/2024, 7-10pm

Until 17/02/2024

Opening hours Wed to Sat 4-8pm

One Minute Space
Marathonos 71, Athens 10435

T: +30 6949085521
[email protected]

*Katerina Komianou, Eleni Tomadaki & Marios Stamatis are SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellows

Despina Zacharopoulou’s (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2021) text “Contracts as Protocols of Governmentality in Performance Art” is now available as an Open Access article in Performance Research Journal ‘On Meeting’ Vol. 28, Issue 2 (2023), edited by Simon Bayly and Johanna Linslay. Cover Image: Mark Robson.

Abstract
This essay raises questions regarding meeting protocols as a form of art practice. Drawing on recent examples from my performance works, I initiate a discussion about how contracts in performance art might operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures towards other ways of ‘meeting with’. The term ‘governmentality’ is used to designate all those ‘regulatory apparatuses (dispositives)’ that exercise power via protocols of economy and circulation, to engender new subjectivities (Foucault 2007), whereas the term ‘morphogenesis’ is employed to describe processes where the genesis of forms follows a sensuous logic of structural disposition or tendency that organizes disparities of potential events. One could argue that in the 1970s, several performance artists adopted contractual methods of negotiating their meeting with an audience in order to critically expose the power dynamics existing within everyday hierarchical relations (O’Dell 1998). In so doing, contracts often demarcated the roles of the artist and the audience from the outset of the live work, as already fixed, separate subjectivities, thus sustaining binary essentialist categories (for example subject vs. object, and so on) as met within the philosophical tradition of dialectics (Golding 2021). However, in my performance works brought forward, contracts operate as protocols of governmentality, offering morphogenetic structures governing the thickness and the porosity of boundaries within the ways that people come to meet with one another, without pre-determining any final outcomes or assigning specific roles to the parties involved. Contracts in this case establish a set of meeting protocols that generate and distribute intensities through the organization of areas of possibilities for the emergence of potential events. And it is within this shifting topography of events that subjectivities emerge through the ways that bodies affect and are affected by other bodies via processes of use.

For a full PDF version of Despina Zacharopoulou’s article, please visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13528165.2023.2260705?needAccess=true&fbclid=IwAR2acYHFiB-oWwzIMMv5OJtS35xA-vC9a_oyOJgGXmFdBHR_a21dEt3ICCw

For the whole Issue of Performance Research ‘On Meeting’, please visit:
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rprs20/28/2

A programme of artists’ moving image works which share reflections on technology, ritual and the more-than-human world.

This evening of screenings includes works by Patricia Dominguez, Kyriaki Goni, Agnieszka Polska, Laure Prouvost, Tabita Rezaire, Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, and Emilija Škarnulytė. The programme will be accompanied by live interventions by artists Kyriaki Goni and Patricia Dominguez.

An Act of Wonder and Gratitude was originally curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Serpentine Head of Ecologies, as part of the Woods: More-than-Human-Curiosity symposium. Organised by are-events.org, the event takes place annually in the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic. Woods operates at the intersection of contemporary art, the landscape, human health, and interspecies coexistence.

Serpentine Cinema: An Act of Wonder and Gratitude
Part of Serpentine Ecologies
Offsite / Ciné Lumière, Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DW
Monday 12 February 2024, 7-9.30pm
PRICE: £9, £7 CONC

Programme:

Patricia Dominguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022

Emilija Škarnulytė, Sunken Cities, 2021

Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022

Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect, 2016

Laure Prouvost, Into all that is here, 2015

Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023

Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, Time and Love, 2022

*Kyriaki Goni is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow (2018)

In “Sunseekers or Dimming the Sun or” Vasilis Papageorgiou reflects on the vicious cycle between labour, leisure, and exhaustion (both human and planetary). By associating the depletion of planetary resources with burnout, Papageorgiou investigates the relationship between capitalist systems of pleasure, their role in the cyclical depletion of planetary resources, and the loop these create in relation the need for rest and regeneration.

The concept of the exhibition is somewhat influenced by George Papam’s text Hospitality Fatigue: Symptoms and Potions (in: Island after Tourism – Escaping the Monocultures of Leisure, Kyklada Press, 2023), in which the author is exploring different models of inhabiting and relating to landscape. Following, Papargeorgiou links the exhaustion of planetary resources to burnout, poetically employing the beach as a central metaphor to portray it as the ultimate fantasy where the dichotomies of nature and human indulgence merge. He reflects on leisure and pleasure as both a cause and a symptom of this exhaustion, hinting that structures of leisure, such as private beaches, contribute to further resource depletion, trapping humanity in a vicious cycle that ultimately stifles imagination.

The exhibition operates with several motifs embedded in the exhibition as sculptures or in the form of video installation. The metal sunbeds with various significant elements such as copper-plated beach towels, or a flower that emerges from beneath a sunbed, as a symbol of resilience against the structures of human-created leisure. Quotidian situations in which people utilize water against heatwaves in different parts of Europe are captured by the artist by his phone camera. One video depicts an elderly lady in the village Lin in Albania throwing a bucket of water on the street. Another shows affluent children playing in a fountain at Place des Vosges in Paris. These contrasting uses of water in different European contexts underscore the disparity in resource utilization in the cycle of leisure and exhaustion.

Vasilis Papageorgiou (*1991, Athens, Greece) is an artist based in Athens. His work has been showcased in notable exhibitions, including the 7th Athens Biennale – Eclipse (2021), Benaki Museum (2019), Stavros Niarchos Cultural Foundation (2019), and MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (2019). He also participated in the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts (2018), among others. Additionally, Papageorgiou is a co-founder of Enterprise Projects, an initiative and project space in Athens, established in 2015, that focuses on artist and curator collaborations.

*Vasilis Papageorgiou is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2018

State of Concept proudly presents a group exhibition with newly commissioned works exploring the relationships between attention, algorithms, and social justice. Founded in a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and Swiss Institute New York, with The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris) as associated partners.

The two-year collaborative project Attention After Technology explores how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise, through newly commissioned works by six international artists. The artists consider how our attention is commodified and monetized, examine how algorithms reinforce bias while also probing their emancipatory potential, and analyze attention as a political space to foster sustained critical thinking and to support collective action.

The exhibition title, Attention After Technology, is a reference to Ruha Benjamin’s celebrated book Race After Technology (2019). In her publication, Benjamin decodes the discriminatory designs embedded in algorithms that prop up racial, socioeconomic, and other systemic hierarchies. Attention is a much discussed topic with regard to technology. It is closely connected to epistemic justice, or the creation and recognition of diverse forms of knowledge, experiences, and perspectives. Our capacity as knowing subjects, and being recognized as such, is an essential component of agency agency and our ability for choice. It is crucial for social justice.

While distraction and fragmentation may seem like antonyms of attention, the exhibition resists such simple dichotomies. Far from luddites opposing technology, the exhibiting artists both use and hack, celebrate and critique, discard and invent new tools. The exhibition explores attention as a practice, as an embodied technology, and as an evolving aesthetic, social, and political sphere. In bringing attention into debates around algorithmic justice, the works in Attention After Technology pull back the curtain on the neutrality of technology, while using it to draft new ways of relating.

In the lead-up to the exhibition, which considers the intersections above, the artists participated in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators, the associated partner collective The Friends of Attention (an informal network of creative collaborators), and advisors from diverse disciplines including computer science and artificial intelligence, visual arts, and queer and transtechnology studies.

This exhibition is the last of three expressions of the expansive project, spanning over two years (2022–2024). The exhibition has travelled from Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (13 October 2023–28 January 2024) to State of Concept Athens (24 February 2024–27 April 2024). Online versions of the artworks have been available on Tropical Papers’ web platform from November 2023. The associated symposium “The Digital Divide – Attention, Algorithms and Social Justice”, coordinated by Art Hub Copenhagen in partnership with IDA – the Danish Society of Engineers and TOASTER, took place on 4 May 2023, while Art Hub also hosted two artist residencies, with biarritzzz and CUSS Group. The overall project also includes curatorial and strategic contributions by Swiss Institute New York, USA.

The last activity of the parallel program, is an online discussion between iLiana Fokianaki (Founder
and Director of State of Concept) on the 29th of February at 18:30 CET. Zoom Link HERE

The exhibition is collectively curated by Kunsthall Trondheim’s team: Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, curator and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Stefanie Hessler; Liz Dom, project manager “Attention After Technology”; Kaja Grefslie Waagen, producer and communications manager; and Art Hub Copenhagen: Lars Bang Larsen, head of art & research; Rose Tygat, project coordinator; and Tropical Papers: María Inés Rodríguez; and State of Concept Athens: iLiana Fokianaki, founder and director; Konstantina Melachrinou, production manager and press officer; and Swiss Institute New York: Stefanie Hessler, director, curatorial concept and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen.

In collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and Swiss Institute New York, The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris).

ATTENTION AFTER TECHNOLOGY
Group Show

24 FEBRUARY—27 APRIL 2024

WITH
biarritzzz (Brazil), Vivian Caccuri (Brazil), Shu Lea Cheang (USA/Taiwan), Kyriaki Goni* (Greece), CUSS Group (South Africa), Femke Herregraven (Netherlands)

CURATORS
Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers, State of Concept Athens, Swiss Institute New York

*Kyriaki Goni is SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow (2018)

In 2023 One Minute Space (OMS)  will focus on the temporal turn in art which approaches questions of global contemporaneity and chronopolitics.

OMS is very pleased to begin the year with the solo exhibition “A day after a day after a day after a day”, by Paky Vlassopoulou, curated by Florent Frizet.

Paky Vlassopoulou presents a new body of work taking as a starting point her research on Leros island, located in the east of the Aegean Sea and only an hour off the coast of Turkey, and its histories of multi-layered confinement.

Leros has a long history of incarceration rooted in its exemplary landscape defined by water and unique architectural heritage.

In the area of Lepida, military barracks built during the Italian occupation (1912-1943), have been reused ever since as indoctrination institutions in post-Greek Civil War era (1948-1964), prison cells for political dissidents during the military junta (1967-1974), mental healthcare facilities (1958-today), and refugee camps, known as hotspots (2016-today).

Last year, right above the existing infrastructures, on top of the hill, a new controlled refugee camp, with barbed wire fencing, surveillance cameras, x-ray scanners and magnetic doors and gates, was built.

Thinking of the common living conditions of all these very different cases of unwanted bodies, Vlassopoulou is drawn to the plate as an object widely recognized as a symbol of sustenance and as a domestic object linked to material culture. She creates multiple porcelain plates to carry words, lines, scratches. Each plate acts like a journal entry documenting numbers of confinement. In the exhibition space, the plates build up a storyline through drawings, notes and quotations.

A day after a day after a day after a day serves as a cognitive and sensorial experience on placement and displacement.

A day after a day after a day after a day
Solo Exhibition by Paky Vlassopoulou
Curated by Florent Frizet
14.01.2023-11.02.2022
Opening: Saturday 14 January 2023, 18:00-22:00
Opening hours: Wednesday-Saturday 17:00-20:00

Xenia Koghilaki: Bang Bang Bodies
TANZTAGE BERLIN 2023
Sophiensaele

Bang Bang Bodies embarks on a choreographic journey into the collective imaginary. What brings bodies together? Where can the experience of togetherness be situated? The work uses headbanging – common in the metal and punk scenes, rituals, and protests – as an endless chain of reciprocity of space and time, sweat and breath, but also historical, cultural and political particles between bodies. On stage, two performers explore the effect of exhaustion, repetition and persistence, bringing out both personal and cultural memories and ideas of how we perceive our bodies in relation to others and the world. They engage in an exchange that is never static but always turbulent.

CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Xenia Koghilaki
CO-CREATION, PERFORMANCE Luisa Fernanda Alfonso
SOUND DESIGN Ernesto Cárcamo Cavazos
LIGHT DESIGN Vito Walter
OUTSIDE EYE André Uerba, Dorota Michalak
MENTORING Kat Válastur
TUTORS Sandra Noeth, Janez Janša

JANUARY 05 | 20.00 H
JANUARY 06 | 20.00 H

https://tanztage-berlin.sophiensaele.com/en/produktionen/2023/bang-bang-bodies/

CRAMA is pleased to present the group exhibition post-truth, fiction, object with works by Noi Fuhrer, Vangelis Gokas, Michael Müller, and Tom Palin.

A questioning gaze, an introverted, self-referencing or self-examining act, one of groping or outlining matters but, simultaneously, outlining the very same act of this. An outlining-physical yet conceptual as well-in duality and as an act of a mirroring between the object and the hand that depicts it. With the occasion of this exhibition, we aspire to take painting as a case study. Painting as an operation through which one may touch the matter of one’s relation to the world and to themselves in both manners of depicting and perceiving, regardless actually whether any actual depiction takes place. Painting as fieldwork regarding individual perception and interpretation, in relation to objects and objectivity, regarding one’s relation to the world. Painting as an act in the dark, an operation in blindfold, yet with a disarming simplicity and honesty. Moreover, painting with the awkwardness that may come along with it; the feeling of uneasiness when standing in front of a painting, of not being sure how to act in relation to it. Are we meant to ‘read’ the painted image, to decipher its deeper meanings? Is there a given path, a possible structural analysis starting perhaps from the ‘thingly’ character of the work and moving to its ‘symbolic’ sides or semiotic connotations?

Noi Fuhrer, Vangelis Gokas, Michael Müller, Tom Palin
curated by Giorgos Kontis
post-truth, fiction, object

Opening December 10th 2022, 4 – 8pm, the exhibition will continue until December 17th 2022 only by appointment: +49 152 04 983 376, [email protected] CRAMA Triftstraße 66, 13353 BERLIN

*Giorgos Kontis is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellows (2021)

Two Thirds Project Space presents the new exhibition entitled “Broken Heart Syndrome”, with artworks of Ileana Arnaoutou, Sevastiana Konstaki, Mariandrie, Natalia Papadopoulou, Eleanna Balesi, Elektra Stampoulou and Evi Zampeli, curated by Faidra Vasileiadou

Broken heart syndrome is a now-recognized cardiomyopathy that mimics a heart attack: it manifests itself with intense chest pressure, shortness of breath and sudden weakness, symptoms that match a heart attack. The syndrome was discovered as a separate pathological entity in the early 1990s by Japanese doctors and became known as “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” due to the similarity of the shape of the affected heart to the Japanese octopus fishing tool. Usually, this condition is triggered by intense mental stress, such as the death of a loved one, a breakup, anger, or the feeling of betrayal.

Can our hearts literally break? Disassemble into its component parts or even more? If this breaking process happens, does it really break us beyond repair? And even if we manage to restore it, what happens to the rupture we know is always there? The exhibition Broken Heart Syndrome recounts the ways that a heart can shatter and fall apart, while at the same time elucidates the processes that occur after a major crack; an attempt to reassemble the discontinuities and fragments. The participating artists present works that flirt with pain and mourning, through the kaleidoscopic prism of emerging to the surface.
Faidra Vasileiadou
museologist – art curator

Opening: 25/11 | 19:00 – 22:00
Duration of exhibition: 26/11 – 10/12
Opening hours: Tues, Wed, Fri | 17:00 – 21:00, Sat | 11:00 – 14:00
Location: Two Thirds Project Space, Themistokleous 42, Exarcheia, 5th floor, #2

*Ileana Arnaoutou, Sevastiana Konstaki and Natalia Papadopoulou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows