Fellow Field: Visual arts

As most interactions these days, the conversation between Maria Mavropoulou and myself about her practice happened virtually. Nothing out of the ordinary in these times you may rightfully argue. And yet never has the virtual space been more appropriate to discuss someone’s work as with Mavropoulou it seems. Throughout the past four years in fact, she has reflected through a variety of lenses on our relationship with the digital, it’s pervasiveness in our daily lives, the complex ways through which we have developed a symbiotic connection to devices that seem to start taking up a life of their own. This is the case also with her latest two series Tear Spit and Cum and Image eaters.

Approaching the two newest series developed by the Athens based artist, who has primarily been working with photography throughout her career and has been a member of Depression Era since 2014, one cannot but stop and reflect on how complex our relationship with screens are, especially in these times of overexposure to digital materials. The two series, developed in parallel throughout the past couple of years construct an intricate critique of the screen, shaped around a double perspective: the first, unfolding in Tear, Spit and Cum is based on the flatness and sterility of the surface of the screen, the second in Image-eaters imagines screens as an anthropomorphic and anthropophagous organic being whose metabolism is kept alive by all the elements (in form of information) we constantly feed it. The resulting relationship is more based on a symbiosis, a win-win food chain, in which the needs of the algorithm for information and interactions are matched by our own human/biological needs to ease and improve our conditions. Mavropoulou elaborating on this in our conversation underlines a positive outlook on our relationship with the digital world, however her words seem slightly at odds with the somewhat disturbing atmospheres presented in the works.

Tear, Spit and Cum features a series of images in which a background colour gradient is overlayed by traces resembling various bodily fluids marking lived emotions. The gradients have been developed by Mavropoulou using samples from sites and apps we’re all grown familiar to, from social media to dating apps to porn sites identified by her as the basic digital architecture we inhabit and give life through our emotions. Her project and the traces of these liquids e/affectively highlight the constraints of a life lived from behind a slick surface of a screen. While we are able to interact, share emotions and even live love stories through the screens, our bodily selves are restrained and obstructed by their surface, leaving behind a mark which at first appears to reveal a kaleidoscopic world of colours but soon exposes all the limit of a digital world made essentially by zeros and ones.

The perspective is completely reversed in Image Eaters in which suddenly we are not observing the digital world from outside but are immersed in a universe of references, visual metaphors, sometimes witty but mostly somewhat disturbing commentaries on the images that constantly surround us when navigating the virtual space. In a project that in many ways departs from her more familiar themes and visual language (and does so convincingly), Mavropoulou seems to find the right vocabulary to complete her thesis on the digital. She does so on the one hand through the titles, in itself a rarity in her practice which leaves this aspect usually open for the viewers to determine, and on the other through the images themselves. The images seem to flirt with the aesthetic of the stock images but recalling what could be defined as a concrete-digital-dystopia while the titles, functioning as a biting commentary on each image, only heighten this sensation of being presented elements of our familiar digital surrounding that make visible its contradictions and sharp edges.

The two series are not Mavroupoulou’s first stint at delving into the dichotomy digital-physical world and feel very much like a consequent step from her project Family Portraits (2017). In it Mavropoulou brings us face to face with familiar images of our homes yet presented with an eerie atmosphere lit exclusively by the many screens of our devices, making up for the absence of human figures.

While observing this earlier work of Mavropoulou one would be more than excused to have their mind travel to hauntology and the concept of the eerie developed by Mark Fisher for example. Even more specifically in his “The weird and the eerie” (2016) he points to the circumstances in which to find the rather elusive concept of the eerie, ascribing it to “the failure of presence”. Think of ancient ruins, or a post-apocalyptic landscape to have an image in mind and of the question hidden behind them about the agency, not whether there was one but whether we’ll ever be able to grasp its true force and rationale. Well, in Family Portraits Mavropoulou manages to large extent to make us face this same feeling not about a distant era and long past lives but about our own existence, about the complex forces of capital, technology and human psychology that made those screen take our place in our homes. By extrapolating the light of the screens in absence of their observers, giving them agency and thus turning them into the silent subjects of the images, Family Portraits delivers a bitter-sweet comment on our world in which the relatable environments of our everyday home is no longer only ours and the terrain of a dispute between us and the forces hidden behind the lit screens.

Through our conversation what emerged is the keen interest to observe rather than bring judgment to the specific way we interact with the digital, the fact that while it certainly opens fundamental and dramatic questions on our way of living the digital environment is not by any means a full substitute to nature and the physical world. The images and thoughts through which Mavropoulou is developing her last few years of practice are a mirror of our society rather than a manifesto for or against the increase of our digital selves.

Christian Oxenius is a German-Italian independent curator, author and researcher living between Athens and Istanbul. His academic background in sociology and urban studies led him to pursue a PhD at the University of Liverpool on biennials as institutional model, during the course of which he established collaborations with Athens, Liverpool and Istanbul Biennial; during this period, he developed a particular interest in artists’ communities and storytelling. His research into experimental writing on art has resulted in a number of exhibitions and publications of international relevance.

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Tucked away in the furthest northeastern reaches of Greece, pressed up against waters that are at the extreme edge of what we know as the Aegean, lies the Thracian port city of Alexandroupoli. Its very name hints at bygone Hellenistic expansion; low-lying and green, the landscape surrounding the city feels a world away from the dry, rocky hills we associate with Classical Athens. For the artist Niki Gulema, growing up at such a distance from the country’s artistic center was a mixed blessing. Her ambivalence makes itself clear as she considers my first question about the influence that her birthplace had on her and her work. At last, she shakes her head and frowns, pushing away any traces of nostalgia. She tells me plainly, “Where I grew up, it’s all flat. Wherever you stand, you can see far, far away — and still, nothing is happening. There was no inspiration for my work in that environment.”

We are sitting across from each other in the living room of her well-loved, charmingly bohemian apartment not far from the centre of Athens. Every piece of furniture, every object on her crowded desk seems to have had many previous lives, but has found, with Niki, a happy home. We laugh about her remarkably old laptop, coming up on a decade. Niki strokes it affectionately and says, ”It gets a little hot, but it’s still running fine,” as if describing an ageing animal companion. In this moment, Niki seems perfectly enmeshed in her immediate surroundings, her seaside childhood feels far away. I push again on the question of environmental influence but she sidesteps and focuses instead on her own creative beginnings.

Niki took up drawing from a very young age. She drew constantly and with ceaseless passion. If she had lived closer to a big city, art school might have seemed a likely path. But, she tells me, those days were different: there was hardly any internet and Niki felt completely isolated from the rest of the world. The possibility of being an artist didn’t just seem remote — it wasn’t even on her horizon of possibilities. Obliquely, she reveals a bit more about the challenges of growing up in Alexandroupoli, “Athens felt so far away. Things happening there didn’t seem like they were in the capital — it was like they were in another country altogether. But fortunately, I had an art teacher who told me about the School of Fine Arts and encouraged me to apply.”

Niki came to Athens at the age of 19 and began her studies. “Once I settled in, I found exactly what I needed. I know that this city is a bubble, but it’s one where I have everything I could want to make my work.” As she advanced in her degree, she broadened her approach; photography, especially, became a major influence. Experimentation with different kinds of lenses, cameras, and analog film revealed new ways of seeing for Niki, a means to fragment the world that could then become whole again on her canvas: “There was a long period when I used telephoto lenses, using them to zoom in on very specific moments so that they would be transformed into something beyond recognition. I also experimented with plastic cameras, which are so imperfect and hard to control. Each one does whatever it wants and makes its own atmosphere. I find something beautiful about that. I remember once I found a bag of expired film. All the images came out pink. Without my intending, that became the start of the project, an accident that told me how I would work.”

As Niki describes her process of bouncing between a disjointed, photographic mosaic and a unified, painterly whole, my mind wanders to her immense canvas, Dawn, which I saw exhibited at the ARTWORKS exhibition at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The work’s largely bare surface is dominated by its empty expanses, broken up by scattered, often solitary forms: a delicate zag of energy here, a soft glow there, an unnameable silhouette resisting definition. The relationship between photographic realism and the painting’s diffuse abstraction seems hard to trace, especially given the underlying subject of her camera’s images. Athens — one of the most chaotic cities where I have ever spent time, a riot of overlapping layers, clashing histories, and churning life — appears unrecognizable as rendered by her brush. Even in the studio-like calm of her apartment, restless street activity periodically interjects; surely her painting has nothing to do with the city we both inhabit?

I tell her about my struggle to connect these two worlds and Niki laughs. She pulls up a jpeg of the two-meter painting on her computer and offers to guide me through her process of imaginary transformation. We walk together through the abstracted cityscape and Niki describes how each individual shape derives from a singular moment of origin: a shadow of Athens’ skyline, a distillation from a photograph she made during one of her urban walks, or even a relic from the flat, watery place she left behind. “In an earlier painting, I drew on the symbol of Alexandroupoli, its lighthouse. The regular rhythm of its beacon turning off and on, illuminating the night, made its way into my work.”

Indeed, many references in Niki’s paintings are prompted by her environment but quickly turn towards the inwardly sensory. She says, “My teacher at art school always told me, ‘You, you hear your paintings.’ Other painters have worked closely with noise; I don’t do this consciously, but somehow it expresses itself in my work. There are sounds that are frozen in my paintings. I listen to funny music when I paint (for example, Milton Babbitt). When I look at each part of my composition, I can remember specific feelings, certain moments, a single voice that informed it.”

Despite this abstraction, Niki’s paintings remain deeply rooted in the world through their materiality. She tells me, “What I like about painting is mixing the colors, stretching the canvas, all these handcrafted aspects, how everything smells. I am a little romantic, I guess. Since I often leave so much empty space in my frames, it’s important for each material to be just so — the unpainted canvas puts more emphasis on the underlying support.” Niki’s attraction to these fine details also pushes her back into the city, like a photographer looking for frames, but with a different goal in mind: “I even get excited tracking down each of my materials, finding just what I need. But it’s more than that; it’s the whole process. For example, I love talking to different shop owners, each of them boasting they have the best stuff. Sometimes they cheat me or sell me fake silk. It’s a game, a search, a hunt.”

As she talks, the once infinite chaos of Athens becomes condensed into a stroke, the bend of a line. In her simple way, Niki reminds us that we rarely ever see the entire city at once. Instead, we experience it in exactly these tiny, crystallized fragments; we inevitably make our own personal map through the surrounding disorder. She pauses and then concludes, “My paintings are a container for all of my experiences.”

I ask her if it takes courage to leave empty spaces on her canvases, to feel confidence in something that appears unfinished. She bats the idea away. “No, I never thought about it. From a young age, I drew this way, with many empty spaces. Even in the emptiness, I know what’s right and what’s wrong. When it’s finished, I can tell.” Such strong conviction also come with challenges, “In the same way, if I make a mistake, I also know. Even if it seems like it’s just one small mark, I can’t work around it, I can’t go back. I have to get rid of the whole canvas and start over.”

But lately, her work has been shifting. Niki’s recent pieces have begun to fill up, paint now running from edge to edge. Her canvases are now drenched in color. Yet the source seems to go deeper. Niki tells me how these “complete” canvases, paradoxically, are the result of her spending more time up north, seeing her once-empty home with new eyes. She says, “I had been away for ten years and after a decade in the city, I had forgotten what it was like to have nothing happening. Suddenly, nature became very enriching for me. In the provinces, we have so much time. I can read, I can draw, I can make my work.” She goes on, “How do people pass the time in a place where nothing is happening? There, everything is very cyclical. Life runs on a program. In the early morning, people work in their gardens, with their bees. At 3 pm, when the sun is high, no one is moving. It’s time to eat and rest. In the city, we lose track of these rhythms; in the country, we are closer to them. Time there is less fragmented. I want my work to return to that wholeness.”

Still, she recognizes the limits of solitude and her need for other kinds of energy. She says, “On the other hand, Athens is where everything happens. Ideas come from being here, seeing people, moving through the city. Right now, I feel on the border. Perhaps going back and forth will be the best way forward.” Although we spoke in the middle of the summer, a time that many look forward to as the best part of the year, Niki was ready for September to arrive; she wanted to get back to a routine. “I need to have a proper studio again, my own space where I can have all my colors.” Niki is committed to staying in the city, but with a new approach, informed by tempos that long predate those imposed by contemporary Athens. “I need a stable place that I can return to every day. I like to keep my surroundings fixed so my ideas can move. It’s only in routines that I can find one thought, which brings the next one, and the next. And then, suddenly, I have the sense of going somewhere.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

A golden foil fringe curtain blows in the wind, from an office building, right over Omonoia square, in the center of Athens. With the window open, Marina Velisioti is working in her studio, one of the numerous offices forming the labyrinthian structure of the building. In the corridors, lawyers, a few more artists, clients and visitors wander around. On the busy ground floor, inside the arcade, a multifunctional fish tavern serves as the building’s cafeteria.

In her luminous studio, Velisioti stacks her materials up in order. Color coordinated skeins of threads of various origins and textures, wool, metal strings, folded rugs and rolled fabrics, a few old magazines and books. A medium size wooden loom, set in front of the window creates an odd composition with the view of the prim hotel façade. Apart from the corner which is catered for the reception of visitors (a coffee, table and a small sofa next to the coffee maker), every inch of the room is organized in favor of the creating process: materials, tools and working decks. The artist doesn’t study nor does research here; this space is dedicated to production. The studio in the office building is a an actual “working” place itself, one could even see it as a crafts(wo)man’s workshop. Hence, the room is screen-free and one can spot only some of the books with her visual references: a series of magazines on UFO’s and conspiracy theories, a pocket size encyclopedia on extraterrestrial life, hardcover books about traditional embroidery and the architecture of ancient and prehistoric civilizations.

Marina Velisioti started her career drawing and painting, following her educational background. Her early works are mostly large canvases, resembling otherworldly deserted landscapes with floating mysterious creatures and machine-like humanoid silhouettes. Her iconographic interest in the aesthetic language of science fiction along with her attraction to popular visual culture were already evident in these works. Interestingly, even in her early painting surfaces, her practice demonstrated signs of her urge to escape two dimensions; the surface is covered with glue, a material that, without disrupting the illustrative lines, added volume to her forms and reached out for the sight of the viewer. Her forms and landscapes were starting to gain weight and movement.

Equally, her ever-favorite technique of collage satisfied the same impulse for visual depth. Collecting tremendous amounts of pictures, photographs and graphic elements from magazines, comics and encyclopedias for ongoing works, or stocking them for future use, Velisioti is carefully picking the structural components of her futuristic and flamboyant world. Landscapes with mysterious colors and unexpected geological relief, landforms that imply traces of inexplicable forces, her collages create a set up and an instigation point for the paths her practice takes in different periods of time and media. After all, her sewn collage series engaged the establishment of the systematic use of thread, a material and its accompanying techniques that defined her practice and liberated new dimensions in it. Her collages are autonomous pieces, studies on composition, plans for printed editions and for the past few years, drafts for her loom-embroidered objects and ceramics.

The yarn entered the artist’s work and slipped into her hands smoothly, as a natural development of her escape tactics from flat surface. Velisioti grew up among fabrics, rags and collars her mother brought from work in a clothes industry, materials that impressed the artist and she would play with. Today, her studio remains close to the source of these materials, a few blocks away from the streets where one can find all types of fabrics yarns and relevant tools. She learned weaving at SEN-Heritage Looms, an association founded in the end of the 19th century in Athens with the purpose to educate young women. She was comfortable enough in this non-academic environment to indulge in the artisanal knowledge, and begun to experiment with motifs of traditional weaving. At this turning point, her research on the non-human and the readings of the inexplicable phenomena, mirrored on the magical and mythological themes of folk and tradition. Her bewitching landscapes are now repositioned on the weaving surface, rough, soft, glowing and stimulating for the touch, as well as for the eye.

Equipped with the expertise and inspired by craftsmanship, Velisioti utilizes this visual and material language to expand her iconographic experimentation. She brings to life images, colors, textures and finally, sculptural objects that she extracts with her bare hands from a universe equally extraterrestrial and human; objects and textiles seem disassembled by Barbarella’s¹ spaceship, relics of a futuristic universe that is, nonetheless, humorous, seductive and conspicuously human-made. A recent example of this twofold effect, is her sculptural installation The Queen is in the chamber of her dreams (2022), showcased at the J. & A. N. Diomedes Botanic Garden as part of the group show “Sheltered Gardens”, organized by PCAI Polygreen and curated by Kika Kyriakakou. Velisioti has set a bamboo tent, covered with a woolen fabric she embroidered knot to knot. On the top of the pyramidoid structure, enigmatic ceramic symbols indicate the importance of the lodge’s inhabitant and possibly their unique powers. On the background, and in dialogue with Velisioti’s work the feathery plumes of the White Feather Pampas Grass plants were calling attention to the organic nature of the elements of the installation, which seemed, however, like it landed on the ground after an intergalactic journey.

Marina Velisioti through laborious processes extracts vestiges and biosignatures of an extraterrestrial civilization to which she attributes earthly and natural characteristics, without demystifying it from its charming and arcane glory. She understands her fabrics, her embroideries, her sculptural and her ceramic work as a pile of findings from an archaeological pit; they are all paraphernalia of an extraterrestrial civilization, whose history and achievements are being recorded in present time by the artist who takes the role of a counterfeiter of history. I see the knitted belts and the long scarf she created for SERAPIS this winter and I think of ceremonial clothes that survived to reveal stories for mystical cults. Velisioti imagines landscapes as magnetic fields, she embroiders sacred architectural monuments and molds in clay cosmic symbols that serve as canals for curious correspondences. Her insistence on handcraft, her choice of materials and her references point out the affective realization that human fantasies of the Other and the transcendental, project mostly our immeasurable admiration of life and nature, as we know it, yet, not always comprehend it.

Currently, along with her new series of ceramics, Marina Velisioti creates, collects and organizes material and also designs a new self-published edition for her work that, -in her own words- involves “party, the erotic, food and UFO’s, all things that have always fascinated me”. I can’t help but share her enthusiasm as I’m thinking that not only these things actually “fascinate” myself, but also bring us closer to the uncanny, the otherworldly and the magical.

Marina Velisioti was born in Thessaloniki, Greece 1982. She studied at the Department of Applied Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Thessaloniki. She is based in Athens. During her university studies she attended courses and seminars of scenography. Amongst her interests are video art applications and music themes of psychology, psychoacoustics and documentary. She has also attended courses in technical analogue and digital photo printing, engraving and sculpture. She is a scholar of U.F.Os, monsters, sci-fi culture. In her recent work, Marina Velisioti produces a series of collages, tapestries, sculptures developing narratives inspired by ancient buildings, deserted or forgotten landscapes, motifs symbols, over which she collides with the most prominent technique, turning them into astonishing, unrealistic universes, often with a playful mood. She is the founder and editor of the art zine Bebabebo. Marina Velisioti rthe Stavros Niarchos received the Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).

Christina Petkopoulou, (Athens, 1992) is a free-lance curator, researcher and writer based in Athens. She has studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne and completed a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the Panteion University of Social Sciences. She is a member and the in-house curator of the A-DASH team, a researcher and curator of the online art projects a time of her own by Zoe Chatziyannaki and Athens Report by Anna Lascari. She has curated exhibitions and public programs (Lipiu, 2020, Playing Ground, Automatic Transmission, 2019, Liminal Aristeidis Lappas solo show, Praxitelous 33, 2016, Choro-graphies-Points of flight, Artscape Athens, 2014 and more). Her texts have been published in several editions and catalogues (The ArtNewspaper Greece, Lipiu, Vera Chotzoglou, Bona Fide, State of Concept, 2021, Ammophila II, Under the Burning Sun, 2021, The Feminine Sublime, 2019 and more). She has worked for the Greek Contemporary Art Institute (ISET) researching and documenting its archive and she has also collaborated with several cultural institutions such as the Athens Biennale (2013, 2015), Art Athina (2014, 2015) and Archaeological Dialogues (2015). In 2016, she was chosen for the Neon Foundation curatorial exchange program in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and in 2019, she received the SNF Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.

¹ Roger Vadim, Barbarella, 1968

In psychoanalysis, it is common for patients to repeatedly relate the same events. A slight change in the structure of a sentence or a word used mistakenly in the course of one of the many iterations can shift the patient’s way of thinking and force them to see themselves in the reality of the situation, now presented under a different light. Something completely obvious to one’s milieu may remain unperceived by the person in analysis. Once aware of this otherwise conspicuous trait, the patient becomes frightened. It is a little like seeing one’s bare back captured in a picture. How scaringly blatant is this image! The experience produces a displacement of what was previously a familiar part of one’s body and personal narrative and in that sense cannot but inspire fear.

When I look at Anastasia Douka’s sculptures, the same thought always springs to mind. “But it is obvious,” I hear myself musing, though of course I have never before imagined or recalled in this particular way the object Anastasia chose to use. Once Anastasia’s sculptures have rendered their revelatory service to the object, the result is the emergence of a new type of ‘existence’. The object, be it a chain, an inverted ladder or the ‘skin’ of a crocodile or a female figure depicted in a public sculpture, is displaced first mildly, then at an intimidating degree.

This ‘object’ is so close to my nose I almost feel I am unable to see it! Or, to put it more accurately, it is embossed on my nose. Suspended half inside, half outside my nostril, it radiates as it is left to create prismatic reflections on the symbol it has chosen as its content.

Anastasia’s sculpture is embossed on body and conscience alike. Therein, in my opinion, lies the explanation for the coexistence of the positive and the negative in her practice.

The works are like toys that have been cut open, revealing an interior you had always formed a picture of though not quite in this way. When faced with Anastasia’s sculptures, I have the feeling that I am wearing an elastic mask. I suck on it with my mouth so that the plastic skin of the mask becomes attached to mine. Then this skin bursts, and, for a while, I see it reappearing before me.

Anastasia Douka (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is a visual artist working with sculptural media. Her work “Crocodile” is presented in the group exhibition “Unhappy Monuments” at Parko Eleftherias (10–20 October, 2020).

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2020) is a visual artist working in painting, text, sound and photography.

In Malvina Panagiotidi’s basement studio, pots sitting on top of small electric burners are filled with nameless liquids, slowly boiling. If you squint your eyes, you might instead see cauldrons, the artist transformed into an alchemist from days gone by. Magical shapeshifting seems entirely possible in the world that Malvina’s work conjures up. Her latest sculptures, composed principally of frozen liquids (wax and glass), take the form of contorted hands, draped fabrics, braided hair, unblinking eyes, and unbeating hearts. These configurations are only temporary, though — when her work is exhibited, the wax is illuminated and begins to melt and deform, disappearing before our eyes. Such ephemerality is befitting of Malvina’s paranormal sources of inspiration, which range from spirit sightings, to ectoplasmic landscapes, haunted houses, and occult manuscripts. But as we talk, this heady mix of ideas starts to take on a clearer outline and I discover Malvina’s firm grounding in the specificities of the Greek environment.

The first cornerstone: years ago, when Malvina was a little girl, she used to help her father formulate the prescription medications in the backroom of the drug store that he owned in the Athens neighbourhood of Pangrati. Seen in this light, her artist’s studio filled with implements of heating, cooking, mixing, and casting is merely an extension of the family business in another guise. Further, when looking at Malvina’s work, I am reminded that in Greek, the word for medicine (pharmakon) also means “poison.” What can save us can also kill us, if administered in the wrong dose. Malvina’s sculptures rest on this ambiguous border, carefully balancing the forces of structure and chaos, life and death, science and magic.

As we trace the origins of Malvina’s varied interests — ghosts, spirits, the uncanny, architecture, local Greek histories — another seminal memory emerges from Malvina’s past. “Since I was a little girl, I remember being amazed by the magic of glass,” she reflects. “When I was nine years old, I was told in my science lessons that glass is like a plasma, it’s always moving. This was presented as one of the paradoxes of physics: you see a solid, but it’s actually a fluid.” For years, these ideas ebbed and flowed through Malvina’s consciousness, shifting and morphing until finally taking material shape in her sculptural works.

But before dedicating herself to art, Malvina had several other formative educational experiences, especially during her architectural studies in the city of Volos. Even though she never worked as an architect, she asserts, “Architecture is always present in my work in different ways. Not only in the construction of objects, but also in my thinking. For me, architecture is a structure of thought.” Her time in Volos also brought her into contact with many of the themes she would later explore in her artistic research.

For example, her final undergraduate research project was an examination of the forensic collection as a museum. She focused specifically on a collection located in Athens, now part of the city’s university, that was established at the beginning of the 20th century. Its founder, Professor Ioannis Georgiadis, was inspired by traditions of forensic criminology in western Europe, and began to gather together a diverse and eclectic assortment of objects: wax models, vases filled with formaldehyde, mummified bodies, patches of skin with tattoos, black magic paraphernalia, anthropometric materials, and even a guillotine that was used for executions here in Greece. For Malvina, “everything started from the writings of this professor. Besides all the objects, the key text for my research was his description of the ‘accessories of decomposition’: an exacting description of the 8–10 different insects that come in a specific order to carry out the process of decomposing dead bodies. My entire project began from this point.”

Next for Malvina was a postgraduate arts degree in Berlin, which gave her the space to develop her artwork while also imposing some much-needed distance from Greece. The program, titled “Art in Context,” pushed her to produce work in her new home while also digging deeper into her Greek origins. Her graduation project focused on the Greek concept of haunting. “It turns out that we have a different concept of haunting from, for example, the Victorians,” she explains. “My research explored the subject in numerous directions, drawing from folklore, superstitions, cultural history, literature, political events — the building blocks of the Greek psyche. I wanted to see how our uncanny belief in ghosts could be connected to our imagined relationship to socio-political frameworks. Ultimately, I produced a series of wax reliefs that depicted specific haunted houses across Athens. What I love about these structures is how they are still part of the city’s urban fabric today. These buildings became vessels to express the city’s history, ghostly personifications of its layered past, but also anchors that connect the past with the present. Over time, as they accrete stories and superstitions, they become unofficial monuments for the locals. By focusing on these select points, I found a way to convey a personalized reading of the history of my city.”

As for wax, which along with glass has become one of the hallmarks of Malvina’s work, she was initially drawn to the material because of its connection to her forensic research. Wax is often used in anatomy models because its softness and malleability connect it with the human body on a tangible level. Wax, like the body, has certain characteristics that can change drastically depending on the surrounding environment. Beyond their material similarities, Malvina found a deeper thread to tie her interest in organic decomposition and decay with her wax sculptures: a wick inserted in the heart of each of her creations. These wicks are not merely for decoration: upon exhibition, Malvina’s wax objects are illuminated, burning until they melt down to a puddle, completing their inexorable return to the formlessness from which they came. As she says, “I don’t see this process as a disappearance, but rather a means to convey the underlying truth of constant transformation. Wax is a living, vivid thing. Like our bodies, like our memories, like our societies, my wax sculptures change, warp, and shift over time, constantly reinterpreted within our system of collective experience.”

Meanwhile, as we wrap up our conversation, I begin to push and shape Malvina’s use of wax in a different direction. To me, there seems to be a plasma-like relationship between the pressure exerted by Malvina’s casts on her wax forms and the immense pressure exerted by the crisis on a malleable generation of young Greek artists. As we go back and forth, our exchange reflects the contested meanings of Athens’ recent cultural renaissance. Specifically, Malvina questions aloud how her generation will be considered in relation to the crisis, the defining feature of Greek life for the duration of her artistic career. Incidentally, this reality applies to almost every Artworks Fellow who joined Malvina in the first cohort. She says, “I cannot speak for older or younger artists, but only as someone who started making art in precisely this period. Will we be a generation that produced great work — or only a “generation of the crisis?” Will our art stand on its own or only be a recording of its economic context and socio-political surroundings? This remains to be seen.”

In the case of Malvina’s art, her shapes take on much more complex associations than their external forms express on their own. Her distinctive mix of diverse intellectual interests with aesthetic references transforms otherwise simple sculptures into something much more resonant, even haunting. There is no doubt that the pressure exerted by the crisis has been hugely destructive, but in specific moments, it has lead to creation. For Malvina herself, and her artistic contemporaries in Greece, we have to hope this same alchemy will prove true: an intense array of external forces, mixed with an undefinable sprinkling of personal qualities, that will coalesce into something we will all remember.

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

(a series of poetic responses on Iris Touliatou’s show “Mothers”)

In her text occasioned by her solo show “Mothers” at Rodeo Gallery in Athens, Iris Touliatou quotes Lauren Berlant saying: “There are only two kinds of questions; am I right or are you my mother?”. By using her words, Touliatou induces us to her work and along with it, to everything motherhood comes with, symbolically and otherwise; from secure attachments and unconditional loves, to fears of failing, impositions of authority and depictions of non-motherhood, among many other primal senses, behavioural, psycho-social and always political subjects. This poetic text operates as a series of responses and diaristic cartographies of some of these encounters with motherhood. And it does so, by using as schematic axes for its chapters, the titles of Touliatou’s works: mother frame, mother work, mother settle, mother material, mother arrangement, mother light, mother notice and mother orifice.

mother light

Every system around us has a voice

tender ghostly rough
or burned insane behave

acceleration is a thing
engagement is another
but the same

mothers and mothers and fluids

light is never a filter you said
quite the opposite

for when time escapes its institutional life

mother frame

I called my mom before, she told me she had a dream about giving birth to two girls, they were twins. In her dream she was thinking how she’ll cut their hair. She told me one girl would have short hair and the other one long and that she’d preserve that scheme in turn. That way, none of the girls would ever complain about how they look. Then she told me that it all means she’ll be cursed twice. I convinced myself that it won’t happen. I had to avoid my triggers.

On Saturday I was really hungry, I was eating all night long, until chewing exhausted me, and I fell asleep. I dreamt of my mom dying. I woke up knowing how it’d feel like.

In one of her blog posts named “the governing grass of dream language”, Anne Boyer writes: “Beginnerism might be like any other preference for annihilation: things that are always reducing us to the beginner’s nought? Love, intoxication, divinity, beauty, and revolt.”

I killed my mom and two days after, she gave birth to two daughters.

You killed time and

mother orifice

we found freedom in the margins.

mother settle

I was scrolling on Facebook resisting rest and success, when it hit me: happiness, Laurie Santos says, “comes through empathy, solidarity, altruism”. And then she quotes a guy, a boyband member, saying something like: “committing to one decision is the best way to live your life”.

I felt very empowered reading that line; all of a sudden, commitment justified my whole existence and I started writing about this eye opening quote, only to realize that if I embody it, I might die and I don’t want to.

mother material

There is this poem by Adrienne Rich, called a “Mark of Resistance”.

It goes:

Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon’s weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I live but cannot save
from floods that are to come;
can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape on nothing
that has never existed before.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign”.

That’s for all of your sentence compositions, papers, back and forths,
for when you said that it was easier than you thought it’d be.

Collecting, composing, in touch,

mutations, subversions,
ownership (singular always),

it’s all yours anyway.

Papers are never just papers.
Papers are permissions;

they are portals allowing access to histories and futures and currents.

You used them to prove exclusion.
You won.

mother work

She wants her to be a mother.
She silences her voice, as if hearing it would prove her guilty.

cast concrete gallery furniture as exhibition
structure
it’s all about cheat codes.

I silenced yours.
Hearing it proves me guilty.

mother arrangement

There are things that cannot be weighted unless you force them,
like water or affect or labour,
and there are discourses about them,
sounds and sighs and words and works and protests, but numbers?

I once tried to count them but I failed,
and then I felt deeply sorry because longing for approval slash self-destruction slash the ultimate control slash I’m cool but I’m faking it slash the fear of abandonment is a thing.

Anyway,
the story about counting that which can never be counted started with weight,
it moved to age,
then to money,
until it reached the point of a sustainable living,

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

mother arrangement

There are things that cannot be weighted unless you force them,
like water or affect or labour,
and there are discourses about them,
sounds and sighs and words and works and protests, but numbers?

I once tried to count them but I failed,
and then I felt deeply sorry because longing for approval slash self-destruction slash the ultimate control slash I’m cool but I’m faking it slash the fear of abandonment is a thing.

Anyway,
the story about counting that which can never be counted started with weight,
it moved to age,
then to money,
until it reached the point of a sustainable living,

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

By Ioanna Gerakidi

Ιris Touliatou (b.1981, in Athens, GR) engages in a conceptual practice, which transposes the political, environmental and affective, and employs various mediums necessary for each intervention. Using sculpture, photography, sound, scent and text, her work often draws on found objects and creates open forms and shared experiences to comment on time, love, transience, mortality, economies and states of being. She has exhibited at: DESTE Foundation (GR); Radio Athènes (GR); Exile (AUT); Beton Salon/Villa Vassilieff (FR); Manifesta 12, ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE (GR); Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art (DE); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR); Alcobendas Arts Centre CAA (ES)· Onassis Stegi (GR)· Ricard Foundation (FR); contemporary art center La Galerie CAA Noisy le Sec (FR); and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at Nanyang Technological Univesity Center for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) in Singapore, while in 2012 she received the art prize Europas Zukunft from the Leipzig contemporary art museum GFZK. She is currently based in Athens, Greece. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, poetic and archival studies and schemes. She has collaborated with and curated exhibitions and events for various institutions and galleries and residencies and her texts and poems have appeared in international platforms, magazines and publications. She has lectured or led workshops, seminars and talks for academies and research programs across Europe. Her practice and exhibitions have been awarded by institutions, such as Rupert Residency, Mondriaan Fonds, Outset and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS, amongst others.

“So someone would have to wait for the perfect society before daring to speak? Or perhaps speak while disguising their meaning. Or altogether assume the risk and speak in order to lie,” remarks the protagonist of Theo Prodromidis’ film Towards the Bank of the Future, 2013(2013). As bodily presence in the public sphere tragically reemerges as a right needing to be constantly reaffirmed, we are called on to invent new ways through which we will be able to speak about participatory, political or public art. What do we really mean, or what are we trying to disclose, when we talk about art taking on the notions of the political subject, everyday life or the very art of politics and its historicity? Within the framework of this inquiry, the need emerges to reflect these issues anew in a manner that would bypass a series of archetypal ethical questions, such as who has the right to speak and in which way, and would, instead, focus on the reality of things: what is the vocabulary that could include the excluded subjects. If we want to stop speaking ABOUT these subjects and comprehend the actual condition of being excluded, it is perhaps necessary to dedicate oneself to the study of art’s capacity to let the precarious subjects speak for themselves.

In Prodromidis’ video Towards the Bank of the Future (2013), we follow a writer-intellectual as he visits monumental spaces and monument-spaces across the city and witness his revelatory meeting with a Cavafian character. A film documentation that starts off as an endless questioning of the citizen’s place through time and space soon turns into a record of the subject’s agonising need to become included in a historicity weighing heavily down on his/her shoulders. What ethical measure can a person apply when assuming the responsibility to be actively present within his/her own time? What are the costs involved and which parts of them are levied on the individual? The video contains footage from Cairo during the Arab Spring uprisings, shot in 2011 by Mosireen, the independent media collective that came together to document and transmit images of the Egyptian Revolution. Mosireen’s bottom-up approach delivered archive footage that figures as cracks or traumas inflicted on the narrative of Prodromidis’ video. The real space of action comes to provide an answer -and perhaps at the same time pose a challenge- to the main character’s existentialist self-referentiality and to the moral mire into which he is plunged. Historicity itself provides the answer on our behalf: “Somebody is searching for the right words and cannot find them, that’s why you don’t know what to say”.

Still, a few years later, Prodromidis teams up with actress Angeliki Papoulia and does indeed try to find the right words in the course of two 8 hour-long performances presented at Kunsthalle Athena, which will form the basis for his new installation, Goodbye Etc. Element for the support of new structures (2015). Following an open call, the artist amassed a collection of journals and books containing emblems that marked the development of left-wing political discourse. The gathered texts were then torn and taken apart randomly — or not — before being reassembled in front of the audience. The objective: to create a new book out of the existing ones. The publication resulting out of Goodbye…Etc. Element for the support of new structures (2015) traveled widely: it was shown at the Thessaloniki Biennale of contemporary art and at the Fodazione Sandretto re Rabodengo, where it was presented as an installation without, however, disowning its performative origins. These archives, bound together into 16 bright red copies-objects, claim to forge their own relationship with the audience, which is invited to leaf through them, change their position or even try and remove them from the exhibition space. Both the archives and the visitors participate in a well-orchestrated and surprising choreography in order to shape, using chance and their own mobility as a vehicle, a new, sculptural common space. Fragments of texts that played a key role in the evolution of revolutionary and emancipatory politics and whose echo still reverberates strongly not just in contemporary discourses articulating political demands but also on people’s collective memory, for a moment cease to function as theoretical monuments and organically transform into the joints of a live mechanism calling for involvement and active participation. Rid of the burden of having to deliver a narrative at the end his archival research, Prodromidis explores the possibilities of a dialogue unfolding between the text and the architectural landscape, as well as the public space and the people inhabiting it. The fact that Goodbye etc. performs all of the above in the context of institutionally established cultural settings, such as the ones provided by modern art biennials, already intimated a clear orientation towards a bold artistic practice which, in the following years, would tap even more firmly into the problematics germinating within the axis politics-art-community.

In 2019, the work A poem as an image (Amartolo) lends a voice to groups deprived of one. Woman activists, members of collectivities, and female immigrants read Galateia Kazantaki’s poem “Amartolo” and their voice becomes the focal point of an installation presented at State of Concept gallery in Athens, in the context of an exhibition curated by the collectivity What, How and for Whom / WHW. “From the depths of my hell I scream to you: I am your image, society, and I resemble you”, are the words blurted out from the headphones, thus delivering a public performance, an attempt to claim visibility. The poetry of a woman persecuted for her political activities placed in the mouths of women fighting for their experience of femininity to be acknowledged within the realms of society turns into an almost corporeal assembly releasing an emotional charge akin to that of a public protest. Yet the sound of this installation did not find an outlet into the urban space, which is the natural setting of every collective action, but instead resounded only within the confines of a modern art project space. To what extent, then, did the project manage to circumnavigate the authority of the dominant discourse, so as to challenge it or at least break its continuity? Prodromidis has no illusions: he does not believe that art is capable of bridging the distance separating the exhibition space from the socio-political sphere. Instead, then, of proposing solutions he brings into relief the potential inherent in each moment: he probes into, shapes and delivers a temporary performative field that is conducive to solidarity and participation, a sphere through which inroads can be made into the public.

Pushing on with this peculiar attempt to own up to the artist’s privilege vis-a-vis the community, in March 2020, in the context of the exhibition Translocal Cooperation held in Furtherfield gallery in London, Prodromidis decides to contribute an edited volume featuring texts written by multiple authors. In the work An open newspaper (You can’t evict a movement) (2020), the result of his collaboration with Theodoros Karyotis, Tonia Katerini, Stathis Mitropoulos, Nemanca Pantovic and Ana Vilenica, Prodromidis sets himself the goal of publishing a newspaper gathering new texts discussing the protection of first residence and the movements against evictions. In this manner, he tries to welcome people whose housing rights have been thrown into precarity and the solidarity movements favourably inclined towards them into an area of the public sphere that usually remains barred to them. Most importantly, though, he does this without purporting that his own writings can represent the members of this community, his track record of advocating for social causes notwithstanding. As the editor of the publication, he instead invited grassroots activists as well as scholars studying the solidarity movements organised in recent years for the protection of the first residence in Greece and Serbia. In Theo Prodromidis’ work, political activism, solidarity and the notion of collective action are not embodied in the work but rather heard, seen and strengthened through the work of art, whose visibility and institutional support the artist uses as his instruments. I finish this article, the result of many meetings and conversations with the artist, less with a sense of ownership over it and more with the feeling that it is a piece of writing I have contributed to. And this feeling possibly best encapsulates the importance of producing something in a shared condition.

Theo Prodromidis (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is a visual artist and film director based in Athens, Greece.

Christina Petkopoulou (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is an independent curator currently based in Athens.

How does one support oneself as an artist? Does one’s art suffer from being utilized as a means of financial support? Athens, once crisis-stricken, has been feted as a city on the rise, one of Europe’s next art capitals. But what does that international buzz materially translate to for Greek artists trying to support themselves on a month-to-month basis?

These are questions not only for those living in Greece but artists everywhere. Today, between the precarity of creative work, the increasing cost of education — especially of fine arts degrees around Europe (even while Greece’s public universities bravely hold out) — and the rapidly-rising expense of living in major cities, where so much of the art world’s attention seems to focus, it is hard to ignore financial realities when seriously contemplating pursuing the life of the artist.

Such questions preface the work of photographer Angelos Tzortzinis because he offers a concrete example of how to navigate these irresolvable tensions. If we take the name “ARTWORKS” seriously — that is, believe in the idea that ”art” “works” — then Angelos’ artistic and professional practice is an important one to understand.

Angelos is a freelance photographer who puts his craft to work every single day both to express his vision and to support himself and his family. The balance that he has sustained, since the age of 21, between financial sustainability and creative satisfaction contains an essential lesson. From the beginning of our conversation, he acknowledges the temptation to allow his daily work to influence or even diminish his underlying passion for photography, but with careful discipline, he has been able to maintain his twinned existence. Photography, for Angelos, stands for many things: a place to explore his core values and beliefs, a channel to find the right distance from his surroundings, a space for moral education — but alongside all of these abstract concepts, the camera also functions as his fundamental means of livelihood.

In 2015, Angelos was named Time magazine’s “Wire Photographer of the Year” in recognition of his heartfelt photographs that documented two historic events that befell Greece over the past decade. In the case of the first, Greece’s economic crisis, Angelos was able to document the event as it unfolded over the course of several years. Unlike so many headline-seeking journalists, he was not a passive bystander, but embedded in the situation, capturing the struggle of his own daily life and those around him. The second, the height of the refugee and migrant wave that passed through Greece in 2015, was also a topic that was close to Angelos’ personal experience.

As he summarizes, “I wasn’t just a Greek but someone who had lived through both of these experiences on an intimate level.” Rather than pretending to offer the clarifying perspective of the all-knowing photographer, Angelos accepted his own limited perspective. Each day he worked, he would ask himself, What is happening? and would then go out with his camera to answer his own question. By admitting his confusion, his photographs transcended the usual impersonality of news photographs to convey an individual’s point of view on dizzying global events. His honesty translated to his work: ”Maybe this is what attracted Time: a sensitivity to what we were all living through here in Greece. Unlike many of the foreign press, my images were less hardcore and more emotionally empathetic. I sometimes worry that we have tired out our audiences…”

But for all of Angelos’ closeness to these stories, he emphasized one thing repeatedly while we spoke: the importance of distance. To produce images with any external legibility, Angelos learned how to hold himself apart. As he told me, “If you lose distance, you lose your orientation and finally, your destination. There is close, close, and close — in other words, many different levels. For example, at the start of the crisis, I was swallowed by the story. I was following every demonstration and documenting the struggles of individual people who couldn’t pay their electricity bills. All of these emotions began to affect me too much to carry on working. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more sensitive to what ‘close’ means. Every photographer finds their own distance; I looked towards individuals who I really admire to understand where I needed to be. Vanessa Winship in Turkey…Daido Moriyama in Japan…Trente Parke in Australia…Garry Winogrand in the US…what I saw in each was how they could be inside their subjects — while maintaining themselves apart.”

For Angelos, an emotional proximity to the country’s financial crisis and later, the surge in migration, came from his own background. Growing up in Egaleo, a poor suburb of Athens, many of Angelos’ neighbors and friends were refugees from Albania and the Middle East, especially Iraq. Thus, while many spoke of the 2015 “refugee crisis” as a new phenomenon, Angelos had lived with refugees and migrants his entire life. The other formative event of these childhood years was the untimely death of Angelos’ father. At a young age, he felt the burden of having to support others. He knew that whatever path he decided to pursue, it would have to sustain not only him, but those around him.

Given his difficult circumstances, Angelos began searching, trying to understand himself and the world he lived in. Early on, Angelos showed a technical aptitude for making pictures; at the age of 21, he dedicated himself to photography. But from the beginning, he decided “photography is not just nice light and a pretty frame, but about depth and feeling.” Through this profession, he says, “I tried to improve myself as a human.” Angelos continuously pushed himself, “to go one step extra, to seek out the next level. And soon I discovered the only way to get there was not through more photography, but everything else: reading books, watching documentaries, moving through the world. When I began, I did not understand the breadth that was needed. The broader my education became, the more this came out in my pictures.” Yet more than any visual or intellectual training, Angelos believes in something even more foundational: “There are many great photographers but fewer good people. The latter is the most important, but also the most rare.”

Nevertheless, Angelos has always had to balance his nobler sentiments with practical realities. Today, he supports his wife and they are expecting a child, while relying on his photographic earnings. This balancing act informs his photographs; Angelos knows that making money with his art is not a simple thing. “How do I protect my personal work from being influenced by my commercial work? It’s very difficult. When I began, I was innocent. I wasn’t interested if other people liked my photos, I did it only for myself. But now, it’s impossible not to think what will enter the market. At the same time, I know this is dangerous. I now feel I am on a good path, but it’s a constant struggle to not be influenced by what the editors and audiences out there will think. It’s a fight that demands vigilance.”

Social media, for example, is a huge problem in this regard. As any photographer knows, Instagram is an essential channel for getting one’s work out into the world. But Angelos says, “Social media can help you only if you impose on it very careful control and limits.” For Angelos, social media feeds another troublesome trend: artists’ obsession with exposure. “Everyone wants exposure and festival exhibitions and awards without being paid. This is very bad. All artists need to get paid for their work, time, and skill. I don’t care about fame, I care about being recognized for my work.”

He goes on, “I won’t give my work without being paid. It’s a simple life rule. If I give my work for free, I won’t be respected. We have to respect ourselves; no one will do it for us. We live in difficult times — in photography, in art, in all aspects of life. If you give your work away for free, then you will do it constantly. You need to set a hard rule and follow it.”

For his entire career, Angelos has followed a difficult road, balancing these many demands. But as we close, he dismisses one more illusion that is so frequently held in the art world: “You can’t do everything by yourself. We artists need each other, we need communities. For example, I have a friend at Reuters who helps me with my texts. Every photo project is 50 percent pictures and 50 percent text. You can have amazing pictures but if you don’t have a good text, you have a problem.” And then Angelos, who has depended on his camera for so, so many things over the years, reveals how one person, and one machine, are never enough: “Every time I do a final selection, I show my edit to my wife. We sit at the kitchen table and discuss the work. She tells me to cut pictures, even at the very last minute. Remember: we all need help from each other. Politically, socially, ethically, it’s the only way we can live.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis can be found working in an apartment, a former architect’s office in a residential area, in the environs of central Athens. “We live in the city. We live in the block of flats. We see the block of flats as a cave”¹ he wrote in the accompanying text of his solo show in Kalfayan Galleries in 2021. His studio is a cave itself, encapsulated in a block of flats, distanced from the vivid core of the Athenian artworld, yet close to it in terms of practicality. One can work there undistracted. Afar but approachable. Among family houses, other professionals, shop owners, families, students, Kassapis is painting, drawing, writing, composing and playing music in working-hour shifts.

This multitasking, however, in the case of Kassapis seems to be employed in favor of painting. His texts are notes of his painstaking observation of the most delicate and indiscernible functions of human memory and perception. Poetic landscapes of self-reflection that stand as pieces of literature per se, his texts are compositions of scattered diary excerpts that the artist puts together in order to organize his research on image making. “Look at these plants below. How does it sound like?”² Kassapis writes, and even though he — proudly — admits this question was initially posed by his 3-year-old son at the time, one can’t help but, read it in relation with his own preoccupation with sound making. His soundscapes, distant analogue tones, are made to be listened to in his own studio during the actual process of painting. An analogue audio mixer, an old phone (a few devices he displayed in his last solo show “Pliance” in Radio Athènes, Athens in December 2022 as a sound installation from his soundscape series “Rooms in Negative”) are always in the room, placed beside him, actively involved in the creative process. Even though it is certain that artists rarely produce the soundtrack that accompanies their studio work, Kassapis speaks of this particular practice in a casual and humble way, as if his sound pieces are necessary painting tools, practical devices that are just “part of the job”.

I notice that, in contrast with his paintings, his soundscapes emerge from the outside, open-air, sometimes natural, physical spaces. In the calm and introverted capsule of the studio, they infuse instances of what is — or could be — taking place within the infinite dimensions of the exterior environment. This carefully premeditated condition that prevails over the apartment that is the artist’s studio, what purpose does it serve? What’s the use of this perfectly curated set-up: the soundwaves vibing through the speakers, the clear-cut lighting, the relics of the former architectural office, instruments of the design discipline, wooden rulers, the old tv and the slide projector, vintage design magazines, notebooks and markers, the brushes and papers, personal objects.

Trying to comprehend how the manipulation of the surroundings of the creation affects the work, I asked him about its relationship with space, yet our conversation would always lead us to the concept of time. Kassapis’ painting is a long study on memory, specifically in the very process of recollection. His works lie precisely on this conjunction of time and space, where subjectiveness, intuition, perception and human body coproduce an attenuated reflection of the lived experience. Series of paintings that formalistically consist of compositions of objects and landscapes unfold aspects of what the artist refers to as the “nuance of memory”: the distortions, the superpositions and the deductions that formulate an image within the mechanism of recollection, a process affiliated, according to him, to the concepts of repetition, duration and mood³. His paintings, parts of indivisible series, are often seen as studies of color and shape on a subject, a perception he welcomes from the position of a painting and drawing teacher, a parallel profession he devotes himself to this day. After all, how can one study perception, if not by assimilating it from the subjective gaze of the other?

And then again, we return to the concept of duration. As the viewer spends more time gazing on Kassapis’ series of paintings, they realize that the matter of composition and technique is not his main concern, even though it remains his credible vehicle. Within their absolute silence, his canvases disclose a sequence, a rhythm which — as obscure as it may be — certainly remains present. Slight changes on the dubious position of the potential light source and on the overall framing of the subject suggest the existence of a microscopic movement that entangles among the pieces that form the series. This type of motion is so vague, one might question their own vision, or even, the artist’s intention. Is it there? Is it actually taking place or it is us, the viewers who fail to recall the details, as our sight moves across the painting surfaces?

That sense of mistaking that to the artist resembles a Freudian slip, engages the viewer with his eternal subject: the autonomous life of human memory. That familiar sense of intuition that renders us at the disposal of the empirical object, the esoteric state of being present in several timelines, our unique way to recall an image . With this theoretical diagonal in mind, that I think strikes through his work, I personally tend to see Kassapis’ painting series, as a juxtaposition of analogue monitors, continually projecting impressions of objects, bodies and spaces that I have actually encountered at some point. “These photos I collect, I do not distinguish them from my personal ones. They are not photos of facts, but they help to recollect”⁴ he writes.

Merging into his work, I feel I can relate more to the instrumented atmosphere of his studio and the practice that is taking place there. I like to think that Kassapis is creating a simulation, a space where himself -if exhaustively focused- can capture the material traces of memory. With the soundscapes insulating every corner of its shell, the charged and stimulating objects, its dense quietness, the artist’s studio is a space where he observes the experience of recollection, he runs trials and experiments and records fragments of this intimate and abstruse mental process. The journal of this investigation is transcribed in his canvases, captured in his sound pieces, spoken in his writing.

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (b. 1981) studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens from 1999–2004 where he lives and works. His work includes painting, drawing, photography, text, sound and music. He has also worked on set designs and as a teacher. Solo shows: Pliancy (Radio Athenes,2022.Athens. The Shallow Room (A Sud, Pescara 2022). To see a block of flats as a cave (Kalfayan galleries,Athens, 2021).’Melting snow as if in a room’, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis / Konstantinos Hadjinikolaou (Tavros, Athens, 2021), ‘Songs’. Athanasios Argianas / Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (Hero Gallery, Amsterdam, 2018), ‘Breakwater’ (Independent Space, Athens 2015), ‘How Can one Remember Thirst?’ (Loraini Alimantiri
Gallery, Athens 2011), ‘Bones are Tight’ (Loraini Alimantiri Gallery, Athens 2008), ‘Numb’ (Loraini Alimantiri Gallery, Athens2006).Selected group shows: Documenta 14 (Art Director: Adam Szymczyck, Cur. Katerina Tselou, Athens / Kassel 2017), ‘Reverb: new art from Greece’ (cur. Evita Tsokanta — Eirine Efstathiou, Boston, 2014), ‘Hell as Pavillion’ (cur. Nadia Argyropoulou, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013), ‘Heaven’, Athens Biennale (cur. Christoforos Marinos, Athens, 2009), ‘Anathena’ (cur. Marina Fokidi-Marina Gioti, Athens, 2006). Selected set designs: ‘Era Povera’, Patricia Apergi (Athens 2012), ‘As my Heart in a Storm’, (Bijoux de Kant, Athens, 2012). ‘Blossom’, Agni Papadeli Rossetou. Selected music works:Rooms in negative-Lucky Boys published on tape.(untitled. 1) 2019. Rooms in Negative, published on vinyl (2009), Look and the Beast, Music for the dance performance by Agni Papadeli Rossetou. Andreas Ragnar Kassapis was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2020.

Christina Petkopoulou, (Athens, 1992) is a free-lance curator, researcher and writer based in Athens. She has studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne and completed a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the Panteion University of Social Sciences. She is a member and the in-house curator of the A-DASH team, a researcher and curator of the online art projects a time of her own by Zoe Chatziyannaki and Athens Report by Anna Lascari. She has curated exhibitions and public programs (Lipiu, 2020, Playing Ground, Automatic Transmission, 2019, Liminal Aristeidis Lappas solo show, Praxitelous 33, 2016, Choro-graphies-Points of flight, Artscape Athens, 2014 and more). Her texts have been published in several editions and catalogues (The ArtNewspaper Greece, Lipiu, Vera Chotzoglou, Bona Fide, State of Concept, 2021, Ammophila II, Under the Burning Sun, 2021, The Feminine Sublime, 2019 and more). She has worked for the Greek Contemporary Art Institute (ISET) researching and documenting its archive and she has also collaborated with several cultural institutions such as the Athens Biennale (2013, 2015), Art Athina (2014, 2015) and Archaeological Dialogues (2015). In 2016, she was chosen for the Neon Foundation curatorial exchange program in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and in 2019, she received the SNF Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.

¹ Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2021, To see a block of flats as a cave, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

² Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2022, Pliancy, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

³ In Bergson found as “la durée” and “stimmung”

⁴Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2022, Pliancy, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

In his latest solo gallery show, multidisciplinary artist Yorgos Maraziotis lures the viewer into an environment where not everything is what it seems. The exhibition Monroe Springs at Antwerp’s Base-Alpha Gallery consists of paintings and sculptures of different sizes, installed unorthodoxly to create a carefully-planned spatial choreography that puts the viewer’s body into different situations. The deeper visitors delve into the exhibition, the more they realise that behind the show’s apparent softness and playfulness hides a much darker layer, one that is full of violence, social injustice and late-capitalism ennui.

The exhibition’s title refers to an imaginary place, a Californian town perhaps named after Marilyn Monroe. Maraziotis chose this title because he draws inspiration from California, and specifically Los Angeles, for all the works he created for the exhibition. The artist has never visited Los Angeles though; the place exists in his mind as a collage of the representations he has been exposed to over mass media and through popular culture. The show is referencing the city and its history, but at the same time is also addressing the struggles and plight of any western or westernised modern city. Monroe Springs is therefore not a show about Los Angeles, but turns Los Angeles into a metaphor for 21st-century urban societies and the trappings of urbanisation and capitalism.

Upon entering the gallery space, visitors walk past a set of wall-mounted sculptures in the form of Japanese shuriken made of thick pink marble. The weapons’ sharpness is cancelled by the choice of material, and their colour imbues them with an attractive, almost edible quality. Functioning as the exhibition’s ceremonial gateway, a pedestal stands in the middle of the hallway carrying a pair of pristine white roller skates with iridescent details. The shoes are filled with soil into which two pink candles are standing lit. On either side of the pedestal and near the ceiling hang two neon lights in yellow and pink; they are based on a drawing by Maraziotis of cartoonish blood oozing from an invisible wound.

Passing the pedestal visitors find themselves in the exhibition’s first room. A large copper articulated sculpture is hanging from the ceiling like a metal spine made of laser-cut, identical abstract shapes. The impression of the sculpture changes as one moves around it, becoming almost invisible and razor-like from the side but curvaceous and figurative from the front. The shapes are again based on a doodle by Maraziotis, but being cut out of thin metal adds an element of danger and aggressiveness to them. On the wall across, a small painting is sitting on a metal shelf; a plant removed from its pot is placed right in front of it, concealing its content and at the same time duplicating the tropical plants depicted in the painting.

A pair of large paintings standing back-to-back on the floor conceal the entrance to the next room. They have been placed like a wall that separates this first part of the exhibition from the next, creating an indirect path for visitors to follow. Behind the two paintings and mounted on the wall with magnets is a pair of metal nunchaku, the Japanese karate weapon made famous by Bruce Lee and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Maraziotis’ nunchaku are connected with a very long chain to look more like a skipping rope, confusing in one gesture the limits between violence and play.

In the final and largest room of the exhibition, there are two sculptures. On the left there’s a curving white volume covered in ceramic bathroom tiles and a single metal tube coming out of its top like the railing of a swimming pool ladder. The end of this metal tube that touches the floor is pointed like a weapon. On the other side of the room there’s an austere metal structure that is modelled after a children’s swing with two seats — only in this case the swings are replaced by two angular slates of metal that dangle mournfully from their chains. Above the sculptures, two paintings of identical size are hanging from the ceiling like billboards. A red neon light in the same shape as those in the entrance tints the white wall with an ominous red glare.

The paintings at Monroe Springs are made using a limited palette of bright yellow, pink and red. At first sight, they seem cheerful and harmless, featuring lush palm trees and cartoonish forms painted sparsely on raw canvas. At closer inspection, and especially when one reads their titles, the paintings are in fact a blood bath, referencing violence both real and fictional. In the first room, the 2,4-meter-high painting Rodney King’s Liquor Circus (2019) is back-to-back with LA Guns (2019), referencing Rodney King’s beating by the LA Police in 1991 and the subsequent riots where over 60 people died. Hanging over the dystopian swings in the back room, the two paintings are referencing Kathy Acker’s violent postmodern writing (Cathy’s Eyelids, 2019) and Disney films (Bunny Love, 2019). The exhibition is constantly referencing the 1980s and 90s through various elements — whether that is the vintage roller skates, karate B-movies, the Los Angeles riots or Acker’s punk literature. This conscious decision relates to the constant tug of war that is taking place between violence and play throughout the exhibition, but also to the artist’s own nostalgia for a childhood that is becoming more and more distant (Maraziotis is after all a Millennial, born in 1984). This very clear reference to the late 1980s and early 1990s also highlights that although we change and move on, history repeats itself: this year we saw another filmed incident of excessive police violence in the US that sparked widespread riots, and we’re again sliding into a recession like in the 1990s.

Maraziotis incorporates these issues not only in each work separately but also in the conception of the exhibition as a whole. The nuanced, almost theatrical dramaturgy of moving from one space to the other, the underlying sadness that permeates every attempt to cheerfulness and optimism, the impact that the different materials have on the viewer, the show’s disorienting layout — all are elements that cannot be conveyed via photography and must be experienced in person. That said, Monroe Springs is not just a well-played game of perception and aesthetics, but also a melancholy recollection of the state of the world today. We were promised prosperity and peace, but we ended up with endless war and class oppression. We were promised a playground and we ended up in a torture chamber.

Review by Kiriakos Spirou, originally published on und-athens.com.

Marble columns; soaring arches; celebrated monuments that have stood for millennia. So often, it is these structures that stand in for “culture,” the proud embodiments that we mentally refer to as emblems of our civilizations. But in reality, they are the exception, the ostentatious outliers. So much more has been built over the span of human history using softer, mutable, ephemeral materials, such as wood, clay, and straw. And even more invisibly, there are those structures that underlie all of society, never taking a physical form at all: feeding, cleaning, caretaking, loving.

When we talk about shaping society, it is the imposing institutions that we are likely to think about first: parliaments, courts, and banks. But these towering peaks of stone and steel rarely take the time to acknowledge the interstitial materials they are built upon. It takes the prodding of an artist to remind us that we can lower our gaze from those that strive to reach the heavens, and find great beauty in our overlooked earthly underpinnings. Not only that, but if we truly want to shape society, it is in these unspoken spaces where we must focus our efforts.

This is the field which Paky Vlassopoulou explores in her work. Trained as a sculptor, Paky has confidence in her talents for formal and artistic production. But lately, her interests have expanded to examine how physical objects and shared spaces are interwoven within vast, underappreciated webs of invisible work. She continues to sculpt, but the materials she utilizes have evolved to include social ties, emotional bonds, and intimate relationships.

From early on, the social element of art was on Paky’s mind. Indeed, when she first began her education, she didn’t even think she would become an artist. Rather, she imagined she would organize concerts, exhibitions, and other gatherings to bring people together. But she quickly realized that she couldn’t live on the phone and behind a keyboard, only arranging events and programming for others. She re-committed to the idea of making art itself and started exploring the broad range of themes that art can address. She focused on tactile relationships, always through three-dimensional objects, putting special emphasis on the process of making, rather than the outcome. Reflecting on this perspective, she explains, “Sculpture is my first vocabulary. What I learned most about my work in school is that I always start with my hands, not my eyes. I am always thinking sensually, and about how we experience our environments spatially. My focus is on touch, not sight.”

Even during the time when Paky was making objects, the notion of mutability was key. She says, “My artworks were always ephemeral, including my built sculptures. Look at the fact that I’ve been working with clay and straw for ten years. I consider my clay to be a product of the earth, rather than as ceramic, a human technology. I sculpt in a way that is fragile, but also re-arrangeable. No matter what I build, it can always change. I don’t believe in the concrete.”

As Paky’s work developed, she realized that she was not just interested in the objects themselves, but what these objects reflected about the social structures they existed in. Her larger question became, “How can I make art in a way that can be decomposed and reconfigured in another assembly?” For example, counterintuitively, the first time Paky baked one of her clay pieces was just two years ago. But even then, this fixity was not for the sake of the object, but for the purpose of creating a social environment: the hardened piece was a carafe, which she used to serve wine at a performance. She says, “It was only when I thought to make a tool that my sculptures took on any permanence.” More recently, objects have receded further in Paky’s practice, used only as a means of bringing people together to share a space. Ultimately, she is still producing ephemeral sculptures, but these are now ones that each person can take home with them — that is, their shared memories of a group experience.

Paky’s increased flexibility has also opened her work in other directions, especially in terms of reaching broader audiences. She admits, “An important aspect for me is my social life outside art. This has led me to question how more people can engage with art, starting with my partner but extending to my friends, neighbors, and more. I believe that art can address issues such as freedom, identity, and social relations, and I cannot imagine myself questioning such universal issues solely within a narrow professional sphere.” As she pushes herself more in this direction, she signals at least one clear influence from within the art world, albeit a figure who reveals a path for breaking out of it: the Polish artist Paweł Althamer.

Like Paky, Althamer makes sculptural works with the goal of using his art as a means of “community building.” Drawing inspiration from such an example, Paky goes on to assert, “If you stay in a structure that is too narrow and hierarchical — such as the academy or the fine art world — it can only hurt your ability to communicate. Some years ago, I did an exhibition that was very pessimistic and that was addressed only to the art world. When it was over, I asked myself: Why? Whom am I talking to? Who is going to value my work? Only we, as individuals, can value our own work. Even if the best museums acquire it, nobody can tell you that what you have made, or done, or written is meaningful. The belief that you are somehow adding to the world has to come from yourself.”

Still, Paky is no solitary individualist. Although she might chafe against the weight of larger structures, she passionately believes in more agile forms of collective action. Take the artist-run space called 3 137 (three artists, located at 137 Mavromichali St in Athens), of which Paky constitutes an essential third. As she describes it, “3 137 began in 2012. It came out of an encounter, a debate about the agency that was possible in art. There was never a grand plan; it wasn’t a conscious response to the financial crisis. Rather, we realized from the beginning that there was a collective need for a place to gather, collaborate, and make exhibitions outside of the gallery system. Our initial interest was to map the city and its art scene, and question how things worked. We quickly became a small family, and then slowly began to expand outward. We invited various groups to our space, especially those from outside of the Fine Arts School. We mixed social networks, different social classes, all kinds of people. We used the radio to invite people from the neighborhood; we addressed the possibility of auto-didactism; we invited individuals who were in rehab. A friend of mine even did a show about how football could be used as a tool to fight fascism.”

Yet this effort of reaching out to others is never finished. Reflecting on the development of 3 137, as well as her own work, Paky confidently says, “Looking back, I can see how each one of my projects answers a question that I posed in the past.” But then she pushes herself to discover how her questions can become “more inviting for others (and accessible for more kinds of others).” She goes on, “I want to continue to invite as many different kinds of people to experience these questions with me — not just intellectually, but physically, by bringing them into the spaces I inhabit.”

While Paky tirelessly questions the structures in which she operates, she also recognizes that beyond her own work, or even the walls of 3 137, the city of Athens has changed dramatically since 2012. “Today,” she continues, “Athens is very different. Young people who are just starting out already know how to self-organize. There are artist-run initiatives all over the city. This means we now face a new set of questions: What are the gaps we still see in Athens? What role do we play to address them? For one thing, Athens is still missing state-run institutions supporting contemporary art. For another, it lacks sustainable means of discourse-production. In the former category, EMST, the city’s contemporary art museum, has been struggling for years, opening briefly and then closing its doors for long stretches. Paky explains, “When the institution put out a call for a new director, 3 137 sent in an application for the position, where we seriously suggested alternative governance models and tried to imagine how this institution could be sustainable. Our goal was to make this discussion public — so we then published our application. The lack of a functioning contemporary art museum in Athens is a major structural gap and we want to address it.”

But Paky, fresh from spending several months at WHW Akademija, a new arts study program in Croatia, wants to broaden her view beyond Greece. For her, two words are central not only to Greece, but the whole world right now: flexibility and precarity. On the side of flexibility, Paky is optimistic. Not only has this idea been present in her sculptures from the start, but she sees it extending to many other areas as well. “What is exciting about the moment we live in is the opportunity to see different civilizations and understand what they are doing,” she says. “We can begin to look past the hegemony of the West — recognizing the extent to which the US and Europeans have done really, really terrible things. I don’t mean to exoticize other civilizations but rather to acknowledge that we have been taught a constrained narrative that has nothing to do with the full possibilities of being human. The framework, from my point of view, has been super exclusive, extremely arrogant, and overly ‘productive,’ but in a very limited definition of production. Since the mid-20th century, the United States took over the paradigm of work, productivity, and usefulness. Fortunately, I think this is all starting to change. It’s an amazing moment to understand these structures, and thus ourselves, more clearly.”

On the other hand, flexibility also comes with a great deal of precarity. This has been sharply evident in Greece but can be seen in all parts of our late-capitalist world. “Beginning most visibly in 2008, many people in the middle class started to find themselves in situations of precarity,” Paky explains. “While this is sad in many ways, the positive aspect for me is that people who once had a safe position have been shaken, which creates space for connection between different layers of society. If precarity affects us all, that can force us to explore new structures and different ways of organizing ourselves. Amidst this crisis, my hope is that we will start to look around and see others who are more similar to us than we thought.”

Paky also appreciates the difficulty and uncertainty of embracing such precarity: “It’s more challenging to sustain flexible things. It’s very tiring. It’s easier to create clear laws, strict norms. If you follow a more open-ended approach, you have to work a lot.” At the same time, as with the marble temples cited at the beginning of this essay, our society cannot only be built on the hard and fast. For example, Paky pushes us to look at the domestic sphere: “While the public sphere is governed by explicit rules and codes of law, the space inside the home has many unspoken norms. Indeed, our entire society is held together by fragile, socially-determined, unstable relations — in the home, amongst families, between friends. Ultimately, I don’t believe we need to clarify every single rule, but rather, we need care and we need to perceive with care. We must recognize that providing care takes energy and time, and we need to value such efforts.”

To conclude our conversation, Paky moves from broad, speculative strokes to something more specific: the role of the artist. On this subject, Paky’s final words are exceedingly clear: “Provoke,” she urges. “What is close to you, in every moment, is the most important thing. As an artist, you must expose yourself to what’s really meaningful to you. You will have a reaction, and eventually these feelings will come back to you in a different form. This process always comes with difficulties — but in my mind, it is the only interesting way to live and create.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.