Chara Stergiou was born in Greece (1991). She is a multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher. Her practice focuses on the point where epistemological research and artistic practice merge. With a strong background in spatial studies, she manages to explore questions of agency and materiality, as well as the larger-scale distribution of technical media by approaching the latter through the lens of archaeology. She studies description-defying aesthetic spatialities and uses sonic narratives to capture phenomena of a seemingly invisible and immaterial nature. In this context, she has developed the methodology of the ‘DJ Lecture’. The latter is a hybrid narrative technique for addressing sociopolitical phenomena related to the sea, whereby stories, geographies and identities compose a sonic, almost radiophonic, event subsequently transmitted with the aid of a kind of distorted ethnomusicology. She is a graduate of the Department of Visual Cultures (MA in Contemporary Art Theory) of Goldsmiths, University of London and she also holds a MSc in Post-Industrial Design from the University of Thessaly, Greece, where she also obtained her diploma in Architecture. She is among the artists selected to participate in the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Meditarranean MEDITARRANEA 19 ‘School of Waters’.
Sofia Sfyri was born in 1990, in Athens. She started a degree in Architecture but quickly changed her mind and eventually studied cinema at the University of Westminster (BA of Arts, 2013) and Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins (MA of Arts, 2016). Her practice includes experimental, moving image pieces, as well as short films, devised performances, and sometimes object-based work. She uses live art, camp aesthetics, and a cinematic approach to her performances. Themes that pervade her work are identity, queer, failure and self-censorship, among others. She has shown her work in the UK, Italy, Spain and Greece. She works as a videographer. Her current projects include a theatrical performance and writing the script for a short film.
Elissavet Sfyri (b. 1994, Athens) completed her postgraduate studies in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. She is a Fine Art graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been presented in a number of international venues, such as the CICA Museum in South Korea; MAMCO, the contemporary art museum of Geneva; as well as the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan. In August 2018, she produced and curated the Saline Art Residency, a contemporary art event of permanent public sculptures, to which she also contributed as an artist.
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.
Thodoris Trampas is a young visual and performance artist whose work has been acclaimed in Greece and abroad. He was born in 1991 in Devonport, Australia, and he comes from the city of Serres. His first medium, painting, has led him to bodily expression through improvisation and also to installation, especially performance art. Ηe studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, from where he graduated with distinction in 2015. He attended the postgraduate programme Education Sciences-Special Education of the University of Nicosia (offered jointly with the University of Patras) in the period 2016-18, under a scholarship from the University of Nicosia. He has collaborated with the Marina Abramovic Institute and the Organization for Culture and Development NEON in the context of the Long Durational Performance event, which took place at the Benaki Museum in Athens. The international association Biennale of Young Creators from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM) and the General Secretariat for Lifelong Learning jointly chose his work to represent Greece during the LANDXSCAPES residency programme in Italy, as well as at the UKYA CITY TAKEOVER International Film Festival, held in February 2019 in Nottingham. He recently won two awards for the documentary Pangea: one for Best Medium-length Professional Documentary at the 8th On Art Film Festival in Poland; and one for Best Actor at the ORION International Film Festival in Australia. He lives and works in Athens. He teaches performance art, focusing particularly on the medium’s basic elements and mechanics. At the same time, he shows his work in various group exhibitions and festivals, both in Greece and abroad.
Elena Demetria Chantzis (Athens, 1986) is a Greek-Italian visual artist and architect based in Athens. She studied architecture at Sapienza University in Rome and holds postgraduate degrees in design from the Politecnico di Milano and in art and architecture from the Instead (parapoesis) programme of the University of Thessaly, where she has also worked as a tutor. Her work emanates from the observation of objects of the everyday life, which she records through photography, text, drawings, video and sound and recreates in new images reflecting on contemporary lifestyles. She has participated in shows such as The Orbit at Kalanea Space in Athens; Walking the dog on the salt, in the context of the Marpissa festival in Paros; Geometries, held at the Agricultural University of Athens, as a contributor to the project A knee on the ground; Heatwave at State of Concept gallery; and Staging of Objectsat Circuits and Currents. She has collaborated with the architectural initiatives Kassandras, Diplomates and with the architect Aristide Antonas for the production of installations and exhibitions such as documenta14 and the Venice Biennale, and worked for art spaces such as the Leefewerk project and Dino Morra gallery (in the context of Art Athina). In addition, she has served as artist assistant to Mary Zygouri for the Aeschylean Festival and Rainer Oldendorf for documenta 14.
Lily Hassioti (b. 1994) is a visual artist that works across various media. She lives and works in Athens. Based on the hardware/ software binary her work investigates the relationship between the tangible and the intangible, creating ephemeral situations and interactive installations. The structure, organisation and connectivity in natural, technological and social systems, as well as the currents, energy and information that run through them function as her artistic language as well as a navigational tool. Lily is a founding member of Athens Open Studio, a space focusing on practice-led inquiry and education. She completed her undergraduate studies in Fine Art (2016) at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) , part of Dundee University, Scotland, from where she also received the RSA John Kinross scholarship to pursue independent studies in Florence. Selected shows: Athens Digital Arts Festival 2019 and 2017; Coast, exhibition held at the Ullapool visual arts centre An Talla Solais, (UK, 2019); New Contemporaries, show at the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh, 2017); and Paradigm Electronic Arts, exhibition in Summerhall, Edinburgh (2016). Her work is part of the Royal Scottish Academy collection and was featured in Eleftherios Venizelos Airport in Athens in 2019. Public works include: Avli presented in Volakas, Tinos as part of Kinono Art Gathering (2018); and Garden of Evolution, 2016 in Dundee Botanic Gardens, Scotland.
Natalia Papadopoulou (Athens, 1989) is a filmmaker and visual artist
who works with video art, new media and performance. She completed the Doc Nomads Joint Master Degree in Documentary Filmmaking, which is delivered by a consortium of three prominent European universities: the Luca School of Arts in Brussels, the Academy of Theatre and Film (SZFE) in Budapest and Lusofona University in Lisbon. She lives and works in Athens. Her work constitutes a kind of experiential investigation on how art can serve as a
catalyst that can help release the individual’s ‘poetic self’.
Bill Psarras (1985) is an artist, academic and musician. He is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Performing and Digital Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Peloponnese. He has been a former adjunct lecturer at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University (2016-2019) where he also conducted his postdoctoral research exploring performance/site/technology in relation to Geohumanities (State Scholarship, 2017-2019). He holds a PhD in Arts and Technology from Goldsmiths, University of London, where he studied under an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship (2013). He has also an MA in Digital Arts (University of the Arts London) and a BA in Audiovisual Arts (Ionian University). His art practice includes site-specific walking performances, mixed media installations, video/digital art and poetry; exploring the geopoetics and politics of the urban experience through memory, emotion and site. He has exhibited in international contemporary art festivals, group exhibitions and cultural institutions across Europe and the US. His art research has been published in international journals (Leonardo Electronic Almanac-MIT Press, Technoetic Arts, IJART: International Journal of Arts and Technology), conferences (International Symposium on Electronic Art 2013), chapters in edited books on the intersections of contemporary art, performance and urban-cultural studies. As a musician, he has composed music for documentaries and self-released a series of e-albums across the rock and ambient spectrum. On 2017, he published the poetry collection Tundra (Pigi Publications).
Ersi Varveri (1984) is a visual artist living and working between Antwerp, Athens and Syros (Greece). She holds a diploma (BA) from Athens School of Fine arts (2011), a Master’s degree from Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (In-Situ Department, 2015) and a Master of Research in Art and Design from Sint Lucas School of Art, Antwerp (2016). From January 2017 to February 2020 she co-hosted the artist-run space the Pink House (Antwerp) and co-founded the publishing workshop pink house press.
Her work covers a wide range of artistic mediums, often dealing with the notion of space. Through her recent research project series Becoming a space, she created a series of clothes and embroideries, photographs, ink drawings and short fictional stories, while she also discovered the zine publication process and experimented with self-publishing as a tool for a flexible (self-)reflection and creative archiving practice.
Currently she is conducting a research project connected to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, under the title one space becoming another. Together with Gijs Waterschoot, visual artist and collaborator for this project, they see their experience in the Pink House as a background to research further new possibilities and necessities of artist-run spaces.
Ιasonas Kampanis was born in 1985 in Athens, where he lives and works. Since 2007, he has been working with painting, printmaking, photography, digital media, performance, installations and scenographic works. His works have been presented mainly in Greece and the United Kingdom, including at the Bishopsgate Institute (London, 2013); London Print Studio (2013); O3 Gallery, with zoologist and painter Desmond Morris (Oxford, 2013); Museum of Typography (Chania, 2014); Ligne Roset Westend (London, 2014); Islington Arts Factory (London, 2015); Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes Gallery (London, 2016); Onassis Stegi (Athens, 2018)’ in the film Salt Wound by Maria Gaitanidi, in collaboration with actress Stacy Martin (2018); Michael Cacoyannis Foundation (Athens, 2019); kunstahallekleinbasel (Basel, 2019)’ and at the Victoria Square Project (Athens, September 2020).
Ionian Bisai (1992) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Athens. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2018). His artistic research focuses on the critical reading of underexposed stories and examines the ways in which these become embedded in new contexts. Fully endorsing the age of augmented reality, the artist weaves social engagement and critique through participatory strategies and performative sequences, resulting in hybrid films and video installations. In 2016, in the context of his long-term artistic collaboration with Sotiris Tsiganos, he founded the Latent Community project, an ongoing artistic investigation intertwining fieldwork and moving image in order to tackle contemporary judicial, social and ecological issues. The duo aims to create conceptual and emotional experiences through which a more equal and sustainable future may be imagined. Their work has been presented in several international exhibitions and festivals (Athens Biennale, documenta14 – Public Programs, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative, Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete and the Recontemporary cultural association in Turin). Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos have been awarded prizes by the LOOP artistic platform in Barcelona and Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arabic Emirates). For the period 2020-2021, they are fellows of Onassis AiR – School of Infinite Rehearsals.
Alexandra Niaka is an interactive media artist. She holds a Master of Architecture in Design for Performance and Interaction from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a diploma of architecture from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She expresses herself through interactive installations, immersive technologies, and written text. Through her work, she tries to provide creative answers to questions concerning the relation between human and technology and explore the way in which this relation determines how we perceive, and interact with, our surrounding reality. To that end, she focuses on the use of cutting-edge technology to create Mixed, Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences. Her research focuses on theories of consciousness and perception and she tries to render visible intangible concepts like the brain processes that occur during perceptual experiences. Her work is based on the biofeedback loop between brain data and the surrounding reality. Her main experimentation tool is the EEG headset. She has worked for London- based creative studios, like The Workers (inc.) and Jason Bruges studio.
Janis Rafa completed her education in Fine Art at the University of Leeds (2002-2012) with a PhD in video art and was a resident at the Rijksakademie (2013-2014) with a scholarship by Onassis Foundation. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).In 2020 she was commissioned for a new video work by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19: Codes of Domestic Violence. In 2019 she presented her first museum solo at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. Her feature fiction film, Kala azar (2020), had its world premiere in the International Film Festival Rotterdam (KNF award), a US premiere at New Directors/ New Films at MoMA (New York, 2020), followed by an international festival run (25 festivals, 5 wins) and a Dutch cinema release (2020).
Rafa’s works have also been shown at MAXXI (Rome, 2020), State of Concept (Athens, 2020), Manifesta 12 (Palermo, 2018), Palazzo Medici Riccardi (Florence, 2017), Centre d’art Contemporain Chanot (France, 2017), Kunsthalle Munster (Germany, 2017), Museum Voorlinden (2017), EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam, 2016), Palazzo Strozzi (2015), State Museum Thessaloniki (Greece, 2011), amongst other venues. Rafa’s works are in collections of the Dutch museums
Stedelijk, Centraal, Voorlinden and part of Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy).
Antigone studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (2005) and Fine Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2009) and at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London. She holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Royal School of Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium (2014). She has participated in exhibitions and festivals in Belgium, Germany, Greece and other countries, where she contributed visual works and performances and ran a series of workshops. She has also been selected for a number of residency programmes in Belgium (Workspacebrussels, Kaaistudios, Air Antwerpen, Recyclart Brussels). In 2017 she returned to her native Greece and she now lives and works in Athens. Alongside her artistic activity, she has been teaching art to various age groups in diverse contexts since 2009. In her work she combines many different media such as performance, video, drawing, photography and installation art, investigating the manifold ways in which we perceive the concepts of place, space and time that shape our identity.
Ventourakis’ practice situates itself at the threshold between art and document, constituting an attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image. In 2013, he completed the MA in Fine Art (Photography, with distinction) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL) and was also the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013), awarded to a UAL final-year student. His work has been selected for a number of initiatives showcasing the work of promising and top graduating artist in the UK, such as the Future Map exhibition (2013); Catlin Guide (2014); and the exhibition Fresh Faced Wild Eyed at the Photographers Gallery (2014). In 2015 he was a visiting artist at California Institute of the Arts with a Fulbright Artist Fellowship, while in 2016 he was a fellow in IdeasCity Athens, an initiative organized by the New Museum of New York. He was shortlisted for the MAC International award (2016) and the Bar-Tur Photobook Award (2015). His work has recently been presented on the occasion of the following exhibitions and festivals: The Same River Twice (Athens, Benaki Museum, 2019); Hors Pistes 14 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2019); The Perfect Storm (NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, 2017); Format Photo Festival (Derby, UK, 2017); the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Tirana, 2017); as well as the parallel program of the Istanbul Biennale (2017). Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala and a co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Athens.
Eliza Soroga is a Greek artist working across forms and artistic languages within Contemporary Art Practice as an attempt to explore the dialogue between everyday life and performance. She holds an MA in Performance Making (Goldsmiths University of London) and an MA in Cultural Theory (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). She was named Overall Winner in Performance & Video Art during the 11th International Arte Laguna Prize competition (Venice, 2017). Her work has been commissioned by the Athens & Epidaurus Festival (2018), the City of Athens (2019) and Arts Council England (2013-2017). Her works have been showcased at Victoria & Albert Museum, Battersea Arts Centre, The Yard Theatre, and Rich Mix in London; Forum des images and Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France; EYE Film Institute and social centre OT301 in Amsterdam; TANZRAUSCHEN Wuppertal Festival in Germany, and many more. Eliza works is a visiting lecturer teaching architecture and design in undergraduate programmes offered by Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London); University of East London; and Middle East Technical University (Ankara).
After completing her architectural studies in Greece, Maria Tsilogianni received an MA in Design Critical Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London (2017). Her multidisciplinary practice moves between critical theory, speculative design and future studies. Using mixed media, she experiments with mechanisms and structures that invade domestic environments and disrupt everyday performativity in order to reinvent alternative interactions between humans and the built environment. She has been an artist-in-residence at Affect-Agora (Berlin, 2015) and her work has been published and presented at international conferences and group exhibitions, including: Cook 8, Benaki Museum (Athens, 2018); London Design Festival, (2017); Mittelweg, Mittelweg 50 (Berlin, 2015); Default 5//Long time no sea, Tsalapata Museum (Volos, 2015), 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Architecture, 2012. She recently co-founded studio MIWI –a speculative design practice based in Athens and San Francisco that explores future scenarios through the design of immersive experiences as well as digital and spatial narratives. Studio MIWI’s work has been awarded, published and exhibited internationally in the context of the following exhibitions and competitions: 1st prize and Vitra Design Museum Award Dancing. Alternative designs for clubs, Non Architecture Competitions, 2018; Aesthetics of Prosthetics, Pratt Institute, 2019; Honourable Mention at the Fairy Tales 2020 competition, organised by the online platform Blank Space Project. She is currently active in the field of Collectible Design, working on the production of avant-garde objects and spatial structures.
Eleni Bagaki is a visual artist holding a Master’s in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. In her practice, she investigates the autobiographical narrative and its relation to fiction and theory. Drawing inspiration from feminist perspectives in the fields of cinema and literature, her works emerge as stories, poems, films, songs, sculptures, or something else. She has been an artist-in-residence at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2020); Fogo Island Arts, Fogo Island (2019); Iaspis, Stockholm (2018–2019); Pivô, Sao Paulo (2018, supported by a Pivô artist grant); and at Kantor Foundation, Krakow (2017). In 2018 she presented her solo exhibition, A book, a film, and a soundtrack, at Radio Athènes, Αthens, with the support of the NEON Organisation for Culture and Development and the Outset Fund. Other solo exhibitions include: The importance of reading, writing, and exfoliating (2018, Palette Terre, Paris); Economy Class (2016-2017, Signal, Malmö); Now You See Me, Oh Now You Don’t (2015-2016, New Studio, London); Crack, Crack, Pop, Pop…oh what a relief it is! (2015, Radio Athènes, Athens). Selected group exhibitions include: Millennial Feminisms (2017, L’Inconnue, Montreal); The Equilibrists (2016, organized by the DESTE Foundation and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Benaki Museum, Athens); and Lustlands (2013, Family Business, New York).