Iria Vrettou is a Greek artist, born in 1995 and based in Athens. She holds a Diploma in Animation from the University of the Arts London and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice-Moving Image from the Royal College of Art, London. Her practice is primarily focused on concepts and modes of hybridity as methods of research and practice, whilst addressing aspects of hand-drawn animation in its relation to wider cinematic and performative practices. Her research engages with environmental and social issues, critically examining the function of the ‘screen’ in the context of cultural production and political processes, and explores the creation of art works that can work as disquieting, complete spatiotemporal experiences. Within this framework, in the last couple of years she has developed a keen interest in the real and symbolic life of volcanoes. She has participated in various art projects in Athens, London and Seoul. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Her artistic work pays tribute to what looks like a life outside of what we have been socialised to do over thousands of years of constructing civilisation — that is, living in group settlements. In solitude, her subjects look like renegades from an ancient historical cult, burdened with uncertainty and the vulnerability of their journey. Each one of them is blurred, camouflaged or non-existent. Their power lies in the intricacies of their dissimulation. The minute approach Gerasimou adopts results in images resembling an archeological excavation—slowly unfolding into breeding grounds for hypothetical scenarios. She was born in Greece in 1989. She studied photography at the Akto Art and Design College in Greece. She continued her studies at the International Centre of Photography in New York. Currently, she lived and works in Athens. For the past ten years she has been experimenting with different fields of photography, professional as well as artistic. She has participated in several group exhibitions held in Greece, Istanbul, New York and Italy. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Orestis Giannoulis (born in 1996) lives and works in Athens. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2021 and is currently a postgraduate student at the Dutch Art Institute. He uses written language, voice and performance to create physical and linguistic formations of collective expression and structures of action and contemplation, with fluid artistic outcomes. Orestis examines the interconnections of immaterial information with the material world and is particularly interested in exploring the ways through which language relates to physicality, identity and economy. Through his texts he experiments with literalism, generalization and the emotional surplus value of words. He focuses οn overidentification strategies and researches the capitalization and commercial malleability of emotion, as manifested in the production and circulation of public discourse, overused expressions and strategies of enunciation. The performative articulation of his texts investigates the limits between inhibition, eloquence, exposure and political engagement. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Pennie Key (Penelope Koliopoulou) is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Athens. Between 2010 and 2020 she lived in London, receiving an MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2016. For the period 2020-2021, she is a fellow of Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Holland). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). Her work is largely about power dynamics, sexuality, and gender. It’s usually intimate, intense, and personal. She has a make-do aesthetic and prefers to use cheap, democratic materials, such as adhesive tape and photocopies. Important part of her research engages with martial arts and various forms of sex work.
Virna Koutla is an architect and artist currently based in Athens. In 2014 she graduated from the School of Architecture at the National and Technical University of Athens and in 2017 she received an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2016, she joined the research group Informed Matters (University of the Arts London), where she focused on the materiality and performativity of spaces. Virna worked as a designer and artist in London and Lisbon, before moving to Athens to work on prestigious architectural and cultural projects. Her individual work has been presented at exhibitions and conferences across Europe, Japan and the US, and awarded internationally. Her research project ‘Square Mythologies’ was included in the volume Interior Futures (eds. Brooker, Harriss & Walker, Crucible Press: 2019). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Konstantina Krikzoni is a Greek, London-based artist. She hold an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. She studied painting at the School of Visual and Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2015); and mathematics at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the same university(2010). She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020) and of a NEON Organisation for Culture and Development scholarship (2020/21, 2021/22), while she has been shortlisted for a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship (2021). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). Her work has been exhibited in London (The ceiling with a tranquil eye, Cork St Galleries, 2021), in Entrevaux, France (Les danses nocturnes, curated by East Contemporary Gallery, Spread Museum Entrevaux, 2021), in Berlin (ELF – Schaufenster Gallery, 2020; L’artiste et les commissaires, Lage Egal Gallery, 2019; and All out, KWADRAT Gallery, 2019) and in Athens (2020 Rooms, Kappatos Gallery). Konstantina works primarily with oil on canvas, watercolor on paper and mixed media and explores themes of childhood, memory, feminism, trauma and sexuality. Her work is intuitive and responsive, a domain where bodily touch becomes an embroidered second skin engaging with a visceral form of visual storytelling, and tactility forms a visual language where painting, embroidery and symbolism coalesce and women reign.
Stefanos Levidis is a researcher and visual practitioner. He is a project coordinator at the research agency Forensic Architecture, where he oversees the agency’s work on borders and migration. His PhD dissertation, submitted at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, and titled Border Natures. The Environment as Weapon at the Edges of Greece, interrogates the entanglement of border defence strategies with the natural environment at the external borders of the EU, with a focus on the Greek case. He also holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, as well as a Master’s in Advanced Architecture from the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. As a member of Forensic Architecture he was part of the team nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, and has lectured and exhibited internationally. His own spatial and visual practice has also been presented and published internationally, and his investigative research has been submitted to courts in support of human rights cases. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Lydia Miligkou (b.1995) is a visual artist based in Athens. She holds an integrated Μaster’s degree from the Department of Fine Arts of the Athens School of Fine Arts.
Οne central question in her work is whether it is still possible to disengage ourselves from the dominant narratives that shape our desires and our decisions, both in the personal and in the political sphere. She mainly works with installations, textiles, writing, sculpture and video, all of which she employs to create poetic instances designed to fight back against the disenchantment of the world. She has participated in group exhibitions and festivals in Greece and abroad and presented her work at Athens & Epidaurus festival (Athens); European Cultural Centre of Delphi; Benaki Museum (Athens); Witch Rave Festival, Berlin; and 11th Sonic Arts Festival, Corfu, among others. Her poems have appeared in Teflon magazine and have been presented at poetry slam events (Atopos CVC). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Since 2018 she has been working in the art direction department of several Greek and international film productions.
Stamos Michael is a self-taught artist and designer based in Athens. Ηe studied sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and has worked in various creative fields, focusing on architecture and applied arts. In 2016 he founded GRACE, an independent cultural platform which occupied an abandoned neoclassical hotel in Athens, aiming to reclaim the hotel’s empty space and reintegrate it back into the active landscape of the city as a place for cultural development and creative interaction. In Michaels’ work, specific qualities commonly attributed to physical space (open or closed, available or occupied) are combined with actions such as intervention, reconstruction or abandonment to set up a sociological methodology for perceiving reality. While processing a system for understanding and dealing with reality which resonates with practices widely used in social studies and critical architecture, Michael appropriates both the notion and the means of architecture in order to express ideas related to the management of physical space. Through a multidisciplinary practice bringing together architectural design, functional art, digital media and textual landscape analysis, Michael aims to establish a new sense of architecture which seeks to force itself through a space that is, for the most part, taken. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Eleni Papazoglou (b.1993, Athens) lives and works in London, UK. She studied visual communication at Camberwell College of Art (2015) and moving image at the Royal College of Art (2018). She uses instruction-led processes to observe systematised collective experiences in the contexts of sport, work and play. With a multidisciplinary practice, Eleni’s output ranges from moving image and performance, to artist books and collage. nRecent group exhibitions include Squeezebox at Collective Ending, (London, 2021) and Working Progress at the South London Gallery (London, 2020), while she was part of the Unrealisable residency programme at Arebyte Studios (London, 2020). She has been awarded the SET Studio Award (London, 2020-21); selected for the group residency Peer Forum 2020 hosted by Camden Arts Center (London, 2020-21); and is the artist-in-residence for this year’s Supersmashers (South London Gallery, 2020-2021), a weekly art session for young people in foster care. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). Eleni lectures on Illustration and Visual Media at the London College of Communication, London University of the Arts.
Danae Io is an artist living and working in Athens and Rotterdam. Through video, sound, and text, her work addresses various methods through which language becomes actively involved in systematizing and codifying sociopolitical infrastructures. She holds a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Institute of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and has previously studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founder of the research project System of Systems and co-organises the research initiative Schemas of Uncertainty. Her writing has been published by Sternberg Press (Berlin), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal) and Contra Journal. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstverein (Amsterdam); Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam); Sub Rosa Space (Athens); Grace (Athens); Stroom Den Haag (The Hague); Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose (Amsterdam); Display (Prague); and SESI-SP gallery of Art (São Paulo), among others. She is a tutor at the Critical Inquiry Lab Master’s programme of the Design Academy Eindhoven. She has collaborated with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Greece; the Arts Catalyst organization in London; the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam; the State of Concept contemporary art institution in Athens; and the bookshop San Serriffe in Amsterdam, among others. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Anastasia Perahia Dede (b.1995, USA) is a visual artist using a variety of media, including moving image, installation, sound, mixed media and text. She holds a BA from Central Saint Martins and an MA from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL, University of London). Her work reflects an interest in language and its ability to obfuscate meanings, and in the way in which the notion of a psyche can be explored through landscapes and our wider consumption of space. In her video work and installation Landscapes of Ladino (2019), she explored this nexus between language and landscape through an examination of the near-disappearance of the Judaeo-Spanish community in Greece. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Nana Seferli (b.1989) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences of the University of Ioannina and continued her studies with a postgraduate degree from École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne in Quimper, France. She has presented her work at festivals and art venues in Greece and abroad. Selected group exhibitions include: Imago Mundi in Venice in 2015; PEINDRE # 2 in MICA Gallery, Rennes (France, 2014); 7> 5 in Quimper (2013); Thrills and Chills at CAN Eleni Androulidaki Gallery (Athens, 2013); and Kodra Fresh 2013 Floating Walls, part of the Action Field Kodra festival held annually in Thessaloniki (Greece, 2013). Together with Lucie Ferezou, she has co-curated and participated in the duo show Under the Luna, presented in Booze Cooperativa (Athens, 2018); and with Akis Karanos in the duo show The Way the Dog Ran Away, held at Galaxias municipal cultural centre in Nea Smyrni, Attica (Greece, 2016). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). Between 2014 and 2020 she worked as an art teacher in special and general education.
Kyvèli Zoi Stenou (b.1993 in Athens, Greece) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Athens, Greece. She completed her BFA at the School of Visual Arts New York City (USA, 2016), after attending classes at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 2014) and Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design (London, 2011-12). Her work features in many private collections across the globe, and her collaborations include projects for the National Theatre of Greece, the Michael Cacoyannis’ Foundation, SVA Theatre in New York and for the film director George Panoussopoulos. She has held four solo shows and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York City, London and Athens, the most recent being: El que Busca Encuentra, y Sigue Encontrando, a group show curated by Daniel Baez for White Columns gallery (New York); Art on Boards | The Skate Project at Zoumboulakis Gallery (Athens); and Peirao, the inaugural group exhibition of KYAN Projects, a new project space she founded herself in June 2021. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Sotiris Tsiganos (1992) is a visual artist and filmmaker, based in Athens. He studied at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia. His practice mainly involves research-based projects, mixing fieldwork and moving image with a focus on social and ecological injustice. He is part of the artist duo Latent Community (with Ionian Bisai). Producing work in the age of augmented realities, Latent Community weaves together participatory strategies and performative sequences which result in hybrid film productions remixing documentary, fiction and archive. Their work has been presented internationally in various exhibitions and festivals, including: Athens Biennale (2017); documenta 14 – Public Programs (2017); Sharjah Film Platform – Sharjah Art Foundation (2019); Recontemporary art space in Turin (2019); Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (2020); PCAI – Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative (2020); School of Waters – Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale (2021); and 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022): rīvus. They have been granted awards by LOOP Barcelona and Sharjah Art Foundation and have participated in the residency programmes ONASSIS AiR 2021: The School of Infinite Rehearsals; and Caravan Residency Program (Bozar Palais des Beaux-Arts/Fondazione Pistoletto). He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Eleni Tomadaki is a visual artist based between London & Athens. Working interdisciplinary across moving image, installation, performance, text and digital media, she invents non-linear storytelling narratives to interrogate one’s relationship to the Other. She is interested in the multiple forms this Other can take, such as language, society, the law, one’s own self, or simply of another. Through examining these relationships, she explores themes around the trouble of identity, resistance and belonging/ not belonging. The distorted use of language in her work abdicates its legitimacy as a definite symbol.
She is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, and one of the 6 commissioned writers for Open Space’s 2021 edition of Writing Space. She has shown work in the UK at Tate St Ives, Gasworks, South London Gallery, Assembly Point, HOAX Publication; and internationally at the Institute of Fine Arts Toulouse, Uppsala Konst Museum, Megaron Athens International Conference Centre, The Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, amongst others. Her work has also taken part in international film festivals including the Oscar-qualifying 37th Cinanima International Animation Festival and the 56th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and has received a Student Award from the 15th Melbourne International Animation Festival and the 6th Animasyros International Animation Festival. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
They hold an MPhil in Psychology (University of Cambridge, UK) and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London, University of London and National Institute of Mental Health, US). They have presented video-art performances and visual narratives in Greece, Cyprus, UK, and Berlin. On May 2021, they took part in Exchange Program Thessaloniki – Leipzig 2021, a two-month residency programme in Leipzig, where they created poems following discussions with local queer refugees/immigrants. They have a strong social media presence, publishing original and translated poems as video poems on YouTube (channel: Sam Albatros) and on their website: https://queerpoets.com. Their first novel, faulty boy is expected to be published in 2021, while their translation of Richard Siken’s poetry book Crush will be published in 2022-2023. They have been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Aggelos Barai is a photographer. He was born in Fieri, Albania (1994) and in 1998 he migrated with his family to Greece, where he grew up. He has studied photography and art history in Athens. His work focuses mainly on social issues, such as human rights and migration movements in the Balkans. He has been awarded several prizes in Greece and abroad, including from the Educational Foundation of the Journalists’ Union of Macedonia & Thrace Daily Newspapers and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). He is a member of the Foreign Press Association of Greece and a brand ambassador for FujiFilm in Greece. Since 2012 he has been working as a freelance photographer, collaborating with non-governmental organisations as well as with Greek and international newspapers and magazines. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Georges Jacotey (b. 1987) is a performance and digital media artist with a film and theatre background. In his practice, he approaches issues of queer representation and the unrelenting cultural hegemony of the West. He has exhibited his work in international festivals and biennales, such as 3hd Festival (Berlin), Manifesta 11 (Zürich), Critical Hedonism (Barcelona), NU Performance Festival (Tallinn), Antagon (Helsinki) and dgtl fmnsm (Dresden); and in the context of exhibitions and screenings in numerous institutions and art spaces, including: Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo, NY), La Capella (Barcelona), Festspielhaus Hellerau (Hellerau, Germany), Pleasure Dome (Toronto), Athens Museum of Queer Arts (Athens), etc. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).
Ι live and work in Athens and I am a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts (2015-2020). The last years I have been particularly interested in developing alternative ways of spatial perception through projections and sculptural installations, as well as in the creation of optical illusions. I have participated in exhibitions such as Genius loci: the spirit of the place, at the Tryfon Art Residency (Lesvos, 2016); Blank-shiny at the Numismatic Museum (2019); and the Tempo Forte Italy-Greece 2019 initiative, in the context of which my work was exhibited in the Garden of Sculptures, housed in the Embassy of Italy in Athens. Ι have also participated in the stage design of the poetic-performative event held for the launch of the zine Koreni in Romatzo (Athens, 2018). I recently took part in the Inspire Project initiative of MOMus – Experimental Centre for the Arts, culminating in the exhibition DOMA – From Plato’s cave to modern ‘reality’. I am currently attending the Future Art Education (FAE) workshop of LAB12 at the Athens School of Fine Arts. I have also been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).