Johnna Sachpazis is a visual artist from Athens living and working in London. They graduated with distinction from the MA Fine Arts at Camberwell College of Arts (University of the Arts London), and hold a BA in Photography from Middlesex University, London. Drawing from their experiences as a non-binary person, they seek to explore the materiality and becoming of the queer and trans body, through concepts such as trauma, embodied memory and post-humanism. They work between photography, sculpture and painting, creating post-Frankenstein figures based on the work of Susan Stryker. Using the monster as a metaphor for the trans experience, their artworks aim to highlight and transform the marginalized affective discomfort gender-queer people often experience within normative patriarchal environments. The “monstrous” – as an ode to the monster – becomes a tool of resistance against social norms that reproduce bodily identities according to agelong dichotomies. Their work has been presented in group exhibitions held in various art spaces in London, including: the Saatchi Gallery, South London Gallery, Webber Gallery and Copeland Gallery. In Greece, they have exhibited their work at Space52 (online, 2020), a.antonopoulou.art gallery (Athens, 2019) and MOMus – Experimental Center for the Arts (Thessaloniki, 2019). In April 2021, the Culture magazine of The Sunday Times included them in a list of “12 future stars of the art world you need to know about”. They have been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Antrea Tzourovits has completed his undergraduate studies in sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts and holds a postgraduate degree from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL, University of London). In his practice, he uses a wide range of expressive media and materials, including sculpture, painting, installation, video, and music. He adopts familiar materials and popular symbols in order to create imagery that resonates with the viewer, focusing particularly on the poetic-philosophical of objects and situations. The poetic narrative style he has developed allows him to explore the ambiguities of life with the aim of generating metaphorical content from his own, personal experiences. From an early age, he has held various jobs, including as a playground manufacturer and luthier. In 2020, he presented his first solo exhibition entitled APORIA at Kalfayan Galleries in Athens. He has received a postgraduate studies scholarship from the NEON Organization for Culture and Development. In 2022, he received The Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize and the UCL East Provost Art Prize. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
Irene Ragusini was born in 1988 near lake Garda in Italy and grew up in Athens. She holds a BFA and an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts, a Master’s in Visual Arts from the LUCA School of Arts in Belgium and has completed an artist book training at Grafikskolan school in Stockholm. Using movement as her point of reference, both literally as well as metaphorically, her works are mainly concerned with the notions of identity and belonging. People, materials and localities evolving and intertwining through a process of perpetual displacement form the basis of her research. In 2021, her work was selected to represent Greece at the Bornholm Biennial for Contemporary Glass and Ceramics in Denmark. She has been awarded a mobility grant through the EU program i-Portunus for her project The Archipelago of Shards and has participated in various exhibitions held in Greece and abroad. In October 2020, she founded her own artist-run space in Koukaki, the KOREN process space. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Louiza Ntourou is an artist-filmmaker based in Athens. She studied Political Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and continued with postgraduate studies in visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London; and in experimental film at Kingston University London. Her videos explore the paradox and unexpected facets of reality and reflect on the different ways of seeing ordinary objects of everyday life. For the last three years, she has been working on a series of films entitled The Moment as an Eternity, in which she experiments with the Haiku poetic form and its application on the moving image. The first two videos of the series, To G.K and The Light is Dark Enough (2018), have been presented in various film festivals across the UK, while the video Once Upon a time, a time that never was and always is (2019) was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and presented at Leeds Art Gallery (09/19-11/19) and South London Gallery (12/19-02/20). The film was also selected for the Winter Light exhibition at Hayward Gallery in London (12/20-03/21) and for the performance program of Art Athina Virtual (2021). Her latest artist film, Radio Silence (2019), was commissioned by the BBC New Creatives and presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2020 as well as in London Short Film Festival (2021). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Natalia Manta is a visual artist living and working in Athens. She studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA, 2011 – 2017), where she also completed her Master’s in Fine Arts. She employs different materials such as metal, clay, light-sensitive chemicals and video projections. She collaborates and interacts with artists from a wide range of artistic disciplines —visual, music, theatre or performance artists. In the period 2017-2020, she taught sculpture at the ASFA. Her work has been exhibited both in Greece and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, among others: Handmade: On the Social Dimension of Craft, presented at Art Space Pythagorion on Samos island under the initiative of the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Schwarz Foundation (2022); RESTART, Korean International Ceramic Biennale (2021)· Limitless Limits, Larnaca Biennale, Cyprus (2021)· Surreal Salon 13, Baton Rouge Gallery, USA (2020)· What is REAL, The Real House, New York (2021); Apotropaion, presented at 16 Fokionos Negri exhibition space in Athens with the support of The Sotiris Fellios Collection, (2021); ANEW, KOREN process space, Athens (2021); Ki-nimata, Bouboulina Museum, Spetses island (2021); Gender Melancholia, The Project Gallery, Athens, (2021); Deadala, The Mosque Kioutsouk Hassan- Giali Tzamisi, Chania, Crete (2021); The machine in the Ghost, Talc Studio, Athens (2021); and PPC meets art, Public Power Corporation historic factory, Athens (2021). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Dimitris Siokis (b. 1990) is a photographer and visual artist based in Antwerp. He holds an MFA in photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (2022) and has studied architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2015). In his work, he seeks new methods of approaching the familiar. He is principally interested in depicting how everyday events are transformed into patterns that mark the surface of our social structures as well as the mutual dependencies these structures give rise to. Balancing between the personal and the universal, between reality and its performance, his work explores the common elements cutting across our individual lives. Central to his artistic thinking is the concept of uncertainty, as a means of approaching the different facets of truth. In his practice, he uses incorporation of improvisations and collaborative processes as a means of overturning hierarchies and calling for a new approach in photography. In 2022, he received the Roger de Conynck award (Belgium). He has been awarded by ARTWORKS (2022) and is a Fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Support Program.
Alexandre Collet is an artist and scholar living between Greece and France. He is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and of the Visual Studies and Art History department of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He worked as an assistant for documenta 14 and has worked with various institutions, for example the National History of Art Institute (INHA) in France. He has exhibited his work at K-Gold Temporary Gallery in Athens and at the art space Locus Athens, and has collaborated, among others, with brook editions in Paris and with l’Annexe. With photography, video, research an observation as his main media, he moves far from the city, the clubs, the bars and the people and closer to dogs, cats and pigeons, in an effort to find different ways of defining relationships, love and sexuality. These families and kinships transcending the logic of the human/animal-pet binary are at the center of his work. He is particularly interested in the way in which the body can constantly reinvent itself together the dog, the pigeon, and all its other companions. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Despοina Pagiota was born in Thessaloniki in 1994 and is a visual artist based in Hamburg. She holds a BFA (2019) and an MFA (2021) from the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), while part of her studies was completed at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts through the Erasmus student exchange program. In 2020, she was awarded a young artist grant from the art foundation Kunststiftung Christa und Nikolaus Schües. In 2021, she was selected for the NEUSTART KULTUR kickstarter grant for young graduates. In 2022, she received a grant from the cultural foundation Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Stormarn and is currently participating in the “Kunststipendium in der Trittauer Wassermühle” residency program. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, and is part of international private collections. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Alex Karantanas is a mixed-media artist, based in Athens, Greece. He holds a BA in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens and an MFA in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. His work is mainly concerned with questions of gender, desire and the body, all of which are viewed through the lens of post-humanism and cyberculture. His artistic practice develops through music performances in exhibitions and events, multi-media installations and video-art projections, all of which he combines to model immersive environments. His work has been exhibited in various exhibitions, festivals and events around the world, including: Whole United Queer Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival (Ferropolis open-air museum, Germany), Performance Rooms 2020 (organized by Kappatos Gallery in collaboration with Pantheon non-profit organization and held at St George Lycabettus hotel, Athens), Peloponnisos International Documentary Festival, Southern Sweden Design Days festival (Malmö), Krama Festival (Athens), Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival (Greece), and Athens Biennale. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Ioli Kavakou (b. 1993) is a visual artist and writer based in Athens. She holds a BA in Art History and Theory from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2016) and a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University London (2020). Working mainly with new media and text, her work engages with the conversation regarding knowledge production and its relation to fiction, feminisms and the philosophy of science. Her work has been shown in exhibitions in Greece and abroad (Art Night festival, London, UK; and Lenbachhaus museum, Germany, among others). She has participated in a number of research programs including Future Climates (State of Concept, 2016) and contributed to publication projects such as Animal of the State, Fiction Through Reality (HMV-books: Μunich, 2016); and Water Seeks its Own Level (2022), published by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in collaboration with the art space Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. She is currently completing her MA Art Praxis at the DAI. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
Vasilis Galanis (b. 1994) lives and works in Athens. He studied at the School of Visual and Applied Arts of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2012-2017) and holds an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2019-2021). In 2016-2017, he attended classes at the Instituto Politecnico de Lisboa in Portugal. His artistic research tackles issues related to ecology, destruction and mass culture. His work has been presented in group shows held in various cities across Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, etc.) as well as at Cabane Art Space in Athens (pre- or post- (who cares?), solo show) and in Pikap Kato art space in Thessaloniki (kato – Dystopias, duo show). In December 2021, he participated in a residency held in Luxor, Egypt. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis (b. 1996, London) is an artist and writer. His artworks have been exhibited in the UK (My Degree Show, Children of Unhappiness 2020; and Someone Else’s, Incest School 2020), and in Cyprus (Spritz Palace, Thkio Ppalies, 2018). His writing has been published in Hobart Pulp magazine (Toilet Story, 2022) and in Passe-Avant (Relocations, 2022). He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Myrto Vratsanou (Athens, 1994) is a visual artist based in Athens and Cologne. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Sandberg Institute of the Gerritt Rietveld Academy, as well as the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) on a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation. She has been awarded a Kickstarter Grant from the Kunstfonds Foundation and her work is part of the National Bank of Greece collection. Her practice revolves around the haunted, sensual aspects of digital and material spaces. Employing metaphors by creating objects, drawings, writing and films, she explores material histories, fictions and traditions. She has participated in exhibitions, screenings and festivals held in various venues and institutions, among others: Weltkunszimmer in Dusseldorf, Temporary Gallery Cologne, Meinblau Projektraum gallery in Berlin, Neverneverland foundation in Amsterdam, Chisenhale Gallery London, Athens Digital Arts Festival, One Minute Space and a.antonopoulou. art galleries in Athens, Benaki Museum and the Thessaloniki Centre of Contemporary Art. She was a member of the artistic initiative Circuits+Currents and of the documenta 14 chorus. She has taken part in collective, educational projects and residencies, for example the programs Spaces Of Reflection, part of the 10th Berlin Biennale and “Experimental Education Protocol II” held in Delphi and on the island of Nissyros. She has developed a long-standing, collaborative practice with Anouk Asselineau, under the name Asselineau/Vratsanou. Her writing and drawings have been featured in Dating the Chorus II (independent publication); the KURZE 3 anthology (Cologne: KHM, 2022); FDBNHLLLTTFHORROR (London: Sticky Fingers, 2021) and Daisyworld Magazine. In 2022 her first individual publication was published by Dolce Publications. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Christina-Shelagh Mongelli (b. Athens, 1991) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator of Greek-British-Italian descent. Her practice privileges time-based media such as sound, performance, and video. Her research aspires to narrate new mythologies showcasing contemporary political, social and environmental concerns and negotiates the vibrations and distortions forming on the lacuna left open by the dichotomies dissonance/euphony, fiction/reality and machine/organic matter. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; a Master’s of Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL, University of London) and a Post Graduate Certificate in Education from Kingston University. Her recent work has been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, the radio stations BBC Radio 6 and Resonance FM, as well as Milton Keynes Gallery. In addition, she has collaborated with the Athens-based collective Medea Electronique. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Nicole Economides (b.1992) is an artist and independent curator based in Athens and New York. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York (2019) and a BFA from the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina (2016). She has also studied under an Erasmus scholarship at the Université Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis in Paris (2016). Her practice explores the notions of heterotopic spaces and migration mainly through painting installations. Through nostalgic symbols and imagery, she interrogates the expressions of national and personal identity memory, which she views as different ways of dealing with the notion of the monumental (μνημειακός/mnemiakos in Greek – which translates as monumental but also as memorial). Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and festivals in Greece, Berlin, Paris and New York. In 2018, together with Puerto Rican artist Natalia Almonte she founded Paradoxluxe, a collective that critically engages with the reductive representations of Greece and Puerto Rico via a range of media, including video, photography, sculpture, and curation. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
Eva Anerrapsi (b. 1992) is a visual artist and graphic designer from Athens. She studied graphic design at Vakalo Art & Design College and visual arts at the Athens School οf Fine Arts. Using both analogue and digital media, she seeks to describe the qualities, textures and visual relationships resulting from individual gestures. A key concern of her practice is to offer an exploration of contemporary erotic speech. Through photographic recordings, poetic writings, mixed-media drawings and narrative films, she attempts to capture lyrical landscapes which create abstract, associative narratives and explore the limits between the written word and the conditions under which it came to be. The image and the narrative are at times in harmony, at others in dissonance with each other, therefore staging a conversation reminiscent of the contrast between the non-regulated dreaminess of erotic expectation and the tangible randomness of everyday reality. In her practice, the parallel exploration of the digital and the analogue, the visible and the non-visible, the casual and the intentional, provide the means to reflect on current aesthetics and on the shifting means of communication. In June 2022, she held her first solo exhibition at Closing Soon, an artist-run space in Athens. She has participated in exhibitions in Greece, and her work has been featured in publications, photographic albums and film festivals in Europe and New York. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
Naya Magaliou is a visual artist based in Athens, Greece. She received her Fine Art BA from the University of Dundee, Scotland, in 2016 and holds a postgraduate diploma in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Arts (ViCCA) from Aalto University, Finland, where she studied under a scholarship from NEON Organization for Culture and Development. As a transdisciplinary practitioner, she moves smoothly between media, with this mobility of form lying at the heart of her practice. She works with print, installation, painting, typography, digital video and writing. Currently, she is researching and thinking about creative labour practices, working conditions and process-driven thinking, focusing especially on the impact these issues have on artworkers and the art sector. She has exhibited her work in Greece, Estonia, Finland, Austria and Scotland. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Markellos Kolofotias is a visual artist based in Athens. He holds an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts and a Diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the School of Visual and Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. As a postgraduate student, he attended classes at the San Carlos Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain, on an Erasmus scholarship awarded by the State Scholarships Foundation in Greece. His artistic practice unravels as a continuous dialogue with the ₒ-ᵒ “scheme”, the principal and unique source from which his works emanate. Through this dialectic, he explores the encounter of the artist with the artwork, as well as the relation and interactions developing between them. His work has been presented in group exhibitions (If you were food, what food would you be?, Communitism, Athens; Stasis in Practice, 7th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and MOMus – Museum of Alex Mylona; Beyond all Confines, Flu Gallery (Belgrade); Kodra Fresh: Mind the Gap, Action Field Kodra, Thessaloniki; Inspire 2013, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, etc.) and has been distinguished at the 8th Biennale of Fine Arts Students in Greece. Ηe has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Danai Kriki (b. 1992) lives and works in Athens. She is a graduate of the Fine Arts Department of the Athens School of Fine Arts and is currently a postgraduate student at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Her practice explores the design and poetic dynamics of everyday language, and the way in which these can create affective environments. Within these affective worlds, she maps contemporary everyday life as a present in constant crisis, where the subject becomes attached to post-war narratives and collective fantasies of a “good life”. By focusing on the production of unfulfilled desires as they unfold in the realm of love —desire for love, for excitement, for intimacy that lasts, for security— and the gendered implications of the resulting correlations, she seeks to capture the complexities of the social and cultural reproduction of millennials. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).
Ismene King (b. 1993) is a sculptress and ceramist based in Athens. She is a graduate of the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (2014) and holds an MFA in sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL, University of London, 2017), where she was also awarded the Jeanne Szego travel scholarship. Through her practice, she explores emotion and embodiment as a methodology for creating work responding to her surroundings and to subjective as well as collective experiences, such as mourning, trauma, femininity, eroticism and relatedness perceived as potent, active conditions. Finding ways to translate these conditions into sculptural terms is a key element of her work. Parallel to, and as integral part of her individual practice, she has established a long-standing collaboration with the visual artist Ileana Arnaoutou, which is mainly geared towards developing an embodied and sympoietic sculptural approach and exploring subjectivity as a means of relating to others. Selected exhibitions include: True Love Leaves No Traces, Galerist, Istanbul (2022); Encounters in wreath-knot-chain formations, solo exhibition, The Breeder Gallery, Athens (2021); (dis)placement, shown at Off-Quay in London and at Jacaranda in Rio de Janeiro (2017); and Backwards+Forwards, Casa Dona Laura, Lisbon (2016). She has also curated group exhibitions, including APOTROPAION, which was presented at 16 Fokionos Negri exhibition space in Athens with the support of The Sotiris Fellios Collection. She is the founder of Karis Studio, a sculpture workshop in the Neos Kosmos borough of Athens, where she works at promoting the exploration of various facets of creativity and material experimentation. In 2022, she received the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.