Myrto Xanthopoulou was born in Helsinki in 1981. She lives and works in Athens. She studied fine arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and art history at Deree – The American College of Athens. Her practice is characterized by the use of everyday materials, handicraft and text. Her work consists of installations, sculptures and drawings, which attempt to articulate a poetic of the ordinary and the intimate, the unbearable and the silly. In 2020 she presented her fourth solo show in Athens, titled ΜΠΟΥΦΑΝ, and she has participated in various exhibitions in Greece and abroad, at museums, galleries and independent art spaces.
Konstantinos Pettas (b. 1988, Patras) studied Fine Arts and Art Sciences at the University of Ioannina (2011) and has completed his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London (MA Sculpture, 2015) undera Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation scholarship. His practice explores the structures of existence and production within the context of an economy in constant flux. His engagement with the psychological, emotional and political charge of materials and space seeks to maintain the universal human experience through the coexistence of sculpture, video-performance and photography. Recently, his research is focusing increasingly on the critique of the idea of free time, the binary of labour and leisure and especially the idea of the artist’s displaced labour. His work has been presented in group shows, like the 15th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Thessaloniki/Rome) and venues such as: Camden Art Centre (London), 3 137 (Athens), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai) and Chalton Gallery (London).
Dimitris Zampopoulos is an architect raised in Athens, in the shadow of ruins both ancient and modern. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (2017) and at the National School of Architecture Paris LaVillette (ENSAPL, 2015). His work delves into issues and themes related to monuments, the handling of symbols and identity-building, exploring the ways in which these elements interact with each other but also with various forms of power and political or economic order. In the last years, he has participated in a number of exhibitions in Athens and collaborated with brands, architecture studios and art organisations (KORRES natural products, BLP architects, Athens Biennale, etc.).
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’.
Stratis Chatzielenoudas lives and works in Athens as a scriptwriter and film-director. His short films have been presented in many international film festivals. He is an alumnus of the programmes for emerging directors Sarajevo Talents and IDFAcademy. His debut feature documentary Back to the top won the Audience Award and the ERT Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and has screened in many international film festivals (Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Tirana International Film Festival, Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, BOSIFEST International Film Festival). He is currently developing his first feature fiction film and his second feature documentary film.
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.
Dafin Antoniadou is a freelance choreographer, performer and dancer. In 2016, she graduated first in her class from the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT). She also holds a degree from the Department of Physiotherapy of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens (2014). In 2017 she created her first choreographic work, Matter, in collaboration with composer Constantine Skourlis and artist Stathis Doganis, which premiered at Beton7 Centre for the Arts in Athens. In 2018 she presented Fos in the context of Onassis Cultural Centre’s Borderline Festival, another fruit of her collaboration with Constantine Skourlis. Furthermore, she worked with Rafika Chawise on the multidimensional performance/ installation AnimaCaptus – Troades, which was presented at the Benaki Museum in Athens. The project was supported by the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) and the NEON Organisation for Culture and Development. In 2019 she performed in Efi Birba’s performance piece Don Quixote, 2nd Book, chapter 23 and choreographed Rafika Chawise’s Europeana, produced jointly by the Greek National Opera, Ibsen Awards and Lineculture. In 2020, her new choreographic work Vanishing Point premiered at Onassis Cultural Centre’s New Choreographers Festival 7. The work is the result of her collaboration with dancer and choreographer Alexandros Vardaksoglou. On the same year, she played in Yorgos Zois short film Touch Me.
Natasha Sarantopoulou graduated from the Greek National School of Dance in Athens (KSOT 2009-2012). As a performer, she has collaborated with a number of directors and choreographers (Kostas Fillipoglou, Apostolia Papadamaki, Nikos Mastorakis, Sofia Spyratou, Chet Walker, Default Company, Themis Moumoulidis, Dimitris Mylonas and Stathis Athanasiou), performing in various theaters and events across Greece (Athens and Epidaurus Festival, National Opera of Greece, Sani Festival and Badminton theatre, among others). As a movement director, she has worked in theatrical performances presented in venues such as the National Theater of Greece, Municipal Theater of Piraeus, Neos Kosmos Theater, etc. Together with Ioanna Antonarou, they created their choreographic pieces Walk Lola Walk and It’ s Better in the Bahamas. The staging of the latter piece was funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture.
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).
Kelly Tsipni-Kolaza is an independent curator and producer based in Athens, Greece. Between 2012 and 2015 she held curatorial positions in public art institutions in London such as the Serpentine Galleries, The Architecture Foundation and the Contemporary Art Society. In 2016-2017, Tsipni-Kolaza worked as a Curatorial Assistant for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. Between 2018 and 2020 she was the Exhibition Manager of the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art and the Associate Curator for Art Night in London, UK. Curatorial projects include: Orange Trees that Talk, a mediated performance by Cooking Sections held at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (2015); Sonic Revolutions: Vibrations from the Levant, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016); Litany for Amplified Voices, in the context of SKG Bridges Festival, Thessaloniki (2019). In 2018, she co-founded “miss dialectic”, an art operator that aims to support artistic and curatorial research with a strong focus on education and the production of new work through interdisciplinary collaborations. In 2015 she received the Forecast Platform Curatorial Award.
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.
Born in 1985, he studied documentary film in London and graduated with distinction from Brunel University London in 2012. He works in film, television and art projects, as a director, assistant director, cinematographer and editor. He has collaborated with institutions, museums, festivals, production companies and television stations in Greece and abroad (Greek National Opera – Stavros Niarchos Foundation, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Onassis Foundation, Sadler’s Wells, Benaki Museum, the Venice Biennale, Ibsen Awards Festival, London Review of Books, BBC, CNN, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, etc.). His films are rooted in the art of documentary and avant-garde cinema and have been screened at international festivals and online platforms (International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, La Nuu Phtography Festival in Barcelona, thespace.org (BBC), greatbigstory.com (CNN ), etc.)
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).