Maria Louizou is a Greek sculptor born and based in Athens. The main body of her work consists of sculptural installations embedded with vocal compositions she creates herself. She studied sculpture at the Athens School οf Fine Arts (ASFA) and theory of music (classical and electronic) in the Athens Conservatoire. In 2019, her work was presented in New York, as part of the annual benefit exhibition Tabula Rasa running under the artistic direction of Robert Wilson’s; as well as in Beijing, where she was awarded the prize China Taiyuan International Youth Metal Sculpture 2018. She has also shown work as part of the Theorimata exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST). She participated in the Summer Residency of the Watermill Center in New York, under donations from collectors Cornelia Long and Franz Wassmer. In 2019, Sinestetica gallery in Rome hosted her first solo show, 22°C.
Ilektra Maipa (born in 1989) is a visual artist based in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Painting at the Department of Visual & Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia and graduated with distinction. She continued her studies at the Manchester School of Art, Metropolitan University of Manchester (MΑ, Hons). Maipa works across a range of media, including drawings, digital collages, installations, performances for camera and text. Her work was has been presented at the Manchester Art Fair ( UK, 2019); House of Culture (Rethymno, 2016); K-Gold Gallery (Lesvos, 2016); Experimental Center for the Arts (Thessaloniki, 2014); Greek Culture Foundation (Berlin, 2013); Action Field Kodra (Thessaloniki, 2012) Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Thessaloniki, 2011). She has also worked with the Marina Abramovic Institute and the Benaki Museum. Since 2019 she has been collaborating with Yiannis Ziogas, Tim Brennan and Dave Griffiths on the International Residency Exchange programme Nomadic Itinerary between Prespa/Florina and Allenheads/Manchester. The programme enables students to participate in a unique nomadic experience and is part of the wider Visual March to Prespes network of walking and sound artists. It is hosted jointly by the Department of Visual and Applied Arts University of Western Macedonia and the Department of Art and Performance, Manchester School of Art.
Born in 1984, in Athens, Yorgos Maraziotis holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He has also studied Silkscreen at the School of Visual Arts New York City and holds a First-Class degree in Visual Arts from the Wolverhampton University. He uses various media, such as sculpture, installation and publications. His multidisciplinary practice focuses on conceptual processes that revisit past civilisations and attempt to translate them into today’s culture. He sculpturally intervenes in space and develops intimate, participatory situations that explore domesticity, question contemporary habitation and study the contrast between the real and the fictitious. Participants of his artworks are asked to shift their traditional viewpoint and think with their bodies. His artworks often take on elements of gestural narrative and attempt to combine diametrically opposed notions, such as the private/the public, pleasure/discontent or danger/safety. His work has been exhibited internationally, in galleries, art institutions and museums including, among others, the Marres – House for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht); AC Institute, (New York); Box Freiraum (Berlin); 7th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Greece); School of Visual Arts New York City; Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp; as well as the museums CICA (South Korea), Matadero (Madrid), Benaki (Athens), and Tinguely (Basel). He is a former resident artist at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Christos Xyrafakis was born in Agrinio in 1989. He is a graduate of the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT) in Athens and of the Department of Mathematics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. After gaining a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation for the period 2014-2015, he completed a postgraduate degree at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) and attended the educational programme Ex-In where, under the guidance of David Zambrano, he was taught the flying low and passing through techniques. Presently, he is part of the main cast for the show The Thread, choreographed by Russell Maliphant, while in the past he has collaborated with Jukstapoz, Claudio Bernardo, Konstantinos Rigos,the Hellenic Dance Company, Olatz de Andres and other dance practitioners. In 2017, he was part of the main cast for Alcestes, National Theatre of Greece production directed by Katerina Evangelatos. He has served as assistant choreographer to Jukstapoz, Roberto Olivan and Robert Clark, while in 2017 he interned at Dimitris’ Papaioannou production The Great Tamer. In 2018 he co-created, together with Andi Xhuma, the piece Ok, that’s you.., which showed during the New Choreographers Festival held at Onassis Stegi. He teaches contemporary dance at the Mari Hadjimichali professional dance school. In 2019 he was invited to teach at the Greek National School of Dance in Athens and at the Tirana Ballet Academy.
Alkistis Mavrokefalou (born in Athens, 1993) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (2014) from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford and her Master of Fine Arts (2017) from the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Her work is centred on the coexistence of frailty and durability observed in organic shreds found in nature (such as flower petals, exoskeletons, etc) and on the elliptical, illusory presence of these fragments within their surroundings. Her practice is an effort to communicate their elusive, elliptical essence through structures that play with the perception of depth and surface. She has taken part in several group shows, including, more recently: Matrix Akashic Fields Forever, Hydra School Projects (Greece, 2020); Coffins of Black, Coffins of Luck, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center (Athens, 2019); Kypselian Salon, Snehta Gallery and Residency (Athens, 2019); The shell, Space18 (Thessaloniki, 2019); An Earthly Matter, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center (Athens, 2018); Rooms18, Kappatos Gallery (Athens, 2018).
Irini Miga (b. Greece, lives and works between New York and Athens, Greece) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sculpture, installation, video, sound, text and everyday performativity.
Irini finds humble, anti-monumental gestures and giving value to the minor and otherwise neglected of immense importance. In her practice, she creates constellations of humble gestures that call for close examination. By examining the way in which we apprehend and perceive our surroundings, her work engages with the memory of place, starting from the point of origin and continuing all the way to the present. This impetus manifests itself in the form of reconstructions of sites and objects of personal and not only significance. She is particularly fascinated by the language of objects that surround our everyday reality; the dialogues and shifting relationships of axes such as physical space, form and utility, sculpture and painting.
Miga studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, London’s Central Saint Martins College, and received her Master in Fine Arts from Columbia University. Recent solo shows include: Reflections, at Atlanta Contemporary; Away in Another Way of Saying Here, at Essex Flowers gallery, in NY; An Interval at Flyweight Projects in NY; and group shows such as Room for Failure at Piero Atchugarry gallery in Miami; Tomorrow’s Dream, at Neuer Essener Kunstverein in Essen; Scraggly Beard Grandpa, at Capsule Shanghai, in China; The Best is the Least We Can Do, at Atlanta Contemporary; The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum in New York, the DESTE Foundation and shown in the Benaki Museum in Athens. Miga has been honored residencies by several organizations including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Workspace Program; the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Residency Program; The Fountainhead Residency; and The Watermill Center. Her work belongs to collections such as The European Central Bank Collection, the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art / Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Greece and other international private collections.
Born in Athens in 1989, Ioannis Michos studied in the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT) and in P.A.R.T.S in Brussels, where he was taught repertories from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, Wim Vandekeybus and Trisha Brown. In 2009 he collaborated with Dimitris Papaioannou as a performer in Nowhere at the National Theatre of Greece. Between 2012 and 2016, he lived in France where he worked with Philippe Decouflé. In 2017 he returned to Greece to collaborate for the second time with Dimitris Papaioannou in the project The Great Tamer, which was presented internationally at Festival d’Avignon, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Dance Umbrella, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and other venues. More recently, he danced in Babel and in the revival of Rite of Spring by Konstantinos Rigos and worked as assistant director to Konstaninos Rigos for projects presesented at the Greek National Opera, as well as a choreographer for various theater pieces.
Ioanna is a researcher and curator. Her work focuses on digital and networked ecologies as well as on contemporary visual culture. Her PhD research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.), and A.G. Leventis Foundation, was an embedded ethnography conducted at Tate Modern, which explored the contemporary art museum’s understanding(s) of digital and network culture. Ioanna also holds a BA degree in Media and Culture from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MA degree in Digital Culture and Technology from the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She has held positions in several organisations and institutions in the UK and in Greece, for example The Photographers’ Gallery, the Royal National Theatre, London South Bank University, The Royal College of Art and the Athens Biennale, while she was a member of the Connectiva curatorial collective.
She currently works as an independent curator and as an associate researcher in the Centre of New Media & Feminist Public Practices at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly. She is also the editor of unthinking.photography, the online platform of The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme, and a research associate at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image based at London South Bank University.
Vassilia Kaga is a queer, feminist curator, producer and performer. Their multidimensional work attempts to challenge the normative, especially heteronormative, white dominant structures and mentalities incorporated into the network of art relations as well as the wider public sphere. They hold a BA Degree in Communication, Media and Culture with a specialisation in Cultural Management from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Ever since obtaining their degree, they have contributed to several artistic projects in Greece, Germany and Sweden, the majority of which were ran by collectives and mainly aimed at highlighting marginalized artistic perspectives. In 2017, they launched Aye mari, an exhibition series exploring queer curating as a practice capable of lending a voice to those who have been excluded from the master narratives of art. They are one of the founding members of Failing Femmes, a group aspiring to create an autonomous support network for LGBTQI+ creators. Vassilia Kaga’s need to curate exhibitions originates from a utopian desire intertwining with their queer identity. In this context, however, utopia is nothing more than the need to heal collective traumas caused by an ostensibly functioning system.
Klea Charitou is an art historian and curator based in Athens. After completing her BA in Greek Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she obtained a Master’s degree in the History of Art from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a second Master’s in Curating from the University of Rennes in France. Currently, she is studying towards a PhD at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), preparing a thesis entitled The Relationship Between Logos and Art in the Greek Art of the 1970s. She has worked as a curatorial assistant for documenta 14 and was part of the curatorial team for Kunsthalle Athena. Other curatorial highlights include: South as a State of Mind magazine; This Is Not My Beautiful House (Kunsthalle Athena); and Cady Noland Unauthorized, (University Rennes 2 and FRAC Bretagne). 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.
Christos Mouchas (b. 1994) studied at the University of Sussex, UK. His practice includes performances focusing on the artist-audience relationship and dynamics through motion and contact, as well as visual artworks and installations.
His works have been presented at the Onassis Stegi, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival and The Performance Shop, the Marina Abramović Institute, the Dance House Lemesos, the K-Gold Temporary Gallery in Lesvos, and the Talkin’ Heads hair salon in Athens. Moreover, he has collaborated with magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar China and AnOther; and the brands Christian Dior and Digitaria, among others. He has also participated in the NEON Curatorial Exchange program ran by the Whitechapel Gallery. He lives and works in Athens.
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).
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.
Sofia Dona is an artist and architect. In 2018 she was awarded with the City of Munich Prize for Architecture and in 2015 with the Fulbright scholarship for Greek Artists. Her work is exhibited in various spaces such as the Μunicipal Institute of Art and Culture in Tijuana (2019), the association Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbKin Berlin (2017), the Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torinο (2016) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (2013). In July 2020 she presented the work Macho Sounds/Gender Noise at the Staatsgallerie Stuttgart museym in collaboration with Daphne Dragona. In 2019 she presented the solo exhibition Voyageurs at Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck, and the site-specific work Applaus at the Munich Central Train Station, in the context of the public art program of the City of Munich. She has co-curated the Aphrodite* queer feminist film festival (Athens & Epidaurus festival 2018 and 2019) and the projects Enjoy Y(our) State of Emergency (nGbK, Berlin, 2014); New Babylon Revisited (Goethe Institute Athens, 2014); and On Board (Goethe Institute Athens, 2013). As a member of the Errands group, she has participated in exhibitions with projects such as the Epicurean Garden (Matera Cultural Capital, 2019), Summer Ladders(1st Istanbul Design Biennial, 2012) and Transporting Utopia (2nd Athens Bienniale, 2009).
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).
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.