ARTWORKS SUPPORTS THE GREEK PARTICIPATION IN THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION – LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

21.03.24 @ 12:00

ARTWORKS, in collaboration with its founding donor, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), supports the Greek participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, for the presentation of the interdisciplinary installation Xirómero / Dryland some members of which are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

Through this support, our aim is to enhance artistic creation and provide visibility to the young, dynamic, and talented individuals who have joined forces to represent the country in such an important institution for contemporary art this year.

Xirómero / Dryland is an interdisciplinary collective installation based conceived by by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos and has been created in collaboration with Elia Kalogianni (SNF ARTWORKS Moving Image Fellow 2022), Yorgos Kyvernitis (SNF ARTWORKS Moving Image Fellow 2019), Kostas Chaikalis and Fotis Sagonas (SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2018). The Greek participation has been curated by Panos Giannikopoulos (ARTWORKS’ Program Coordinator).

The work consists of a piece of agricultural irrigation equipment which synchronises a sound, video and lighting installation in real time. It investigates the experience of a village festival, drawing on the experience of the panighíria—local folk festivals—of Thessaly and the area of Xirómero, in western Greece, which lends the work its title. The work navigates the political potential of sound and music and the impact of technology on rural landscapes and cultural diversity.

In between ritual and entertainment, the village festival is charged with content and meaning. It is connected to agricultural work; it is born of—but also begets—the community’s internal time cycle which follows the pace of irrigation and other agricultural tasks. It helps the community form an image of itself as well as maintain social cohesion and connectivity.

Xirómero/Dryland also utilizes the architectural features of the Pavilion of Greece to evoke images of agricultural warehouses or the religious architecture that is so often the backdrop of the panighíri. The watering apparatus at the centre of the Pavilion delineates a circular perimeter in the space of the pavilion.

Water—as a central point of reference here—is seen as a prism through which to reflect on issues of scarcity or abundance, as well as on its social connotations. As the watering system switches on, it sets a specific pace and marks the time like a clock suggesting specific routes for the viewers to follow. Inside the Pavilion, viewers become participants, on-stage becomes off-stage, the performative gives way to the everyday. This incessant interplay between ‘representation’ and reality is reproduced within the work itself.

Xirómero/Dryland attempts to create associations between a geographically contextualized experience and the global condition; to facilitate shifts of perspective between dominant and marginalised cultural subjects which seem to open up a liminal space for the articulation of new meanings.

* Xirómero (Ξηρόμερο) [ksirˈomero]: Known for its paneghíria, was a historic province of Aetolia-Acarnania. Today, it is a municipality in the Region of Western Greece.

Xirómero / Dryland | Photo ©Yorgos Kyvernitis

Xirómero/Dryland
Pavilion of Greece at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
April 20–November 24, 2024

Professional preview: April 17–19

Press conference: April 18, 13:30 pm, accreditation required

Pavilion of Greece– La Biennale di Venezia
Giardini
30122 Venice
Italy
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm

Commissioner: EΜΣΤ | Νational Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Katerina Gregos, Artistic Director

Administrative & financial director EMΣΤ | Νational Museum of Contemporary Art Athens: Athina Ioannou

Head of production of the Greek Pavilion, ΕΜΣΤ | Νational Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens: Yannis Arvanitis

Artistic team:

Kostas Chaikalis, Thanasis Deligiannis, Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Yiannis Michalopoulos, Fotis Sagonas

Curator: Panos Giannikopoulos

Artistic collaborators: Fotini Papachristopoulou, Studio Precarity (Vassiliki-Maria Plavou and Marios Stamatis)

Elia Kalogianni

Yorgos Kyvernitis

Fotis Sagonas

Elia Kalogianni (GR,1995) is a visual artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Athens (Greece). Since 2014, she lives and works between Athens and the Netherlands. Her body of work combines (experimental) films, video installations, moving-image essays and photographs, exploring the interchangeable qualities between reality and imagination. Kalogianni’s narratives, selections of archival and other materials, representations of lived and fictional realities, aim for sticking to the gaze of the ones that denied access to it. Kalogianni’s practice raises questions varying from tradition and its mnemonic representation to the application of power dynamics and surveillance in the current psychosocial schemes.
Her works have been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Neverneverland and the International Theater in Amsterdam, among others.
Kalogianni’s films have been awarded and screened in multiple international film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and Nederlands Film Festival. She was nominated for the Hellenic Film Academy Awards and has received a Special Mention at the Eye on Art Research Lab organized by the Eye Film Museum. She is currently working on Mammalia, a short experimental film supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Greek Film Centre and the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation.
Kalogianni works as an exhibition floormanager at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. She has also collaborated on projects for the exhibition center Looiersgracht 60 (Netherlands), the Amsterdam Conservatory (CvA), Onassis Stegi, Aegean Film Festival and Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Kalogianni is a fellow of LAPS: Research Institute for Art and Public Space (Netherlands) and she has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022). She is part of the artistic team representing Greece at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2024 with the interdisciplinary installation”Xirómerο/Dryland”.

Born in Athens, 1988.
He works as a photographer and documentary filmmaker between Athens and Amsterdam.
His work balances between photojournalism and observational cinema.
Kyvernitis currently works as a filmmaker, cinematographer and creative live-camera operator in films, plays and multidisciplinary projects which have been presented in several European festivals and foundations (IFFR Rotterdam Film Festival, Holland Festival, Onassis Foundation, Athens Epidaurus Festival, etc.).
He is part of the creative team that represents the greek Pavilion in the 60th Venice Biennale of Arts with the project called ‘XIROMERO/DRYLAND’
His first documentary The Canaries (2019, 17min.), was nominated for an IRIS Award at the Hellenic Film Academy and won the Audience Award for Best Short Greek Production at the 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. His new documentary Tonnage will be released this year powered by the Eleusis Capital of Culture 2023.
Kyvernitis has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2019).
He studied Architecture at the University of Patras and holds a Master of Science in Culture and Documentary Filmmaking, at the University of Aegean.

Fotis Sagonas (b.1983) is a visual artist and an architect.
His works have been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, the Venice
Biennale of Architecture, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, the
Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the State Museum of Contemporary Art in
Thessaloniki et al. In 2012, he received a Fulbright Scholarship for Visual Arts at the
School of Visual Arts in New York and in 2018, the ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos
Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship Award. From 2018–2022, he has been teaching the
courses of spatial representation, visual arts and introduction to architectural design, at
the Department of Architecture of the University of Ioannina.
He is member of the artistic team that will represent Greece ―through the collective
work Xiromero/Dryland― at the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.