The Collection as an Automaton

Our Fellow Petros Moris participates in the exhibition The Collection as an Automaton, at ACG Art Gallery, Deree – The American College of Greece, 22.02.2019-23.03.2019.

The Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts (FRSFPA) of Deree – The American College of Greece is pleased to present the exhibition ‘The Collection as an Automaton’, curated by invited curator Elpida Karaba. The exhibition is part of the Arts Festival organized by the FRSFPA.

The analogy of the automaton for a collection is used whereas the finite mechanism of the automaton condenses all the limitations one has to face, challenge and transcend within a collecting praxis. The interest for the automaton has different and diverse connotations. It is related a lot to modernism’s vision of a broader life enhanced by the automaton but at the same time it is connected with a lot of modernism’s disillusions. The automatization of life through indexes, taxonomy, archives, registers and machines became the mechanism par excellence of canonization and surveillance of life, of what Foucault called biopolitics. And furthermore nowadays the automaton has been connected to another aspiration for the future related to the post-human condition. So, proposing the collection as an automaton asks, how do we evaluate the inclusion and exclusion processes of automata? How do we redefine in our current condition, our relationship to apparatuses of power or empowerment, emancipation that at the same time are the apparatuses of control and oppression? What are the visions and dystopias of (post)humanity? Artists, Α-dash team, Natasha Biza, Kostas Christopoulos, Effie Halivopoulou, Dimitris Ioannou, Litto Kattou, Georgia Kotretsos, Jesper List Thomsen, Petros Moris, Yiannis Papadopoulos / Olga Mexa, and Cally Spooner, were invited to work with the content of The American College of Greece Art Collection in the broader sense. This addresses not only works of art and objects but documents, correspondence, oral history, storage space, in order to create new works or proposals for the existing works, the history of the collection, the management of belongings, the history of the College, the backgrounds, the gender and the personal history of the donors. Artists consider different methodologies as well as critical questioning on the ontology vs the epistemology of a collection as working tools that aim to create diverse and critical narratives not only for The American College of Greece Art Collection but also within its specific context as a consignment of an educational institution. The works of art, the research as well as the final product of the exhibition will become part of broader discourse on what it means to collect in our new changing world. If and how nowadays the bigger and bigger collective and accumulative impulse manages to find new meanings? How it is to collect in the virtual world, in a world where our relationship with material things is drastically changing, in a world where issues of identity, personal and political becomes radical, where collecting practices, cultural hierarchies and global economy become one?

Participating artists: Α-dash team (Noemi Niederhauser, Eva Isleifs, Zoe Hatziyannaki), Natasa Biza, Kostas Christopoulos (with the students of the 8th studio of painting of ASFA Olga Vlassi, Thanos Kardoulas & Katerina Messini), Effie Halivopoulou (in collaboration with Deree – The American College of Greece alumnae Dimitra Prifti and Afroditi Andreou and the student Aliki Ntounia), Dimitris Ioannou, Lito Kattou, Georgia Kotretsos, Jesper List Thomsen, Petros Moris, Yiannis Papadopoulos/Olga Mexa, Cally Spooner.

Curated by: Elpida Karaba