Readings
Τexts, interviews and essays about contemporary art production in Greece with the aim of strengthening critical discourse.
06.03.2024
FLOATING IMAGES
ARTWORKS collaborates with Enterprise Projects and supports the making of the 9th EP Journal written by Ioanna Zouli (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2020). Read here EP J9 “FLOATING IMAGES”
21.02.2024
It’s not easy without a compass...
Lately, when I’m walking around Athens and I feel increasingly threatened by memory loss. The cause is not my age, neither my missing brain cells. The flow of time and life itself is not the same in the city I grew up. The fluidity of space is reminiscent to the fluidity of online images and […]
12.02.2024
Back and Again. On the Practice of Latent Community
In 2016, Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos found out about the history of Kallio, a village in Fokida, Greece, which was expropriated by the Greek junta in 1969 and covered by the waters of an artificial lake that would constitute the main water supply reservoir for the city of Athens. While researching and conducting interviews in order to gather more material with regards to this admittedly extraordinary case, not only did they discover that access to information was particularly difficult but also that surprisingly few people were aware of this series of events. Back then, Ionian and Sotiris were struck by the existence of a gap, something that was missing, which for them held a personal but also artistic interest.
16.01.2024
What's the hairy fuss? Productive confusion and bodily exuberance in "Bang Bang Bodies"
Unlike other body parts, hair has a life of its own; it grows rather fast, we could even modify it by changing hair-cut or even colour. There is, though it is less frequently theorized, a discursive repositioning of the self via hair symbolism; it is a malleable raw material, an element in which identity can […]
27.12.2023
The City as Orchestra, Language, Ritual. On the Performative Character of Chrysanthi Koumianaki's Work.
Text by Danai Giannoglou Copy edited by EG Figure of Speech (Geli Mademli & Eleanna Papathanasiadi) When I first told Chrysanthi Koumianaki that I thought she was a performance artist, she laughed. That was the beginning of an intensely interesting ongoing conversation we’ve been having for the past few months, during and after her solo […]
14.12.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Konstantina Kotzamani
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): While preparing for our discussion, I came across your “Electric Swan” on ERT2. Although we may not be personally acquainted, it filled me with pride to acknowledge the numerous awards you’ve received for this particular film. How does it feel when you rewatch older works? Konstantina Kotzamani (KK): Well, I rarely go […]
04.12.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Angelos Papadopoulos
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): I’d like to start with your long-term work “We Need to Talk about Father,” which takes different forms along the way. I personally look forward to its presentation at the Athens Conservatoire for the “Art, a Silent Revolution” program I curate, addressing themes of violence, inequality, and stereotypes. What is the next […]
27.11.2023
On education. To all of you, who have found your own way
In her book Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom, Bell Hooks speaks about pedagogical practices as systems that should approach knowledge not as a means for gaining, collecting and reproducing information, but as “processes of inquiry” to quote the words of Paolo Freire, a theorist whose work affected Ηooks’ theses. What can […]
15.11.2023
Have we met before? You look strangely familiar.
When I think of Natasha Sarantopoulou’s performances, the first thing that comes to mind is ambiguity. An ambiguity, however, that has little to do with vagueness or inexactness; in her case―and often of her co-performer, Ioanna Antonarou―is an act of baffling intimacy. But again, this type of intimacy isn’t merely about closeness or proximity. Actually, […]
09.11.2023
Redefining the narrative of the moving image: Kostis Charamountanis talks about his playfully experimental cinema
Kostis Charamountanis is a sui generis case of a young and promising Greek director. The fact that he is self-taught and has worked as an actor, music composer, sound designer, editor, second assistant director and production assistant in theatre, television and film only partly account for his originality. His films (six shorts and three video […]
26.10.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Eleni Ellada Damianou
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): It’s remarkable how our paths crossed back in 2009 during that foundation dance course, just before we embarked on our professional journeys. Life took us in different directions for a while, but now, it’s wonderful to see how we’ve both found ourselves in the exciting realm where the worlds of performing and […]
19.10.2023
The uninhibited and unapologetically pop cinema of the directorial duo Lida Vartziotis and Dimitris Tsakaleas
Lida Vartzioti and Dimitris Tsakaleas, SNF ARTWORKS Fellows in 2022 and 2021 respectively, are among the very few directorial duos in Greek cinema, both in number and as concerns the genre of the cinema they serve. Yawth, their first short film and the biggest surprise of the 41st International Drama Short Film Festival in 2018, […]
13.10.2023
NEVER ENDING ENDS
ARTWORKS collaborates with Enterprise Projects and supports the making of the 8th EP Journal written by Panos Fourtoulakis (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2021). Read here EP J8 “NEVER ENDING ENDS”
25.09.2023
Athanasios Kanakis, State of Emergency: tokens of fragility defending a collective mode of existence
In a state of emergency, one is called on to prioritise, provide a cold assessment of what it is that matters the most. The subject finds itself caught up between the impulse to defend the collective mode of existence and the desire to preserve what, on a personal level, it considers as acquis. This conflict […]
05.09.2023
Surface(d) above the face, or what escapes our love and attention
It was a few weeks back that I returned from Istanbul, where I’ve spent a bit more than a month as a curatorial resident of SAHA Association, with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship Program by ARTWORKS. There’re a million things I could write about my time there; in personal and […]
31.08.2023
Post Notes and Edited Versions
Post Notes and Edited Versions is a text co-written by Valinia Svoronou and Eva Vaslamatzi on the occasion of Svoronou’s solo show The moonless mountain curated by Olympia Tzortzi at Callirrhoe in November-December 2022. In the exhibition, Svoronou worked around family narratives related to her Asia Minor origin and referred to Akylas Millas (b.1934, Istanbul), […]
22.08.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Eleni Papazoglou
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Eleni, we first met a couple of summers ago at a beautiful olive grove in Lesvos. You participated in a program of Hermitage Sykaminea focusing on community-making. Do you have any good stories from your stay there? Eleni Papazoglou (EP): Hermitage Sykaminea is a special place run by the most incredible human, […]
10.08.2023
To be found in translation; doing things to/with dance with/to words
It is often mentioned that we are lost in translation whenever we try to give an account of dance using words. A kind of persistent torment that accompanies the shift from a sensorially rich experience to something that is believed exclusively cerebral (and maybe too rational). Could we for now debunk this logic and accept […]
25.07.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Chara Stergiou
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Chara, it’s funny how we first met on a taxi from Rimini to San Marino, where you participated at the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale. We had this absurd conversation blending popular lyrics with Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories. Do you have any recollection of that ride? Chara Stergiou (CS): Absolutely! We started chatting […]
12.07.2023
Nana Seferli’s liberating ecological manifesto
Nana Seferli’s studio is situated near the Southern suburbs of the city, and that, in Athens, means it can be found within the dense urban tissue, yet a breath away from the seacoast. In the broader region of Kallithea, the artist found a store space, bright and calm, among other small businesses and family houses. […]
29.06.2023
Where arthouse cinema meets box office success: behind the scenes of “Behind the Haystacks” with Asimina Proedrou
When your first feature film snatches six awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, plays continuously for more than five months in cinemas and wins 10 awards (out of a record number of 17 nominations) in the recent Iris Awards of the Greek Film Academy, including Best Picture and Best Director, then you can be pretty […]
21.06.2023
Nicolas Vamvouklis in conversation with Foteini Palpana
Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Foteini, it’s great meeting you at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, where your solo show is currently on view. This is actually the first time I get to see your work up close. Could you briefly introduce me to your art practice? Foteini Palpana (FP): It is great meeting you too, […]
08.06.2023
Stefania Orfanidou : Heaven is a place (A place where nothing nothing ever happens¹)
The trolley bus is taking me to Stefania Orfanidou’s studio in Pagrati, the region of Athens where I grew up and moved from years ago. I know that sense that the day is over when the trolley bus turns right after Kallimarmaron stadium — the sound of the machine as it switches lines, resembling that of a […]
19.05.2023
Caressing the vicious
An online correspondence between Ioanna Gerakidi and Iria Vrettou, tracing Vrettou’s artistic practice as a vessel for thinking across the limits of the real, the potentials of the imaginary and the pleasure of the habitual, for becoming with monsters, animals, nymphs and other deities. Iria Vrettou, Horse Dives and Volcanic Fumes. Composition (2023) Ioanna Gerakidi (IG) […]
10.05.2023
Marina Velisioti: A stratigraphy of strange encounters
A golden foil fringe curtain blows in the wind, from an office building, right over Omonoia square, in the center of Athens. With the window open, Marina Velisioti is working in her studio, one of the numerous offices forming the labyrinthian structure of the building. In the corridors, lawyers, a few more artists, clients and […]
26.04.2023
An invitation to contemplate the eventfulness of movement
The text that follows is a response to a workshop Alexandra Waierstall assisted in PLYFA — a former industrial park in downtown Athens. The participants, all SNF ARTWORKS Fellows, were introduced to the basic kinetic-sensorial approaches the choreographer has developed in relation to Rita McBride’s monumental modular sculpture, “Arena”¹ (1997): starting from the solo “Sounding Silence” (2013), […]
30.03.2023
On life, sensuality and being an artist
Looking at Eleni Bagaki’s latest series of paintings at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) entitled Something like a poem, a nude, and flowers in a vase, I think spontaneously of Celia Hampton’s work. Beyond the fact that both artists represent male nudes from a female perspective, their respective artistic processes intersect […]
17.03.2023
EUPHORIA
ARTWORKS collaborates with Enterprise Projects and supports the making of the 7th EP Journal written by Mare Spanoudaki (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2019). The essay EUPHORIA was written amid lockdown, during the recent pandemic, and it refers to practices of dance and music as forms of “spring” that release our mental and physical euphoria and, […]
10.03.2023
I lost my path but then I found time and it all felt sane again
(a series of poetic responses on Iris Touliatou’s show “Mothers”) In her text occasioned by her solo show “Mothers” at Rodeo Gallery in Athens, Iris Touliatou quotes Lauren Berlant saying: “There are only two kinds of questions; am I right or are you my mother?”. By using her words, Touliatou induces us to her work […]
28.02.2023
Andreas Ragnar Kassapis: Monitors of Intuition
Andreas Ragnar Kassapis can be found working in an apartment, a former architect’s office in a residential area, in the environs of central Athens. “We live in the city. We live in the block of flats. We see the block of flats as a cave”¹ he wrote in the accompanying text of his solo show […]
15.02.2023
dear_Danae_my_way_of_responding.doc
Dear Danae, today I decided to start reading your book [i]; I had a mug of coffee and the cat sitting on my lap, some colourful markers and post-it notes to write down things that might develop later into a ‘proper’ text. But from page one, I realised that this was going to take the […]
26.01.2023
Araceli Lemos and the need for a cinema that will define our gaze
Araceli Lemos’ double nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards (John Cassavetes, Someone to Watch awards) for her debut feature film Holy Emy, are the most recent distinctions achieved by the SNF ARTWORKS Moving Image Fellow 2019, who had previously received a special mention at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival and won the Iris Award for […]
09.01.2023
Hardly virtual: an interface to play with movement and think of choreography abstractly
Motion capture and the many different domains it has been implemented, such as cinema, game design, but also engineering, proves that the ability to abstract movement is a tool that goes beyond the art of dance. Rather, it demonstrates how abstraction requires to think of movement in a more philosophical sense, i.e., to occasionally think […]
23.12.2022
What goes around comes around but nothing comes back
Occasioned by Myrto Xanthopoulou’s solo show “STORM (I Don’t Have a Pen)”, a series of poetic responses and reflections on the ways her works engage with the ephemeral and the mundane, the frivolous and the textually lacerated, the inescapably excessive and the raptured, both linguistically and materially, written by Ioanna Gerakidi. Myrto Xanthopoulou, After the […]
15.12.2022
Ideas and Solutions for your Home: exploring the familiar
3 137 is an artist-run space in the center of Athens that was established on a turning for the future of the city as a contemporary art destination and a manifold political battleground. In the past two years, artists and members of 3 137, Paky Vlassopoulou, Chrysanthi Koumianaki and Kosmas Nikolaou curated a contemporary art […]
29.11.2022
Out of Spring: A messy archive to reconceptualize the multiple narratives surrounding “The Rite of Spring”
When Aris Papadopoulos and Martha Passakopoulou ―aka the choreographic duo arisandmartha¹ ― suggested taking a “walk” in the wilderness of The Rite of Spring, we knew from the very beginning that this was not going to be another take on Stravinsky’s score. What felt most appealing to us was how dance history is mediated through […]
18.11.2022
On viewership, theatricality, anger and other stories of transformation
There’s something in Antonis Pittas’ practice that still remains wilfully undefinable, lingering in between linear, historical, modernist, clean and perfect visions, reflections and reenactments of reality, of time and space and everything these ethics and aesthetics bring along and (here comes the oxymoron), the epitome of vulnerability, clumsiness and fearlessness when facing aspects for the […]
27.10.2022
Unmuting bodies | Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
All she likes is popping bubble wrap, 2021, Photo by Andreas Simopoulos Horse = Coconuts Air = Rope Pool of water = (h) Vessels of water Wings = Umbrella Waterfall = Bucket of water Toweling hair = Rubbing feet on front door mat These absurd equations are excerpts of notes made by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, a […]
28.09.2022
Are you a fellow? My experience of being one.
I’ve been a fellow since the age of 10, I just didn’t know it or, perhaps, it had a different meaning then than it has today. I grew up in an apartment block with a kindergarten on the ground floor. I could see its courtyard from the balcony facing the back, and five days a […]
26.08.2022
Being Surface
Content warning: text & images contain elements of violence that might disturb sensitive audiences. Publication Histories The present text is a short version of the article originally published in Performance Philosophy Vol.7, №2 (2022):111–140 [DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.72360, ISSN 2057–7176], based on the author’s practice-led Ph.D. Thesis in Philosophy & Fine Art (Performance) at the Royal College […]
18.07.2022
Bodies, Machines and Smart Synergies: a short text following the event of ARTWORKS on art and artificial intelligence
When planning an event around artificial intelligence (AI), one hardly knows where to start. AI is already operating in the background of different activities of our connected lives [1]. Apps and platforms, devices and appliances, systems and infrastructures are empowered by machine learning. Data sets of information are built and processed in order to optimise […]
01.07.2022
Maria Tsagkari — Flying too Close to the Sun
I was driving in a rough mountainous area of Crete with the intention of installing an artwork on the peak of Psiloritis. It could have been Anogeia, Livadia, Zoniana, Axos or any of the villages I drove by on my way to the road’s end, when I came across the most bizarre landscape: a football […]
20.06.2022
Thinking on practice
A conversation with Eirini Fountedaki and Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou on curatorial practice By Eva Vaslamatzi Cruising Curators, On Queerness and Ruins with Christopher Weickenmeier, Tracing the Ephemera, series of performative readings, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin, 2021 Eva Vaslamatzi I wanted to have this discussion altogether because I think we share a lot in common in our curatorial […]
27.05.2022
“As a marketing expert, this is what I learned from artists and here is my advice to them”
Take any of the essays you wrote at elementary school before turning 10, and you will notice you used to do something you would never allow yourself today: always start your text by saying “I”, which is now practically forbidden. “I played with friends yesterday morning”. “I went on a day trip with my parents”. […]
19.05.2022
Janis Rafailidou guides us to her non-anthropocentric universe
Anyone who has been following the work and career of Janis Rafa, active in the fields of visual arts and moving image, will hardly be surprised to hear that she is the only Greek artist participating in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, entitled “The Milk of Dreams” and curated by none other […]
06.04.2022
All bodies have a performative potential
A conversation between dance artist Aria Boumpaki and curator Eva Vaslamatzi E.V. I would like to focus on projects that are entirely yours, that is, that start from your own idea and initiative, such as the Handle with care project that you recently presented at the Snehta space in Kypseli, Compost (2019) and the 162 […]
23.02.2022
Chasing fake realities
Some years ago, in 2016, I came across Karolina Krasouli’s name on an artwork label at the Rennes Biennale in France. It was the first contact I had with her work, before I had met her: a series of folder-like forms creased into different shapes and painted in colors, which from afar gave the impression […]
26.01.2022
Stefania Strouza: Othering time through sculptural gestures
“I step back from someone who is not yet there and, a millennium in advance, bowing to his spirit.” (Heinrich von Kleist — quoted by Martin Heidegger) Stefania Strouza, Image credit: Marily Konstantinopoulou In one of the most influential works of philosophy of the XX century, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger describes a phenomenon he calls “Temporal […]
07.12.2021
Fragments of a dialogue — Eva Vaslamatzi on curatorial research
Dialogue one: when we talked about chance and intuition It is not often the case that we, as curators, get to reflect on each other’s practice through an open and public conversation. Even less so it happens with someone who, perhaps by mere chance, shares a deep interest (may I dare say love?) for the […]
25.11.2021
Speech Co-Shapes the New Social Sculpture of Patras
An essay by Georgia Manolopoulou about the interdisciplinary research project “TELL ME” by Yorgos Maraziotis What are those voices behind the isolated post-industrial buildings at the heart of the urban network of Patras? Which is that liberating creative speech that depicts the productive and lively activity? The architectural and industrial shells of this city are […]
11.11.2021
Ways out
“I spotted the animal as it exited its nest. From that moment onwards, I started observing it. I was impressed by the way it emerged, Quite clumsily and abruptly. Then it acted naturally, perhaps a bit suspiciously. Then normally. Only by the time it re-entered the nest did it behave strangely again, taking too long.” […]
22.09.2021
« 1 km as the crow flies »
Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά Teaching a workshop at the Architecture School Paris-Malaquais (8–12th of February 2021). I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations The red thread crosses the Mozinor building, Montreuil, 2021, Documentary photography of the […]
19.07.2021
Abundant Waters
“ Feel then that I’m near springs, pools and waterfalls, all with abundant waters. And I free. Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world.” Clarice Lispector. “Água […]
17.06.2021
Our being is always a becoming¹
Selin Davasse, performance documentation, Hydro-Salon for Embodied Aqueousness, Istanbul, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Dear, “A lone island is part of an endless free-thinking and lost imagination. However, an archipelago signifies relations of un-relation between each island. Humans often think each island in an archipelago resembles the others. It is not true. Although each island forms […]
12.05.2021
A tale of darkness and light — Alkistis Mavrokefalou
Alkistis Mavrokefalou. Photo courtersy of the artist What I am proposing to read Alkistis Mavrokefalou’s work is a curious short story of darkness and light. It is a story that begins with some of contemporary philosophy’s darkest and nihilistic lines about civilisation, western thought and even humanity as a whole brought to us by Emil […]
21.04.2021
Beneath the surface — Ionian Bisai and Latent Community
Ionian Bisai. Photo credit: Kanaris Tsiganos Moving image, since its first use, has given artists and cineastes a tool to link the real and the phantastic, the experienced and the unimaginable, the monumental and the deepest individual feeling. The monumental and the individual, it is from this dichotomy that I’d like to start to reflect on […]
04.03.2021
Living the archive. How Maria Sideri’s work and research confronts the archive as a space of action rather than accumulation
(Above) Portrait of Valentine de Saint Point Agence de presse Meurisse, Bibliothèque nationale de France. (Below) Album Reutlinger de portraits divers, vol. 42, photographie positive, Valentine de Saint, Date: between 1875 and 1917, National Library of France (BnF) In a text until recently largely forgotten by critics and historians one of the fathers of Futurism […]
18.02.2021
On the surface and beneath. Maria Mavropoulou’s reflection on the eerie world of our digital lives
Maria Mavropoulou , SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019, portrait courtesy of the artist As most interactions these days, the conversation between Maria Mavropoulou and myself about her practice happened virtually. Nothing out of the ordinary in these times you may rightfully argue. And yet never has the virtual space been more appropriate to discuss someone’s work as […]
18.11.2020
On the occasion of Anastasia Douka’s sculpture “The Crocodile”
In psychoanalysis, it is common for patients to repeatedly relate the same events. A slight change in the structure of a sentence or a word used mistakenly in the course of one of the many iterations can shift the patient’s way of thinking and force them to see themselves in the reality of the situation, […]
18.11.2020
‘Anti-monuments are not erected to honour ‘great men’ but to honour the great power encapsulated in small moments’
Art historian, exhibitions and event curator and collaborator of the City of Athens Culture, Sports and Youth Organisation (OPANDA), Christoforos Marinos is behind the open-air group exhibition ‘Unhappy Monuments’, running between 10 and 20 October at Parko Eleftherias. Installation view, Unhappy Monuments, 2020 | Anastasia Douka, Crocodile, 2020; Spyros Kokonis, Models (Steel Beams)”, 2016–2020; Konstantinos […]
04.11.2020
Thodoris Prodromidis and how art can extend beyond its boundaries
“So someone would have to wait for the perfect society before daring to speak? Or perhaps speak while disguising their meaning. Or altogether assume the risk and speak in order to lie,” remarks the protagonist of Theo Prodromidis’ film Towards the Bank of the Future, 2013(2013). As bodily presence in the public sphere tragically reemerges […]
31.10.2020
On to the past: Yorgos Maraziotis sets up ambiguous playground in Antwerp
In his latest solo gallery show, multidisciplinary artist Yorgos Maraziotis lures the viewer into an environment where not everything is what it seems. The exhibition Monroe Springs at Antwerp’s Base-Alpha Gallery consists of paintings and sculptures of different sizes, installed unorthodoxly to create a carefully-planned spatial choreography that puts the viewer’s body into different situations. […]
![“The Cosmos is inside me and I inside the cosmos”[1]](https://www.art-works.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/19U50wH2Bbj6dJzUrM62rwg-400x500.jpeg)
22.10.2020
“The Cosmos is inside me and I inside the cosmos”[1]
The imminent threat of the collapse of cultural subjectivities that has steadily been looming, partially due to the torrent of digitization, has brought about a resurfacing of the study of the universality of the senses by multiple disciplines. The sensorial revolution, as defined by anthropologist David Howes, endorses a “more relational, less holistic perspective on […]
18.09.2020
“What cannot be said will be wept.” ― attributed to Sappho
Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά Picture yourself in front of a masterful work of art. Standing there startled, paralyzed, silenced. The flow of emotions take control, words seem to fail you and the only thing left to do is pause in unsettling peace in a desperate attempt to take it all in, not to miss a […]
02.09.2020
Anastasia Douka, Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Orestis Mavroudis: Redefining a Documentary Practice
On February 8, 1926, filmmaker John Grierson reviewed Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana, an early docufiction film shot on the Samoan island of Savai’i, in the New York Sun. “Being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, [the film] has documentary value,”[1] he declared. This phrase is […]
31.07.2020
“Call me to thank me for the flowers”*
Christos Massalas is a pleasure to talk to about all matters but most of all cinema. The force of joy that emanates when he describes his projects carries with it a life-affirming vivacity for the art of filmmaking and creativity in general. He is an endless resource of cinematic references that are not limited to […]
22.07.2020
Which side are you on? or The die has been cast*
“This is what we’ve waited for This is it, boys, this is war The president is on the line As ninety-nine red balloons go by Everyone’s a super hero Everyone’s a captain Kirk With orders to identify To clarify and classify If I could find a souvenir Just to prove the world was here”[1] […]
11.06.2020
A pencil-stroke, erased without leaving a trace*
Alexia Karavela is a collector. Not of art, but of traces of humanity. She goes about life, gathering objects, often relics, old images and stories in which a tiny glimpse of humanity can be detected, despite being veiled at first glance. Particularly when hidden under layers of politics, class divisions, social injustice and gender issues. […]
20.05.2020
Mare Spanoudaki: “Our future is interconnected and interdependent”
Evita Tsokanta (ET): How would you define your curatorial practice? Mare Spanoudaki (MS): In the current times of crisis, supported by a growing dissatisfaction for individualistic and materialistic discourses, the conditions that define my approach as a curator, apart from the care for objects or subjects of art, are interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. I am interested […]
07.05.2020
Spinning the Present
Maria Varela at her studio One of the first films made in the Balkans — if not the very first — in 1905 by the cinema pioneers known as the Manaki brothers records the spinning of wool in the village of Avdella, in Grevena. Trying out the new technology that they have just brought from London, they document a […]
08.04.2020
Reach out and Touch
“And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas There is an eerie sense of time dilation in certain stages of a day. At dawn, before […]
24.03.2020
Hoitines pot’este chairete!
Rrose Sélavy, the feminine alter ego of Marcel Duchamp, is a phonetic play on words of the French Eros, c’est la vie that also reads as arroser la vie (translation: to make a toast to life) in the tradition of Dada sound poetry. Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp dressed as a woman, posed as a Hollywood star […]
04.03.2020
Greece’s Gifts — and Burdens: The Geneaology of Petros Moris
On the day we meet, Petros Moris is waiting for me at the cafe in front of Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. A hundred meters away, many of the country’s most prized pieces of cultural heritage sit under protective glass. In the opposite direction, Petros’ latest exhibition, “The Gift of Automation,” is in the middle of […]
11.02.2020
Searching for Meaning and Making Change in the Films of Loukianos Moshonas
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. — Robert Frost, For Once, Then, Something Pure abstraction has a long history in cinema. Some of the […]
23.01.2020
Athens in the Streets: Public Art with Alexandros Simopoulos
The streets (and walls) of Athens have been covered — truly covered — in graffiti for as long as I can remember. As a child visiting from the United States, I didn’t know what to make of these indecipherable tags and scribbles. More broadly, I remember how my feelings about Athens itself were consistently ambivalent. Sometimes I reveled in […]
10.12.2019
The Atom, the Honeybee, the Artist: Hypercomf’s Collaborative Universe
In a way, honeybees are like artists. They venture into their surroundings, seeking out nourishment. In moving from plant to plant, they fertilize flowers and thus bring new life and more beauty to the world. Besides that, deep within their labyrinthine hives, they pool their nectar and painstakingly transform their labor into sustenance. Much like […]
15.11.2019
Augustus Veinoglou Giving Form and Breaking Bounds in Athens/Snehta
Augustus Veinoglou is a man in demand. Before we were able to find a moment to sit down and talk, I tried no fewer than a half dozen times to schedule a meeting. The recurring phrase I heard in reply was “non-stop.” But when I did finally get a hold of him, I began to […]
08.11.2019
Facing the Future, Connecting the Past: Kyriaki Goni’s Time-Bending Networks
Kyriaki Goni, SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2018 Picture yourself standing alone on the highest point of an island. In every direction you look, the land runs underneath your gaze. It may be bare in places, there may be trees, roads, buildings, terracing, walls, farms, hotels, beaches — but, at some point, everything falls away and ends at […]
29.10.2019
What Lies Below: Diving into the Animated Worlds of Eirini Vianelli
“You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended.” — Raymond Carver, “Cathedral” Eirini Vianelli, Icebergs, 2018 Like many artists, Eirini Vianelli did not follow a straight path to her destination. Today, she is an experimental animator whose projects include producing her own films, collaborating with theatrical pieces and operas, and even sprinkling […]
21.10.2019
Shaping the Past as Our Own, with Help from Giorgos Palamaris
Castling Homeside, Giorgos Palamaris, 2015 On the Cycladic island of Paros, Giorgos Palamaris tells me, there is a historic Byzantine church. At first glance, the structure appears unremarkable — but he believes that in this humble building, we can have a telling glimpse of Greek history. He begins by describing how the church was constructed: […]
08.10.2019
Distance, Possession, and Love: Neritan Zinxhiria’s Life in Cinema
Neritan Zinxhiria, Filmmaker. SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2018 At the start of one of Athens’ major summer exhibitions — “The Same River Twice,” co-organized by The New Museum and DESTE and held at the Benaki Museum — we find a beautiful short film by the artist Neritan Zinxhiria. Amidst a wide range of contemporary art pieces, ranging from the plainly […]
03.10.2019
Listening to the Quiet Solitude of Niki Gulema’s Paintings
“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.” — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Niki Gulema Tucked away in the furthest northeastern reaches of Greece, pressed […]
30.09.2019
Daphné Hérétakis Dreams of Cinema Farming
For the first few minutes of our time together, filmmaker Daphné Hérétakis and I struggle to find the right words. We begin in Greek, stumble a bit and attempt English; she learns I spent time in Paris, so we try to connect in French. Daphné has been doing this kind of dance her […]
12.09.2019
Malvina Panagiotidi’s Living Memories and Haunted Forms
In Malvina Panagiotidi’s basement studio, pots sitting on top of small electric burners are filled with nameless liquids, slowly boiling. If you squint your eyes, you might instead see cauldrons, the artist transformed into an alchemist from days gone by. Magical shapeshifting seems entirely possible in the world that Malvina’s work conjures up. […]
10.09.2019
The Eye and the Heart: Angelos Tzortzinis’ Photographic Frame
How does one support oneself as an artist? Does one’s art suffer from being utilized as a means of financial support? Athens, once crisis-stricken, has been feted as a city on the rise, one of Europe’s next art capitals. But what does that international buzz materially translate to for Greek artists trying to […]
04.09.2019
How Paky Vlassopoulou Puts Love, Care, and Community Back into Her Art.
Marble columns; soaring arches; celebrated monuments that have stood for millennia. So often, it is these structures that stand in for “culture,” the proud embodiments that we mentally refer to as emblems of our civilizations. But in reality, they are the exception, the ostentatious outliers. So much more has been built over the […]
03.09.2019
Noticing Things that Don’t Necessarily Exist
This is a great time for contemporary art. A great generation. No one thinks they can change the world anymore: the world has already changed. For some people, the world as we know it does not even exist. Either nothing is real, or everything is flatlining. For us, disasters are happening elsewhere, yet […]
03.09.2019
Υoung Greek artists: a timeless paradigm
Hands, Tools and Automations, Petros Moris, 2018 Let me go straight into the heart of the matter — the focusing on young artists as the motive power of change, on youth’s innate ability to reshape radically the artistic landscape — through an example from the past: a little-known artistic event which can function as a prism, or, better still, […]
03.09.2019
Room to move
Maneki Neko, Manolis Mavris, 2017 From 1987 to 2018 it’s 32 long years. At one end is my participation in the ARTWORKS selection panel for the monetary prizes to moving picture artists; at the other, my graduation from Stavrakos Film School as “film director”. Between the two ends, a labyrinthine course for this “artistic” identity to […]
03.09.2019
The multiple temporalities and spatialities of the new generation of Greek artists
Choir and Manoeuvre, sound — wooden panel, Kosmas Nikolaou, 2018–2019 An art scene is determined by characteristics relating to place and time. Smaller or larger geographic zones and references to decades or eras are used to describe the activity of visual artists within specific spatial and temporal limits. Although the focus on the artistic activity of […]