Performances in Undisclosed Time @ *Art Athina International Art Fair of Athens* curated by Sozita Goudouna
100% Risk, 100% Trust: Towards A New Visual Performance
LIVE is a performance program by visual artists fueled by the participating galleries of Art Athina 2019, as well as independent artists, and will take place throughout the duration of the art fair in multiple sites at Zappeion Mansion.
LIVE is a three-day programming initiative, curated by Sozita Goudouna, that showcases “New Visual Performance” experimentation and liveness and their implications for cultural production.
Welcoming the diversity within performance practice and the creative industries this year’s edition sheds light on the evolution of theatricality from its origin in the theatre to its present use in other art forms and focuses on collaborative practices between historic visual artists that have experimented with performance and emerging artists.
Context
Contemporary live art and durational performance are often predicated on the perpetuation of dominant narratives with regards to what the medium of performance can be or become.
LIVE aims to unfold and challenge these narratives by inviting visual artists who haven’t experimented with the medium of performance or with performative artistic practices, as well as visual artists who have explored the legacy of performance and who attempt to construct a different visual and interdisciplinary future for the medium.
LIVE aims to scrutinize both the visual and aesthetic potential of the notion of performativity, especially in the context of a contemporary art fair as well as of the Athenian cultural milieu.
Sozita Goudouna employs Performa NY Biennial’s unofficial mantra “100% risk, 100% trust” to highlight the profound commitment to giving visual artists full confidence and the risk that this practice entails for commissioning and producing visionary time-based pieces by artists who haven’t yet experimented with liveness.
Performances in Undisclosed Time
Pop-up parallel visual performances are taking place at various spaces of Zappeion mansion in undisclosed time with the participation of visual artists, dancers, actors, and directors.
Klitsa Antoniou
Throwing the Stone
Skoufa Gallery
The work takes as its starting point Meyerhold’s 1, Biomechanics 2 exercise, “Throwing the Stone” (exact duration 1.32 minutes). Exploiting theoretical and historical research processes (that have informed this work), Antoniou contends that Meyerhold’s revolutionary idea, irrespective of the idealism that accompanied his conception, provokes many searing questions about an individual’s chronicle, lingering between an art revolution and a social revolution.
Commissioned, originally, in 2017 by the Museum of St. Petersburg, to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution. For the Athens Performance, a dancer will be performing the ACT in front of the screen.
Sofia Gaafar
Spoon Me
Alibi Gallery
A word game played by two. Visitors are seated opposite the artist and are served a bowl of tomato soup. The pasta letters spooned from the soup are then used to create a letter. Each visitor and a new word.
Kleopatra Haritou
Mavradi
Agathi Kartalos
performers: Niki Skiadaresi, Katerina Spyropoulou
MAVRADI is a performance concerning the beautification of human fascism towards nature.
Marion Inglessi
Vertebrae
ekfrasi — yianna grammatopoulou
The fresh imprint left by the repetitive kneading gesture of fingers, knuckles, knees, and thighs upon soft clay. Brief, exact, pleasurable movements, small at first, intimate, they develop and expand to include the entire body. The ‘negative’ clay elements thus produced form the vertebrae of another body.
Eleni Mylonas
SeaMonster Monk
Cheapart
The live art project SeaMonster Monk is an audiovisual soliloquy on the deep grief that overtakes the artist when she encounters the continued destruction threatening every life on the planet.
Nikos Papadopoulos
Perpetual 2015
Crux Galerie
Performative action and markers on canvas 50x40cm
Video Duration: 4.29 minutes
This video was created during the artist’s residency at CERN in Geneva.
Explosions and paths of particles in space in the form of a dot are visualized in the mediaLAb in front of an 8-meter-long screen. There the artist sets up the easel and a dialogue between his design and his digital dot. The residency was sponsored by the Onassis Stegi following a competition.
Lina Pigadioti
Live Ready made
Skoufa Gallery
The live action intends to engage visitors in an interactive participation employing the media and materials handled by the artist (canvas, paper, acrylic, stencils, paper and photo collages, scraps, readymades etc.) as a vocabulary of that particular visual expression.
George Stamatakis / Rafika Chawishe
On — PrEP
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre
The performance aims to open a platform of dialogue and raise questions about the most current treatment against HIV called PrEP. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) is a way for people who do not have HIV but who are at very high risk of getting HIV to prevent HIV infection by taking a pill every single day. In a plastic fake garden, through symbolism the performers will try to seed the questions that have been raised from this new reality. Is PrEP creating a moral dilemma and why? Is our biggest fear eventually defeated? Who responds to the stigma that can be a deterrent to receiving it?
Chrysanne Stathacos
Secret Feminist Actions
The Breeder
Secret Time
Secret Place
Angelos Skourtis
The Future Is Very Slow
ekfrasi — yianna grammatopoulou
The artist tied all over his body together with a neoclassical pillar at Zappeion Mansion and having its head covered with a Greek flag that features the statement “The Future is Long Overdue.” The viewers receive the multiple ramification of the performance with regards the relationship that contemporary Greeks have with their past and future.
Lydia Venieri
Chessboard Chess
i-D PROJECTART
Pieces are placed in Zappeion Mansion. The diameter of the base of the works matches the size of the tiles. The red pawns represent the Western Android Army of the Sun and the black pawns represent the Army of the Moon and it’s Eastern Amazons. The game is played in teams.
Lydia Venieri
Tarot of Love
i-D PROJECTART
Inside a tent the artist will publicly analyze the cards she devised based on the strategy of love intelligence.
Dimitri Vassilakis quartet accompanies the live action with his piece “Pasiphae”.
Yioula Chadjigeorgiou
The Calm
Renatino Gallery
In her performance The Calm, artist Yioula Chadjigeorgiou is a woman agonizingly seeking to set herself free from the heavy burden she carries. The thick overcoat she wears, its inside pockets filled with sand, symbolizes the exhausting physical and psychological load that ‘lies heavy on her back’ for years, ‘the one that crashes every mortal’ and that she now attempts to leave behind. Her task is not easy; with endurance and repetitive movements, Chadjigeorgiou performs an intense ‘ritual’ towards liberation.
Independent Live Projects
Despoina Chatzipavlidou
Clockwise, without her physical presence
Performance, part of Eva Koliopantou and Despoina Chatzipavlidou’s “Αιδ-ως-δυο” project. The main themes of the material relate to pornography, social media, the female body, eroticism and the queer element. This presentation is part of the material and is a hybrid way of presenting a work of art.
Chryssa Dourgounaki
The Obstacle
The Orator is able to address an audience upon a variety of subjects. Eloquence is an expressive linguistic tool that one can cultivate in order to overcome the difficulty of exposing oneself in public.
Eva Giannakopoulou
Α Proposal for a Female Labour Monument
On August 30, 1918, in front of a Moscow factory, Fanny Kaplan — a Russian revolutionary — fired three shots at Vladimir Lenin. One missed, two didn’t. After the incident she was taken into custody and she was interrogated.
Years later, three Albanian women work under terms of exhausting workloads in a restaurant, coping with precarious labour disciplines.
Delia Gonzalez
FROM HERE TIL ETERNITY
Nostalgia, traces of childhood dispersed. Lost intuition or is it? The narrative intact with spontaneity emerging with vengeance unfolding the genius of our egos. Intellect stimulates as stories unravel. There are no questions only dancers. FROM HERE TIL ETERNITY
Performance by Delia Gonzalez with Vivi Brakoumatsou
Costume by Remember fashion
Iris Karayan
MUTATE
MUTATE is based on the dance performance Unauthorised (2019) created by Iris Karayan. A compilation of pop video clips, YouTube videos of Muhammad Ali and John McEnroe are copied, cut up and rehashed creating a choreographic score that alters and transforms narratives and meanings.
Odette Kouzou
Feed me
Feed me is a live performance, part of the artist’s ongoing research on the relations enacted through the act of eating within the Greek family and further society. Food is already highly charged with affect and meaning, since it serves not only for nutritional reasons, but as a mean of emotional transmission.
In this work, the spectator is asked to feed the performer, who is sitting on a served table, in order to consider the affect of this kind of interaction. How do we pass emotions through the performance of sharing food?
Aliki Krikidi
Emaki — Aucun Oubli n’est pas Innocent
The action affects memory as time suspensions in temporary spaces. Movement of tactile transitions into physical surfaces.
Mind The Fact (Ioanna Valsamidou/ Yolanda Markopoulou)
Lucky Strike
The narratives of global societies are changing. Globalization, digitalization and nationalism will implement new challenges on easy-money-making. To what extent are we part of an automatic process of producing wealth in comfort? Are we really free-will to choose the extent of our involvement in the uprising gambling era? And is there something to understand for ourselves, if we look closer to those who lost, not only property, but also identity? The participants and the public will interact in a game of exploration around the meanings of materialism, war, escape, and otherness. The performance includes documentary material from the long-term artistic project that was initiated in 2015 by Mind The Fact (Ioanna Valsamidou, Yolanda Markopoulou) and a group of people that were occupied with excessive gambling in the past.
Mariela Nestora
Choreographing Liveness
A series of undisclosed actions.
Hara Piperidou
Performative reading: Bataille and Jalaluddin Rumi
“Amor-logie plus éloignée” is a combination of love stories — based on texts by George Bataille (“Madame Eduarda” / “Eroticism”) and poems by Jalaluddin Rumi (“The Beloved”) — and composes a scenery of confession and extinction of the self. Embodied in the cloak of imaginative wordplay, this “Erotology” wishes to exude an otherworldly aura.
Soundscape: Nikos Vittis
Panos Sklavenitis
How to be seen (and heard) 4 / The poetics of failure
Performed by: Thanos Ghikas, Markella Ksilogiannopoulou, Ilias Tafaruci, Tania Varveri
How to be seen (and heard) is a project on the politics of artistic visibility and the poetics of failure, consisting of a series of — initially doomed to fail — self-promoting actions.
Anna Tzakou
Encounters without division: a durational performance
About a meeting with oneself, the other and the space. There is no outside eye. There is no narrative. We do not talk about anything or anyone. What takes place is only the noticing and the direct experience: how in tune with the present are we; what exists between bodies when they look for an understanding that goes beyond words?
Antonis Antoniou, Neli Poulopoulou, Despoina Chatzipavlidou.
Concept, facilitation, performance: Anna Tzakou
Guest-performance artists: Antonis Antoniou, Neli Poulopoulou, Despoina Chatzipavlidou.
Guitar-soundscapes: Vassilis Tzavaras
Video design: Erato Tzavara.
Guest Performance by Pavlos Samios
Production Out Of The Box Intermedia, Production Associates : Georgia Kalogeropoulou & Odette Kou
