MICHAEL KREBBER
Untitled, please don’t throw it away
Barking up the wrong tree
April 1–May 10, 2021
In the fifteenth century, in many houses and palaces in Italy, and later all over Europe, we see the emergence of ‘studioli.’ These small rooms, hidden from the public eye, became retreats where one could write, read, meditate, assemble collections of works of art, books, manuscripts, precious objects, mirrors, musical instruments, and occasionally receive friends and visitors.
Approaching the studiolo as a space that sets in motion conversations about networks of exchange, works of art as material signifiers, the circulation of objects and registers of desire and taste, we inaugurate the exhibition series with an installation by German artist Michael Krebber, from a private collection.
Michael Krebber (*1954, Cologne) has been called a dandy, lazy, self-referential, someone leading a double life. An influential painter and Professor at the Städel School in Frankfurt where he taught until 2016, Krebber often cites Paul Valéry’s “Monsieur Teste.” In the preface of his exhibition catalogue “Puberty in Teaching” (2008), Krebber writes: “Herr Krebber is an adaptation of Monsieur Teste, who is incapable of identifying with any one role, whatever it might be, and who is aware of the possibility that forgery too can be forged.”
“I would like to try to be post-author, post-dandy, post-against-authenticity, post-split-personality and so on.”
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“Studiolo” is the title of an exhibition series featuring works by contemporary artists, drawn from private collections in Athens.
For Studiolo #1 we reconstruct Michael Krebber’s solo exhibition “Ohne Titel, bitte nicht wegwerfen. Die falschen Bäume anheulen” [Untitled, please don’t throw it away. Barking up the wrong tree], first shown at Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin (January 11–March 1, 2003).
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1 Απριλίου - 10 Μαΐου 2021
Τον δέκατο πέμπτο αιώνα, σε πολλά παλάτια και σπίτια στην Ιταλία, και αργότερα σ’ όλη την Ευρώπη, παρατηρούμε την εμφάνιση των studioli. Αυτά τα μικρά δωμάτια, κρυμμένα από τη δημόσια θέα, έγιναν χώροι περισυλλογής όπου οι ιδιοκτήτες τους αποτραβιούνταν για να διαβάσουν, να γράψουν, να συγκεντρώσουν έργα τέχνης, βιβλία, χειρόγραφα, πολύτιμα αντικείμενα, καθρέφτες, μουσικά όργανα, και να δεχτούν περιστασιακά φίλους και επισκέπτες.
Προσεγγίζοντας το studiolo ως έναν χώρο που ενεργοποιεί συζητήσεις σχετικά με τα δίκτυα ανταλλαγής, την κυκλοφορία των αντικειμένων, το έργο τέχνης ως υλικό σημαίνον όπου εγγράφονται κατηγορίες επιθυμίας και γούστου, εγκαινιάζουμε αυτόν τον κύκλο εκθέσεων με μια εγκατάσταση του Γερμανού καλλιτέχνη Michael Krebber που ανήκει σε ιδιωτική συλλογή.
Ο Michael Krebber (*1954, Κολωνία) έχει χαρακτηριστεί δανδής, φυγόπονος, αυτο-αναφορικός, κάποιος που ζει διπλή ζωή. Μέσα από το καλλιτεχνικό του έργο, αλλά και μέσω της διδασκαλίας στη Σχολή Städel της Φρανκφούρτης, απ’ όπου αποχώρησε το 2016, έχει επηρεάσει σημαντικά τη γερμανική σκηνή. Ο ίδιος αναφέρεται συχνά στη φιγούρα του «Κυρίου Τεστ» του Πωλ Βαλερύ. Στον πρόλογο του καταλόγου της έκθεσής του «Puberty in Teaching» (2008) o Krebber γράφει: «Ο Χερ Κρέμπερ είναι μια προσαρμογή του Κυρίου Τεστ, που είναι ανίκανος να ταυτιστεί με οποιονδήποτε ρόλο, όποιος κι αν είναι αυτός, και που γνωρίζει επίσης πως ακόμα και η πλαστογραφία μπορεί να πλαστογραφηθεί».
«Θα ήθελα να προσπαθήσω να είμαι μετα-δημιουργός, μετα-δανδής, μετα-κόντρα-στην-αυθεντικότητα, μετα-διχασμένη-προσωπικότητα και ούτω καθεξής.»
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«Studiolo» είναι ο τίτλος μιας σειράς εκθέσεων έργων τέχνης που προέρχονται από ιδιωτικές συλλογές στην Αθήνα.
Για το Studiolo #1 ανακατασκευάζουμε την ατομική έκθεση του Michael Krebber «Ohne Titel, bitte nicht wegwerfen. Die falschen Bäume anheulen» [Untitled, please don’t throw it away. Barking up the wrong tree], που παρουσιάστηκε για πρώτη φορά στην Galerie Christian Nagel στο Βερολίνο (11 Ιανουαρίου - 1 Μαρτίου 2003).
Together with Akwa Ibom we introduce a special limited edition print by Rallou Panagiotou which emerged from an ongoing collaboration between us that will launch in 2021.
Proceeds from the sale of editions directly benefit the artists and the programme of Radio Athènes and Akwa Ibom.
You can purchase via PayPal, wire transfer, or cash if you drop by.
Please send an email to wave@radioathenes.org with your name and delivery address.
RALLOU PANAGIOTOU
ref.102020 [champagne bottle], 2020
Print on fine art paper
60 x 46 cm
€100 plus shipping
Signed by the artist, the print comes in an edition of 100.
ref.102020 [champagne bottle], 2020 belongs to a new series of prints on paper in which the artist mines her extensive archive of images used as references for her sculptural works. Originally printed on multipurpose paper, after being sourced online using generic search terms, they were collected from her various work sites after production ended. These scans retain the detritus and wear and tear that has accumulated as a byproduct of the work process. Accidental creases, marks from clay, tape, plaster and paint, simultaneously create distance and intimacy with the sourced material, melding the digital life of an image with the quotidian dirt of physicality.
Radio Athènes and Andreas Melas are thrilled to announce the joint representation of the Estate of Bia Davou in close collaboration with Zafos Xagoraris, aiming to archive, preserve, research and promote the oeuvre of one of the most compelling artists of the 20th century.
Bia Davou’s (1932-1996) experimentation with scientific models and their translation to art began in the early seventies, reflecting her interest in the poetics of systems of communication. Her research in the language of mathematics and information technologies, anticipates today’s epistemological dominance of computing, evident in cultural production, governance and modes of thinking.
Several of her works on paper produced between 1975-1978 depict circuit boards, though without any intention to create an applicable model. The form of her precise free-hand design is imbued with expressive qualities, echoing musical notations.
Bia Davou was included in Documenta 14 (Athens, Kassel); in 2009, EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens) presented the first major survey of her work, curated by Tina Pandi and Stamatis Schizakis. Currently her works are included in the group exhibition Fate of a Cell (Martinos, Pandrossou, Athens) through November 7th and in Bia Davou: Works on Paper from the 1970s at Radio Athènes, 8—31 October.
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Το Radio Athènes και ο Ανδρέας Μελάς ανακοινώνουν με πολλή χαρά την κοινή εκπροσώπηση του έργου της Μπίας Ντάβου, σε στενή συνεργασία με τον Ζάφο Ξαγοράρη, με στόχο την αρχειοθέτηση, συντήρηση, έρευνα και προώθηση του πρωτοποριακού έργου της.
Oι πειραματισμoί της Μπίας Ντάβου (1932-1996) με επιστημονικά μοντέλα και η μετάφρασή τους στην τέχνη ξεκίνησε στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του εβδομήντα, αντικατοπτρίζοντας το ενδιαφέρον της για την ποιητική των συστημάτων επικοινωνίας.
Η ἐρευνά της γύρω από την γλώσσα των μαθηματικών και της δυαδικής λογικής προέβλεπε τη σημερινή επιστημολογική κυριαρχία της πληροφορικής, εμφανή στην πολιτιστική παραγωγή, τη διακυβέρνηση και τους τρόπους σκέψης.
Πολλά από τα έργα που παρήχθησαν μεταξύ 1975-1978 απεικονίζουν πλακέτες κυκλωμάτων, χωρίς όμως πρόθεση δημιουργίας εφαρμόσιμων μοντέλων. Τα σχέδια έχουν μια εκφραστική ποιότητα που αντηχεί μουσικές παρτιτούρες.
Η Μπία Ντάβου συμπεριλήφθηκε στη Documenta 14 (Αθήνα, Κάσσελ). Το 2009, το ΕΜΣΤ παρουσίασε την πρώτη αναδρομική έκθεσή της σε επιμἐλεια Τίνας Πανδή και Σταμάτη Σχιζάκη. Έργα της παρουσιάζονται αυτή τη στιγμή στις εκθέσεις Η Τύχη ενός Κυττάρου (Μαρτίνος, Πανδρόσου, Αθήνα) μέχρι τις 7 Νοεμβρίου, και Μπία Ντάβου: Έργα σε χαρτί από τη δεκαετία του 1970 (Radio Athènes) 8—31 Οκτωβρίου.
In early 2020, London-based project space Parrhesiades published Parrhesiades Volume 1, an anthology of sorts that saw outcomes of its first years' programme settle onto the printed page. The original London launch took place on the 11th of March at Camden Arts Centre, on the same day that the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, Harvey Weinstein, who’s criminal sexual abuses spawned the #MeToo movement, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for some of his crimes and the Pound collapsed to a record low against the Dollar. At the launch, context loomed large over Cally Spooner's reading from the DEAD TIME score. With its depiction of financial collapse, collective illness, and abuses of power, interwoven into discourses of care and durational respite, the project met an anxious audience and parrhesiades subsequently entered into a long period of pause and reflection.
As the context shifts again, and we can once more gather together in public, Radio Athènes asks parrhesiades to open up Volume 1 for a new audience in a new time. Quinn Latimer will read from her forwarding essay, Jesper List Thomsen will return to the material that informed his project, FROM TACITURN TO BUFF, and a new reading from Cally Spooner's DEAD TIME will be made accompanied by cellist Stavros Parginos.
The book will be available to buy and alongside these works by Cally Spooner, Jesper List Thomsen and Quinn Latimer, Volume 1 also includes new work by Sung Tieu, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Johanna Hedva and Eva Gold. —Lynton Talbot
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Parrhesiades is a multi-platform project, established in 2019 by curator Lynton Talbot to work with artists for whom language, either written spoken or otherwise performed is an essential part of their practice. Together with the artist, Parrhesiades develops a single new work that exists across multiple platforms. A distributed or exploded model for exhibition that incorporates a partner institution, a speculative book, an online space and part of the curators’ home in South East London which is open by appointment.
By inviting artists to work through the different physicalities and temporalities that this offers, the work is made available to a public in a way that problematises a single reading. This fractured or emergent approach culminates in a publication, presenting an account of the six projects, and constitutes the only form of documentation of the works.
Parrhesiades is informed by the resistant politics found within poetry, where meaning is made not in the strictly codified effects of the language used but in the freedom words are given to emancipate themselves from a useful function. Parrhesiades is interested in this as a methodology. As in poetry, the meaning is made from the real conditions the language produces and not as a representational gesture.
Parrhesiades offers an infrastructure that privileges discursivity over commodity. It is an attempt at a more discrepant form of resistance to the market capture of ideas and understands language in its temporal and ephemeral nature as “always already political”.
Forthcoming projects include Anaïs Duplan, Isabel Waidner, Quinn Latimer, Tai Shani, Caspar Heinemann and Sophie Jung. The programme begins November 2020, with Parrhesiades Volume 2 released in late 2021.
It was sometime in 2015 that we sat down with Dexter Sinister, the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, to talk about the website of the newly founded Radio Athènes.
Partly inspired by our *misleading* name which suggests we are broadcasting sound programmes (we occasionally do that too) and partly due to our common skepticism of images circulating in the internet we opted for an imageless site.
radioathenes.org was designed to funnel all its communication through text and an audio channel, aided by a speaking asterisk character (*) developed by Dexter Sinister. This mark also became the de-facto logo for Radio Athènes.
In March 2018, we started discussing with David a second, sister www. It took lockdown to have time to retrieve and edit material from all the exhibitions, events, readings, discussions, screenings, and openings that have taken place in our HQ and other locations.
radioathenes.tv replaces the radio of the original with a television. The new website (which will continue to run in parallel with the original site) ambiently broadcasts documentation images from five years of events at Radio Athènes organized by event and categorized as channels. A menu at the top left is for changing the channel. A cc button at the bottom right is for hiding captions. The * plays all channels uninterruptedly. Hitting anywhere on the screen will pause the display.
Though the original idea of privileging a real, physical experience over a virtual one appears more urgent than ever (Nietzsche says "the truly surprising thing is rather the body”) radioathenes.tv is a chronicle of extraordinary collaborations, a community created around the shared love of art and a time when sitting close to each other was possible.
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David Reinfurt: The new website is both a step forward and likely a step back. It hovers between two points in time at least 50 years apart. Black-and-white broadcast television sets were common around 1970. These somewhat still magical appliances pulled signals from the air and offered a kind-of proto-internet, serving up a collective electronic experience to geographically dispersed viewers.
Fifty years later, the new site arrives as a relic. Maybe we've collectively had enough of the shiny and/or the new. I myself have plenty of days when I feel staunchly anti-internet, and would just as well flip on the tv if I had one.
NO opening: Saturday 23rd & Sunday 24th, 12—6 pm
Please note only two people can enter the space at a time. Also, exceptionally, we would like to avoid large groups of visitors, so come see the show at unusual hours, like lunch time for example. We would appreciate it if you wore a mask or scarf when visiting.
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For the rest of May we will be open during our regular hours, Wednesday 4—8 pm and Saturday 12—4 pm.
In June we will be open by appointment only,
please send word a day in advance
to book a slot wave@radioathenes.org.
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Last Saturday we got together with Giti.
It was such a joy to see each other again.
We called Vincent in Berlin.
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His exhibition Inner Sp ce would have opened on March 27th.
The works had already arrived, by road.
Spontaneously we all thought we shouldn’t wait until fall to set them up.
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There is no way for him to travel to Athens now, but no one knows when, and under what terms this will be possible.
We have never opened a one-person exhibition without the presence of the artist.
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It’s an experiment.
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Looking very much forward to reconnect with everyone, even at 2 meters away.
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To read a conversation between Vincent Tavenne, Giti Nourbakhsch, Konstantinos Papageorgiou and Helena Papadopoulos originally posted on March 9th, please visit the previous entry.
VINCENT TAVENNE
INNER SP CE
organized by Giti Nourbakhsch
THE EXHIBITION IS POSTPONED
NEW DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON
On Tents, Boxes and Inner Spaces
A conversation between Vincent Tavenne, Giti Nourbakhsch, Konstantinos Papageorgiou and Helena Papadopoulos.
Helena Papadopoulos: Vincent, I was looking at one of your Psycho Boxes at Giti’s place this past January and this note by Ludwig Wittgenstein came to mind: “The human character of various plants: rose, ivy, grass, oak, appletree, corn, palm. Compared with the different characters words have.” Because the forms you create inside these cabinets, some of which resemble aquascapes give the illusion they are breathing, they seem alive. How does each Psycho Box come about?
Vincent Tavenne: The process with the boxes first starts with a “thing", and then an artefact, a fabricated object which substitutes the real object. Next comes the accumulation of these artefacts, a grouping. I place them in relation to each other. When I have arrived at a certain condition or state, I stop and freeze it. I feel this composition of relations deserves protection. Of course it is a box, a black box, something like an aquarium or a stage, a mock-up, sizes are variable, proportions are variable, therefore something surreal or weird can appear. The result ought to be bigger than my plans, the result ought to astonish me. My method is based on playing, on games. Otherwise I would be bored. As a fan of the Renaissance I am aware of the cabinets of curiosities, and putting strange, extraordinary, alien things together. What happens in these boxes is the appropriation of the world.
The boxes with the plants have a slightly different background. I inherited a book on flowers from my mother which she was using daily. So I started to recreate some of them. In fact, these small objects, papier maché with some wire and paint need a practical kind of protection when they are staged.
HP: The Tent Sculptures made of textiles connote nomads’ dwellings, do they relate to how thought nomadizes from language to language, culture to culture? I am thinking of your French background and the fact you have been living in Berlin for some time and how text is linked to the Latin word textum, i.e. fabric and thus to weaving, to different strands woven together.
VT: Ulrich Rückriem, with whom I studied, was always having a stress analyst check the stability of the substrate because of the heaviness of his sculptures. In a way for me this was a repellent example— to have something up which is immobile, and heavy, and difficult. Hence my reflex was simply to do the opposite, build up something for a show and have it easily disappear afterwards, avoiding difficult handling and massive storage. The sculptures made of an inner structure, a framework, and fabric have several influences.
In the beginning I was playing with the French clichés abroad: the wine, the cheese, fashion, the haute couture. I made patterns for sewing, I was sewing as if I was creating drapery or a robe. From the point of view of craftsmanship it is the same, just bigger. The way the framework is constructed is important. Maybe it is my father’s influence as a car engineer that made me very aware of connections, stability, precision, the beauty of constructive solutions accorded to and in proportion to different elements that create the whole.
HP: Giti you have worked with Vincent on several exhibitions at your gallery in Berlin and the Sculpture Légère we are showing at Radio Athènes was made especially for you. How does it feel being inside it?
Giti Nourbakhsch: In our very first show, I think in 1999, Vincent exhibited a tent sculpture which we called “die Tonne”, the barrel. It was a brownish, cylindrical body, high up just below the ceiling of the space and it seemed closed from all sides. It had two entries across from each other, just a slit each. You could enter and follow a narrow path around the half round and then you would enter the center, a surprisingly completely blue space which opened up to the ceiling, like a cone. It was big enough for some people to stand there.
All was blue. You would be there, for no good reason, a space of no defined function, looking up maybe. The fabric/the membranes of the sculpture would dim sounds, so it was very silent and peaceful. All this wasn’t visible from the outside. One day my dog Susi, a tall Danish Dane, disappeared and I was looking for her everywhere. I found her sleeping in the centre of the blue space. She must have walked all the way the inside path to get there. I don’t know why she did it, except that she was special anyway, for example she was enjoying the loud overtone concert of Charlemagne Palestine, lying next to his feet, too. Indeed, the inner space of the barrel was a very pleasant place to be in. Nothing to do, no intentions.
Many years later, I asked Vincent to create an inner space for me, as pleasant as the blue centre of the barrel, where I would go, like Susi did and just be. As a fan of the colour pink, I wished for a space where I could put a bed with pink daylight.
Vincent created a "double barrel”, two cylindrical forms fusing together. Looking from above they have something of an 8, from the outside something of boobs or bottom cheeks. It was funny, the entrance slits were right where the round forms met, as if you entered through the boobs or the bottom cheeks. You would follow a narrow path again and would enter a center, this time with a red closed ceiling, a kind of gossamer. The outside light would reflect into the inside, so my wish to have pink light inside was fulfilled.
I had this bulky object up in my living room for a long time. It questioned, just by being there, how I lived, questioned the sofa, the doors, the coming and going…It was nice to have it in the apartment like a big weird animal. I used it as a reminder that most things and activities are conventions and agreements. A big bulky thing to remind me of the gap, the hiatus. Sculptures can do that. By absorbing and occupying space, they can remind one of emptiness, in a philosophical kind. You don’t think it, you “feel” philosophical.
The surrounding sound was dimmed again. (After I took it away, the apartment seemed empty and sadly rational.) For a while I pinned photos and objects in the inside space. You could also lift the “walls” and have it semi-open.
HP: Vincent, you mostly use natural materials in your work, hand-dyed fabrics, wood, paper. And there are some shapes that keep recurring like the circle and the square. Some of your exhibition titles like “Univers”, “Stratosphère”, “Ether”, “Beginning”, “Black Hole” suggest a reflection on the origin and development of the cosmos. The title you chose for this exhibition in Athens is “Inner Sp ce”. The letter a is missing, and I see your tent rising in the empty space between the letter p and the letter c.
Another thing that can’t be left unsaid is that you started making these series of sculptures where you typically use wooden supports and various textiles more than twenty years ago. That was before the migrant crisis which brought another complexity to what the tent signifies. All this to ask, how do you perceive your work as an artist in relation to a world that seems particularly fragile at this moment in time?
VT: To give a possible answer to both questions above: My interest in the cosmos, the universe and so on, gives me the pleasant feeling of just being a tiny crumb of a bigger picture. That’s nice. All is changing, unstable at all times. I hope my empathy for those forced to be nomadic, to live a provisional life is perceptible.
Konstantinos Papageorgiou: First of all apologies for joining this exchange with considerable delay. In the meantime, you have all seen your branches grow and created an interesting texture of meanings and now I am about to enter and tear this fine web apart. On the other hand, nothing will come out, if we do not stretch our potential and attempt to create something new. Nothing will come out just by staring at something. A new tension, a leap of faith and a gesture of love are asked for. So, we are constantly taking epistemic and emotional risks. Good art is the best reminder of the fact that we are alive and that we need to move within space and time and most importantly “move” within our inner time and space —if we want to be free. Good art is an “awakening of the sleepers” which is something more than just rendering us conscious of x or simply making us believe that y, or perhaps making us hopeful or afraid of z. In that sense, I find the points that have been raised so far very pertinent. The tent structure you are preparing for Radio Athènes, Vincent, already seems to be claiming a part of my own inner space and making me anticipate it in “real”. It has transformed me already. But since I am expected to ask a question (in a sense, I think I already made my point!) I wish to take the discussion back to two works of yours I have seen from close up and admire. The one is “Feu” (Fire), the amazingly monumental and beautiful woodblock print of tongues of fire, with many references to far eastern cosmologies but also printing techniques. The other is the small green sculpture of a plant— is it a nettle, I wonder ? —that appears as a kind of manifestation of an eternal cycle of life. What does this juxtaposition imply? Somehow I have the feeling that the little root is a reminder of sorts (think of the spinning totem in Christopher Nolan’s Inception), of an objective world within which we do live and cannot escape whereas the stylized tongues of fire, variably stenciled, refer to the fluidity and potential of our inner emotional, spiritual, intellectual worlds. Does this make any sense to you at all?
GN: Martin Schuettpelz, who owns a tent sculpture by Vincent, is an architect and among his other projects he constructs Dan Graham’s pavilions, hence he is used to tricky architectural structures. Having the tent in his house, he said, he still doesn’t know what it is. With Martin’s permission, I would like to present his untranslatable German poem/text relating to it:
Blaustoff isst Rotschopf
Goldener Flachs
Hospital auf Häkelkissen
wie oft geht rundes Fenster
Rost im Wasser
Bleiverglasung auf Leder weiß
Schrauben im Selbstdrehpack
weichen Felsen schwarz angucken
war nicht Blau der Mond
Fischgrät nach Zimmergröße
Baguette hinter Glastür
die Latte falsch flicken
Gewinde ohne Filzteller
Flechten hoch auf 360°
Kiloweise Zweitonnenhans
Flechtenkur
Rasenbleiche, andere Bilder suchen
Asphaltbruch über Pappelwurzel
Fliesenholz, salonfähig, Stuckmarmor
Saptil
Tellerrand auf Obstkiste
nach dem Schild schauen und nicht folgen
nummern nach dem Zusammenbauen
mehr Alphabete
Falten für den Strich
Pixelreihe auf gebogener Linie
Kratzer im Parfüm
Waschmaschinenblech gedengelt
Senkel, gesäumt
krüselig gespannt
ruibarbo para Mexico
Birne durchs Loch hängen
Lattenspagat
Kleidersaum mit Staubflaum
Nebelkabinett in Blaumilchstrumpf
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Giti Nourbakhsch is an experimenting former art dealer, she lives and works in Athens.
Helena Papadopoulos is a writer and curator and the founding director of Radio Athènes.
Konstantinos Papageorgiou teaches Philosophy of Law at the Athens University Law School, he lives and works in Athens.
Vincent Tavenne (*1961) was born in Montbéliard, France. He lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Vincent Tavenne has shown internationally including at Kunstverein Rastatt and Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg (2020); Centre Pompidou-Metz/France (2016); Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (2015); Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken (2010); Kunstverein Lübeck / Overbeck-Gesellschaft (2008); Sammlung Grässlin (2007); Kunstverein Arnsberg (2004); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2001); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (1998). Since 1994 he has had solo exhibitions with Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens, Stuttgart/Cologne; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin and Adamski, Berlin. Selected publications include “Polarise-Toi” on the occasion of the titular exhibition at Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag (2010) and “Hundert Fragen und Keine Antwort” a monograph on the occasion of his solo show at Kunstverein Braunschweig published by Walther Koenig Verlag. He was the recipient of the Villa Romana Prize, Florence.
Hours are Wednesday 4-8 pm, Saturday 12-5 pm or by appointment.
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
A pangram (Greek: παν γράμμα, pan gramma, "every letter") or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram, accessed: 20.1.20, 2:16 pm)
A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan, political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines a slogan as "a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising."[1] A slogan usually has the attributes of being memorable, very concise and appealing to the audience. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slogan, accessed: 22.1.20, 11:46 am).
Pangrams and Slogans opens almost a year to the day we visited the Epigraphic Museum of Athens with Dora Economou along with other artists and curators at the invitation of Art Athina. They wanted to organize a group exhibition that would run parallel to the 2019 edition of the fair in which contemporary artists would respond to the museum’s impressive collection of inscriptions from the eight century BC to the Late Roman period, mostly in Greece.
After a captivating walkthrough with archeologist Irene Choremi in the rooms of this especially elegant museum, we sat with Dora at the café of the Archaeological Museum, a few steps away, to discuss what she might want to show next to displays of inscribed slabs of marble or stone and clay fragments recording daily life in ancient Greece, from cost-accounts of the construction of the Parthenon, to carved notes such as “meet you at dusk” (the equivalent of text-messages). Dora identifies herself as a sculptor, though she has made several detailed, large-scale drawings, is an avid photographer still enjoying analog processes, and a gifted writer, in both English and Greek.
She proposed to make drawings of pangrams, in the two languages she has excellent command of, Greek and English and add French with a little help from google translate. She would also design an original typeface for each language. I didn’t know much about pangrams so she pulled out her phone and showed me examples, there are hundreds of them online in practically every language, they are ready-made phrases, authors unknown except in rare cases.
In the spring of 2019 we were told the Epigraphic Museum project had been cancelled. Dora had already selected some amusingly absurd phrases and finished six of the eight drawings. We decided to show them at Radio Athènes instead. In the meantime she was also playing around with catchy phrases from tv commercials. Some were from the eighties — I think not a single person in Greece who lived in a household with a television receiver will fail to recognize them. These ads legacy survived in the following decades. Her Slogans idea somehow sprung from her long-standing fascination with Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Good God of Manhattan (1958), a radio play about the impossibility of love in the social order, conflicting discourses at the apex of the Cold War, and the constant bombardment of indoctrinating slogans through the mass media. To keep it symmetrical, Dora used slogans from ad campaigns in Greek, French and English to create what you might call concrete poetry, or Dadaist poetry, or a form of linguistic conceptualism with a sense of humour, and inscribed them on the Radio Athènes walls using her customized typefaces.
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Dora Economou was born in Athens (1974) where she lives and works. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Art and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include “Representation”, Radio Athènes (2019), “Imbat Ambit” (together with Yasemin Nur) (2019) & “Mountains & Valleys” (2016), Francoise Heitsch Gallery, Munich, “Naturalist”, Ribot Gallery, Milan (2015), “PREDEAL”, The Breeder, Athens & “A Modern Hug”, Francoise Heitsch Gallery, Munich (2014), “By The Spring (Of Production)”, Loraini Alimantiri GazonRouge, Athens (2011). Group exhibitions include: “A.O.-B.C. An Audiovisual Diary” curated by Vicky Zioga, Electra Karatza, Maria Adela Konomi, Lydia Markaki and iLiana Fokianaki, State of Concept, Athens, “I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire” curated by the collective What, How and for Whom / WHW, State of Concept, Athens & Gallery Nova, Zagreb, “Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality” curated by Laura Mott, Cranbrook Art Museum, Michigan, USA, “Voyage around my Room” curated by Kika Kyriakakou, City of Athens Arts Center (2019), “Geometries” curated by Locus Athens, Agricultural University of Athens, “The Materiality of the Painterly Event” curated by Denys Zacharopoulos, City of Athens Arts Center (2018), “Reassembly” curated by G Douglas Barrett & Petros Touloudis, Tinos Quarry Platform (2017), “Hypnos Project” curated by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis & Theophilos Traboulis, Onassis Foundation Cultural Center, Athens (2016), “Life Like”, Transmission, Glasgow (2015), “Family Ghosts” Calling at Family Business curated by Nadia Argyropoulou, New York (2013), “Monodrome”, 3rd Athens Biennial curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio (2011), “Heaven”, 2nd Athens Biennial curated by Christopher Marinos (2009), “Point of Origin” curated by Gary Pearson, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney (2008), “In Present Tense” curated by Tina Pandi, Sotiris Schizakis, Dafni Vitali, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007), “Part time punks” curated by the Callas, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2007), 4th DESTE Prize, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2005). She has participated in residencies and workshops: “Island Hopping” (2019) and “At The Baths” (2016) by Sterna Residency Projects, Nisyros, “Experimental Education Protocol” by Angelo Plessas, Delphi Annex of the Athens School of Fine Arts (2017), “The violent No! of the sun burns the forehead of hills. Sand fleas arrive from salt lake and most of the theatres close.” by the Fiorucci Art Trust and 14th Istanbul Biennial, Kastelorizo, Greece (2015), Harold Arts, Ohio (2012), Palinesti, San Vito al Tagliamento (2009), Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney (2008), Scanning Istanbul (2005), Triangle Artist in Residence Program in DUMBO, Brooklyn, Royal School of Architecture, Copenhagen (2004).
παντόγραμμα ονομάζεται μια πρόταση στην οποία χρησιμοποιούνται όλα τα γράμματα ενός αλφαβήτου, τουλάχιστον από μία φορά το καθένα. Τα παντογράμματα είναι συνήθως διαφορετικά όχι μόνο για κάθε αλφάβητο, αλλά συχνά και για κάθε γλώσσα και χρησιμοποιούνται κυρίως στην τυπογραφία για την ανάδειξη των διαφορετικών γλύφων μιας γραμματοσειράς, καθώς επίσης και παλαιότερα για την ανάπτυξη της καλλιγραφίας ή/και δακτυλογράφησης. (https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Παντόγραμμα, πρόσβαση: 29.1.2020, 11:47 π.μ.)
σλόγκαν ουδέτερο άκλιτο σύντομο διαφημιστικό μήνυμα εμπορικού ή πολιτικού περιεχομένου, διατυπωμένο με τέτοιο τρόπο που να το προσέχει ο δέκτης και να παραμένει στη μνήμη του (https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/σλόγκανπρόσβαση: 29.1.2020, 11:51 π.μ.)
Η έκθεση Παντογρἀμματα και Σλόγκαν ανοίγει σχεδόν ακριβώς ένα χρόνο μετά την επίσκεψη μας στο Επιγραφικό Μουσείο της Αθήνας με τη Ντόρα Οικονόμου και άλλους καλλιτέχνες και επιμελητές μετά από πρόσκληση της Art Athina η οποία ήθελε να διοργανώσει μια ομαδική έκθεση που θα διεξαγόταν παράλληλα με την φουάρ του 2019. Η ιδέα ήταν πως σύγχρονοι καλλιτέχνες θα ανταποκρίνονταν στην εντυπωσιακή συλλογή επιγραφών του μουσείου από τον 8ο αιώνα π.Χ. έως την ύστερη ρωμαϊκή περίοδο, κυρίως από την Ελλάδα.
Μετά από μια συναρπαστική περιπλάνηση με την αρχαιολόγο Ειρήνη Χωρέμη στις αίθουσες αυτού του ιδιαίτερα κομψού μουσείου, καθίσαμε με τη Ντόρα στο καφέ του Αρχαιολογικού Μουσείου που είναι λίγο πιο κάτω, για να συζητήσουμε τι θα ήθελε να δείξει δίπλα σε επιγραφές από μάρμαρο ή πέτρα και θραύσματα πηλού, που καταγράφουν την καθημερινή ζωή στην αρχαία Ελλάδα, από το κόστος της κατασκευής του Παρθενώνα, μέχρι λαξευμένα σημειώματα όπως "συνάντησέ με το σούρουπο" (το ισοδύναμο του σημερινού texting). Η Ντόρα περιγράφει τον εαυτό της σαν γλύπτρια, παρόλο που έχει ασχοληθεί με λεπτομερή, μεγάλης κλίμακας σχέδια, δουλεύει με φωτογραφικά μέσα εξακολουθώντας να απολαμβάνει αναλογικές διεργασίες και έχει εξαιρετική άνεση στο
γράψιμο, τόσο στα αγγλικά όσο και στα ελληνικά.
Η πρότασή της ήταν να κάνει σχέδια παντογραμμάτων, στις δύο γλώσσες που ξέρει καλά, ελληνικά και αγγλικά και προσέθεσε και τα γαλλικά με την βοήθεια του google translate. Επίσης, θα σχεδίαζε πρωτότυπες γραμματοσειρές για την κάθε γλώσσα. Δεν γνώριζα πολλά για τα παντογράμματα, κι έτσι έβγαλε το τηλέφωνό της και μου έδειξε παραδείγματα, υπάρχουν εκατοντάδες από αυτά στο διαδίκτυο σχεδόν σε κάθε γλώσσα, είναι ready-made φράσεις, άγνωστης προέλευσης, εκτός από σπάνιες περιπτώσεις.
Την άνοιξη του 2019 μας ανακοίνωσαν πως το πρότζεκτ στο Επιγραφικό Μουσείο είχε ακυρωθεί. Η Ντόρα είχε ήδη επιλέξει μερικές από τις πιο σουρεαλιστικές και διασκεδαστικές φράσεις και είχε τελειώσει έξι από τα οκτώ σχέδια. Αποφασίσαμε να τα παρουσιάσουμε στο Radio Athènes. Εν τω μεταξύ, είχε αρχίσει να πειραματίζεται και με φράσεις σε διαφημιστικά μηνύματα. Μερικές ήταν από τη δεκαετία του ογδόντα - νομίζω κανείς στην Ελλάδα που ζούσε σε μια οικογένεια με τηλεοπτικό δέκτη δεν θα έχει πρόβλημα να τα αναγνωρίσει. Η μνήμη των διαφημίσεων αυτών επιβίωσε και στις επόμενες δεκαετίες. Η ιδέα των "Σλόγκαν" ξεκίνησε κατά κάποιο τρόπο από το ενδιαφέρον της Ντόρας για το The Good God of Manhattan της Ingeborg Bachmann (1958), ένα ραδιοφωνικό θεατρικό έργο για την απιθανότητα της αγάπης μέσα στο κοινωνικό σύστημα, αντικρουόμενες θέσεις σχετικά με τον Παλαιό και τον Νέο Κόσμο μέσα στην αποκορύφωση του Ψυχρού Πολέμου και τον συνεχή βομβαρδισμό συνθημάτων μέσω των μέσων μαζικής ενημέρωσης.
Για να διατηρήσει μια συμμετρία, η Ντόρα χρησιμοποίησε σλόγκαν από διαφημιστικές εκστρατείες στα ελληνικά, τα γαλλικά και τα αγγλικά και δημιούργησε αυτό που θα μπορούσε να αποκαλέσει κανείς concrete poetry (τεχνοπαίγνια) ή Ντανταιστική ποίηση ή μια μορφή γλωσσολογικής εννοιολογικής τέχνης με αίσθηση του χιούμορ και τα αποτύπωσε στους τοίχους του Radio Athènes χρησιμοποιώντας τις προσαρμοσμένες γραμματοσειρές της.
On the occasion of the third printing and re-re-relaunch of her book, Second Thoughts, artist and writer Angie Keefer will chew gum and juggle while conducting a poetry workshop* alongside a digressive talk on her work and other subjects. With accompanying visuals.
* The workshop channels collective energy through a painless, even delightful, daisy-chain process, ingesting, chewing, dissolving, and reconstituting visual and verbal stimuli as legitimate poetry. Modest audience participation is expected, but no one will be held publicly accountable for their efforts, so don’t let that dissuade you—prior knowledge and skills are neither necessary nor a boon. A pen or pencil would be helpful, though.
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Angie Keefer (b. 1977) is an artist, writer, teacher, amateur engineer, and part-time psycheographer. Her work has been included in Greater New York (2016) and the Whitney Biennial (2014), as well as numerous, even more impressive international exhibitions in Europe and South America, plus a handful of solo things at real museums, all without the aid of commercial representation or significant social media presence. A hefty collection of her writing called Second Thoughts has just been published by Kunstverein Amsterdam and Plug In ICA, featuring a deluxe, double-signature, full-color image section, extensive rewrites, and other bonus material. (Already in its third printing, the latest edition of Second Thoughts, clocking in at well over 500 pages, is now available for worldwide distribution from Idea Books for about a nickel a page—a real bargain, if you ask us.) In 2010, she co-founded The Serving Library, a nonprofit educational and publishing organization, from which she retired in 2017. Long before that, she attended public school in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by private university in New Haven, Connecticut—always studying, studying, studying Art, her first love after reading and bathing. These days, when she is not teaching in Arnhem or Amsterdam, or presenting well-attended public talks and events in the world’s capital cities, she leads a
Poet and critic Quinn Latimer will read excerpts from her essay 'Liver, Kidney, Breath, Body: A Series of (Corporeal) Codas on Some Photographs by Wols and Eileen Quinlan'.
Artist Eleni Bagaki will perform 'Laura Preston is Someone you Don’t Know' a text written for the occasion by writer and critic Domenick Ammirati.
Note on the book:
An encounter across time and space between Wols, a pioneering artist of the early twentieth century, and Eileen Quinlan, a contemporary American artist.
Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is, however, very little known. In an unusual connection across time and space his work is discussed in relation to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols–Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists.
Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual, through an indexical structure, a variety of textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and textures, this richly illustrated book reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic.
Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan, published by Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, edited by Helena Papadopoulos, includes texts by Olivier Berggruen, Quinn Latimer, Helena Papadopoulos, Laura Preston and two conversations with Eileen Quinlan. Design by David Reinfurt. It is available at Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, and is distributed worldwide by MIT Press .
The publication was made possible through the generous support of Goethe-Institut, Miguel Abreu Gallery, The Circle of Friends of Radio Athènes, and the sale of Eileen Quinlan polaroids.
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Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan
Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, November 2019
Softcover w/ dustjacket, 227 x 182 mm; 220 pages, 20 color, 81 b/w illustrations; ISBN 978-1-7336281-3-6
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Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfang Schulze) (1913–1951) was a German-born artist who created most of his work in France. In 1929, while living in Dresden, he started using a still camera and became involved with experimental photography. He considered enrolling at the Bauhaus and the Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin, but on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy he moved to Paris in 1932. There, he started signing his work with the pseudonym Wols from 1937. That same year he was commissioned to photograph the Pavillon de l’Élégance at the World Fair in Paris. When World War II broke out, he was interned for fourteen months as a German refugee. After the war he presented two exhibitions at Galerie René Drouin in Paris; although commercially unsuccessful, the shows made an impression on poets and artists including Francis Ponge and Jean Paulhan. Wols’s paintings and drawings were presented in the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel (1955, 1959, 1964) and at the Venice Biennale in 1958. His photographic work of the 1930s , however, was largely ignored until historian Volker Kahmen and photographer Georg Heusch rediscovered the negatives and produced new prints in 1976. Major solo exhibitions of his photography include Wols Photograph: Der gerettete Blick, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (2013), and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, (2014); Wols Photographs, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums (1999); and Photographies de Wols, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (1980). Wols died stateless in Paris at the age of thirty-eight. He is now celebrated as one of the pioneering artists of Art Informel.
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Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) is an artist interested in the false transparency of the photographic image: it's not a window, but a mirror. Her work presents an opportunity for contemplation alongside an alienation effect that interrupts it—an awareness of the mechanics of presenting and consuming images, or a sudden bracing encounter with the clumsy hand of the artist, attempting to adjust the veil. Recent solo exhibitions include Wait For It at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2019) and Enough at Gallery TPW in Toronto (2018), while Quinlan has also recently participated Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019), Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018 at LUMA in Arles (2018), VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2017), Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan, Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2016), Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Her fifth solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Too Much, was on view in the fall of 2018, coinciding with the release of her first monograph, Good Enough, published by OSMOS. Quinlan currently has work on view in Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, MoMA, and Objects Recognized in Flashes at MUMOK, Vienna.
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Domenick Ammirati is a critic and writer of fiction based in New York. His work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, DIS, Mousse and LARB. He has been selected for residencies at Denniston Hill, the Albee Foundation, and the Core Program at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he was a 2013–14 Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA. Excerpts of his novel The Bottom of the Top have appeared in BOMB and Tammy; and in 2017, received an honorable mention in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition.
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Eleni Bagaki is a visual artist investigating autobiographical narrative and its relation to fiction and theory. Drawing inspiration from feminist/queer perspectives in the fields of cinema, literature, and visual arts, her works emerge as stories, poems, films, songs, sculptures, or something else. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fogo Island Arts (2019), Iaspis, Stockholm (2018–2019), Pivô, Sao Paulo (2018), Kantor Foundation. In 2018 she received a NEON grant for artistic production, and in 2017 she was awarded the Outset grant for her exhibition “A book, a film, and a soundtrack,” Radio Athènes, Αthens. She has exhibited at Signal (Malmö), New Studio (London), L’Inconnue (Montreal), Benaki Museum (Athens), Family Business (New Yοrk), and Palette Terre (Paris). Bagaki received an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. She lives in Αthens, Greece.
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Quinn Latimer is a writer and editor from California whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017); Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder, coedited with Adam Szymczyk (Sternberg Press, 2014); Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (WIELS / Motto Books, 2013); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013); and Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Serpentine Galleries, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Radio Athènes, Athens; The Poetry Project, New York; Venice Architecture Biennale; and Sharjah Biennial 13. A frequent contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor of frieze, Latimer is also the editor of many books, including Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (Sternberg Press, 2012) and coeditor of Pamela Rosenkranz: No Core (JRP|Ringier, 2012). She is currently faculty at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) and, together with Chus Martínez, she is leading a new feminist think tank at Institut Kunst, Basel. Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.
Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, November 2019 Softcover w/ dustjacket, 227 x 182 mm; 220 pages, 20 color, 81 b/w illustrations; ISBN 978-1-7336281-3-6
With contributions by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Olivier Berggruen, Helena Papadopoulos, and two conversations with Eileen Quinlan. Design by David Reinfurt.
The publication was made possible through the generous support of Goethe-Institut, Miguel Abreu Gallery, The Circle of Friends of Radio Athènes, and the sale of Eileen Quinlan polaroids.
It is available in the Sequence bookshop located within Miguel Abreu Gallery, at Radio Athènes on 15 Petraki Street, and distributed worldwide by the MIT Press.
“Hello Flaumi, we are going to the lake to look at our reflection, wanna join us?” ask the diamond-shaped characters their troubled young community member Flaumi.
As in many of Amelie von Wulffen’s comics inhabited by speaking shapes, small animals, fruits and vegetables, gallerists, the artist herself and her Berlin milieu, in Flaumi is Developing Splendidly—one of the four stories published in English on the occasion of the exhibition at Radio Athènes—von Wulffen explores the vicissitudes of reflective representation.
The mirror (the lake in this case) as a recording surface for visual perceptions but also as a surface behind which there is content —think of Alice Through the Looking Glass— can serve as a metaphor for the complicated narratives performed in the pictorial space Amelie von Wulffen creates. “Am I the lover or the beloved—the one who wants or the one who is wanted?” asks Ovid’s Narcissus as he encounters his reflection. Is it the painter’s desire (fantasy) we are looking at, is it our desire (fantasy)?
Boundaries between personal experience and shared social anxieties, self and introject, real and imaginary time and space, explode in the work of von Wulffen who seems to mine the register of the unconscious. However, unlike the psychoanalytic subject’s unconscious whose fantasies about time and space are not in real time and space, here we encounter the paradox of simultaneity: childhood memories, the history of painting, scenes from Netflix series, ice-cream advertisements, cats, Bavarian landscapes, lovers, dogs, and interiors collapse on the surfaces the artist uses that include various materials from canvas, wood, and paper to pianos and found pieces of furniture such as antique cupboards, beds, sofas and school chairs.
How can one distinguish the daydream from the actual event? Is the author and the hero one and the same? Or is the artist’s (subject’s) role dispersed across the narrative? I am thinking here not just of the unexpected links between the contemporary and the untimely in many of von Wulffen’s paintings and pencil-drawn comics —as when she is having conversations with Francisco de Goya in her autobiographical comic Am kühlen Tisch (At the Cool Table) for example—but also of the narrative of painting as a medium itself and a kind of “spiral retelling” as it were, that manifests itself in her quotations of painting styles.
Trenchant and obscure, dark and funny, and I would argue awash with tenderness, Amelie von Wulffen, in the words of artist Amy Sillman: “stretches painting and drawing out horizontally, but to send it down the rabbit hole of the everyday.”
—HP
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Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966 in Breitenbrunn/Oberpfalz, Germany) lives and works in Berlin.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2019); Gio Marconi, Milan (2018); Reena Spaulings, NY (2018); Studio Voltaire, London (2017); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2016); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2015); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2015); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2015); Kunstforum Baloise, Basel (2014); and Gio Marconi Gallery, Milan (2014). Recent group exhibitions include: University of Applied Arts, Viennna (2019); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2018); Oracle, Berlin (2018); Lulu, Mexico City (2018); Metro Pictures, New York (2017); Ludlow 38, New York (2017); Greene Naftali, New York (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Freiburg (2017); and MAMCO, Geneva (2017). A survey of her work will open at Kunstwerke Berlin in 2020.
Her works belong to the collections of Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; and the Seattle Art Museum.
She is a recipient of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award (2016).
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The publication Amelie von Wulffen, Hedwig’s Betrayal: 4 Comics was made possible with the support of Goethe-Institut.
The exhibition is generously supported by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Opening hours are Wednesday 4-8pm, Saturday 1-5pm and by appointment.
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Amelie von Wulffen
Η προδοσία της Χέντβιγκ
Πίνακες, κόμικς και ένα ντουλάπι
17 Σεπτεμβρίου - 16 Νοεμβρίου 2019
Εγκαίνια: Τρίτη, 17 Σεπτεμβρίου, 7:30 - 9:30 μ.μ.
"Γεια σου Φλάουμι, πηγαίνουμε στο ποτάμι για να χαζέψουμε τον αντικατροπτισμό μας, θέλεις να έρθεις μαζί μας;" ρωτούν οι χαρακτήρες σε σχήμα καρό το προβληματισμένο νεαρό μέλος της κοινότητάς τους, Φλάουμι.
Όπως σε πολλά από τα κόμικς της Amelie von Wulffen στα οποία πρωταγωνιστούν ομιλώντα σχήματα, μικρά ζώα, λαχανικά και φρούτα, έμποροι έργων τέχνης, η ίδια η καλλιτέχνιδα και ο Βερολινέζικος κύκλος της, στην Flaumi is Developing Splendidly (Η Φλάουμι Αναπτύσσεται Έκτακτα)- μία από τις τέσσερεις ιστορίες που εκδίδονται στα Αγγλικά με την ευκαιρία της έκθεσης στο Radio Athènes- η von Wulffen διερευνά τις περιπέτειες της αντανακλαστικής αναπαράστασης.
Ο καθρέφτης (το ποτἀμι σε αυτή την περίπτωση) σαν επιφάνεια εγγραφής οπτικών εντυπώσεων αλλά και σαν επιφάνεια πίσω από την οποία υπάρχει περιεχόμενο – σκεφτείτε την Αλίκη Μέσα από τον Καθρέφτη - μπορεί να χρησιμεύσει σαν μεταφορά για τις περίπλοκες αφηγήσεις που εκτελούνται στον εικονογραφικό χώρο που δημιουργεί η Amelie von Wulffen. «Είμαι ο εραστής ή ο αγαπημένος - αυτός που θέλει ή αυτός που τον θέλουν;» ρωτά ο Νάρκισσος του Οβιδίου καθώς συναντά το είδωλό του. Είναι η επιθυμία (φαντασίωση) της ζωγράφου που κοιτάμε, είναι η δική μας επιθυμία (φαντασίωση);
Τα όρια μεταξύ της προσωπικής εμπειρίας και των κοινών κοινωνικών ανησυχιών, του εαυτού και της ενδοβολής, του πραγματικού και του φανταστικού χρόνου και χώρου, εκρήγνυνται στο έργο της von Wulffen, που φαίνεται να αντλεί υλικό από το πεδίο του ασυνείδητου. Ωστόσο, σε αντίθεση με το ασυνείδητο του ψυχαναλυτικού υποκειμένου όπου οι φαντασιώσεις σχετικά με το χρόνο και τον χώρο δεν είναι ποτέ σε πραγματικό χρόνο και χώρο, εδώ συναντάμε το παράδοξο του ταυτόχρονου: παιδικές αναμνήσεις, η ιστορία της ζωγραφικής, σκηνές από σειρές στο Netflix, διαφημίσεις παγωτού, γάτες, βαυαρικά τοπία, εραστές, σκύλοι και εσωτερικοί χώροι συμπτύσσονται στις επιφάνειες που χρησιμοποιεί η καλλιτέχνιδα οι οποίες περιλαμβάνουν διἀφορα υλικά: από καμβά, ξύλο και χαρτί σε πιάνα και έπιπλα όπως ντουλάπια αντίκες, κρεβάτια, καναπέδες και καρέκλες σχολείου.
Πώς μπορεί κανείς να διακρίνει την ονειροπόληση από το πραγματικό γεγονός; Είναι η συγγραφέας και η ηρωίδα ένα και το αυτό; Ή είναι ο ρόλος της καλλιτέχνιδας (του υποκειμένου) διασκορπισμένος σε όλη την αφήγηση; Σκέφτομαι όχι μόνο τις απροσδόκητες σχέσεις μεταξύ του σύγχρονου και του αναχρονιστικού σε πολλά από τα ζωγραφικά έργα και τα κόμικς με μολύβι της von Wulffen -όπως όταν συνομιλεί με τον Francisco de Goya στο αυτοβιογραφικό κόμικ της Am kühlen Tisch (Στο Κούλ Τραπέζι) για παράδειγμα - αλλά και την αφήγηση της ζωγραφικής σαν μέσο και μια "σπειροειδή επανάληψη" που εκδηλώνεται μτις παραθέσεις της διαφορετικών ζωγραφικὠν στυλ.
Αιχμηρή και αδιόρατη, σκοτεινή και αστεία, και θα υποστήριζα γεμάτη τρυφερότητα, η Amelie von Wulffen, όπως σημειώνει η καλλιτέχνιδα Amy Sillman: "εκτείνει την ζωγραφική και το σχέδιο οριζόντια, αλλά για να το στείλει κάτω στο βαθύ λαγούμι της καθημερινότητας".
"In the dead of night here, to whom can one write?”
Transcript from Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras.
The works in this exhibition needed to be made overnight, for luminosity to be measured, for grief to be observed, for electricity to be needed, for news to be printed, for fruits to ripen, for a thought to soften, for the tide to reach its lowest point, for the sea to be unable to be seen, for silence to be sculpture, for a flower to give its scent, for a decision to change, for a prediction to be made, for discovering oneself alive the next day.
—Iris Touliatou, May 2019
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"Midnight is not at everyone’s reach"
A conversation between Iris Touliatou and Helena Papadopoulos
Helena Papadopoulos: In a note you sent me the other day from Singapore you wrote “…very inspiring experience and a time travel to the future. Like 10-20 years ahead. In ecological terms also—closer to the end of the world, etc.”
Iris Touliatou: It is already several hours ahead, it is already Monday and that’s maybe enough to condition my thoughts. Things seem to age faster here, from being exposed to tropical atmospheres and the lack of seasons.
Flowers bloom throughout the year, sea walls and amphibious architectures are protecting Singapore’ s coastline from the rising sea. A kind of experience where ordinary things take on an edge, but the strangeness of a place drives one into life.
HP: In your work you seem to be interested in what evaporates, what intoxicates—scents, vapours, alcohol—in temperatures and climates. A materialist approach that takes into account the environment, the body, affects, the plasticity of nature.
IT: I think of energies and of rhythms, of tempos and durations which flow through bodies, landscapes, and materials in a temporal topography. Much of this temporality that I’ m drawn to, is in scales and forms we cannot sense or predict. The short-lived, occasional, unconstrained, unrepeatable overlaps with the planetary, the ceaseless, the cyclical—like the turning seasons, day and night, the tides.
These energies, intensities and magnitudes are bodies in fragile countermovements. Their fleeting substances and otherness, do not only materialize in a place, a landscape, but also in time or occasion, and it is always a matter of a shift ; to a less dominant position, to a less obvious point of view and the abolition of control and authorship.
HP: And yet you also introduce ideas such as seriality, modularity and repetition in your fluorescent light sculptural installations. At first glance these evoke minimalist and post-minimalist strategies however, where Dan Flavin for example extracts the aesthetic potential of ordinary hardware by inserting light tubes in the rarified context of fine art creating environments of everlasting luminosity, the lights you use are cast-offs. Slowly dying, — are they mostly from the 1970s found in disused office buildings?— their syncopated effervescence is a sign of time running out. Also, the objects you select are repeatable and manifold, serial and sundry.
IT: I find the fluorescents, highly resistant, thriving in neglect in their original habitats.
I take them apart and reassemble them without any further modifications. I like the banality of their shapes, how they carry this habitual worn-out-feeling of something near to the heart, and how they gradually turn into this natural phenomenon or crackling wildlife sound.
I always remind myself that Dan Flavin was a trained meteorologist- when I am trading minimalism for a sentimentalist romantic genre and its recurring themes of love, loss, existence, death. Post a sudden shock, I find that these themes continue to grow within a certain familiarity or with the need for a pattern embedded in them.
Repetitions invite you to think of the repetitions to come in the future. The lights are default choices, their availability, their modularity, their standard, manufactured size; appearing in various iterations, they are both consistent and elusive. Accumulation becomes an affective process along with an underlying obsession, that keeps coming in high bursts like their voltage before expiration. Our relationship keeps changing, until it’s time to let go.
HP: To quote French poet René Char: “Eternity is not much longer than life”.
IT: The absolute could be enclosed within the last moments, the least amounts, the minimum values, short-lived affairs, between night and day, between public and private, between personal and social, between the fear of loss and the gift of loving, between reasonable thinking and passionate action.
HP: When I visited your studio last fall I noticed this alluring portrait of Charlotte Posenenske from 1967 — she is standing coat in hand, wearing slacks that get slimmer at the bottom, a dark coloured turtleneck and she sports a pixie cut. I curated an exhibition in 2012 pairing her work with that of contemporary artist Liz Deschenes and I can see the elective affinities in your attitudes towards objects. How do you connect to figures like Posenenske, also Ana Mendieta; there is a series of drawings in which you replicate her signature that becomes almost a motif on the surface of the paper.
IT: I love this photograph. Posensenske is half smiling, I imagine that she’s just arrived there or that she is about to leave. In the first case, she is not intending to stay long, she is in fact already somewhere else, her steel ducts changed to a blurry shape in the background. I feel close with this idea she had of her objects, more than objects, witnesses of relationships. “What else they are or can mean (art and stuff like that), will not be discussed here,” she wrote. “The main thing is that you can change things.” At the end, she added: “Have fun!”
HP: There is a long tradition of self-portraiture, particularly in painting and photography. What drives your current series of self-portraits in commercial photography studios that you walk-in on any given day, an act which is deliberate but also a little unplanned, depending on where your everyday tasks take you. Is the ‘I’ which is portrayed provisional? Fictive? Is it a way to unthread subjectivity, is it a mask?
IT: The photographs stand somewhere between self and commissioned portraiture, both anticipated and unprepared, as I stand between first and third person, monologue and dialogue, fiction and autobiography. They started as confrontations with slippery entities—myself, time, the medium of photography itself, a certain history of female portraiture. The way these portraits are conducted, their pattern semi thought over, becomes very soothing like stepping on the fresh sand of a shore in the morning.
They are maybe attempting to solve riddles through this unexplained presence within spaces and buildings and explorations of the notion of the ‘wild’ or ‘wilderness’ again, composed by the borrowed landscapes. I’m intrigued by what makes her ephemeral background… lights, heat, downtown, bags, frames, whites, blues, mirrors, clocks, screens. The content of this background, like weather, suspended and welded into me.
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Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece) is currently artist-in-residence at the NTU CCA Singapore. Recent solo exhibitions include Woman Spinning at Palermo, Stuttgart, Germany (2019) and Some Seine, HYLE, Athens, Greece (2017). Selected group exhibitions include The Same River Twice: Contemporary Art in Athens, curated by Margot Norton and Natalie Bell, Deste Foundation at the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (upcoming); Bright File (June), curated by Maya Tounta, Haus N Athen, Athens, Greece (2018); May the bridges I burn light the way, 5x5x5: Selected Projects, Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy (2018); and Expanded Ecologies, curated by Daphne Vitali, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2009).
The exhibition is made possible with the generous support of NEON
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Opening hours are Wednesday 4-8pm, Saturday 1-5pm and by appointment.
Special hours June 16-21, open daily 4-8pm
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ΙΡΙΣ ΤΟΥΛΙΑΤΟΥ
OVERNIGHT
14 Ιουνίου - 14 Ιουλίου 2019
Εγκαίνια: Τετάρτη 14 Ιουνίου, 8-10μμ
"In the dead of night here, to whom can one write?”
Από την ταινία Destroy, She Said της Μαργκερίτ Ντυράς
Τα έργα σε αυτή την έκθεση έπρεπε να γίνουν την νύχτα, για τη μετρηθεί η φωτεινότητα, για να παρατηρηθεί η θλίψη, για να είναι αναγκαία η ηλεκτρική ενέργεια, για να τυπωθούν τα νέα, να ωριμάσουν τα φρούτα, για να μαλακώσουν οι σκέψεις, για να φτάσει στο κατώτατο σημείο η παλίρροια, για να μην είναι ορατή η θάλασσα, για να είναι η σιωπή γλυπτική, για να δώσει ένα λουλούδι το άρωμά του, για μια απόφαση να αλλάξει, μια πρόβλεψη να γίνει, για να ανακαλύψει τον εαυτό της ζωντανό την επόμενη μέρα.
—Ιρις Τουλιάτου, Μάιος 2019
Join us on Monday, May 27th for a travelogue with Dora Economou. This will be the closing event of her solo exhibition "Representation". The slide show starts at 8:30 pm sharp.
Last Spring, I made a long trip to the East. First I visited Thailand where my brother currently lives and works, I went to Cambodia to see the Angkor temples, then I passed on to Japan and crossed the country by train from South to North. It was my second time in Japan, I had visited Tokyo and Kyoto in Spring 2016, looked for Mount Fuji and saw Rock Gardens. I had done no homework, didn’t have a smart phone and spent part of the journey looking for the way out of a metro station. This time, I prepared the trip the way I’d prepare one of my art works. I made a list with references and destinations, the underlying theme being the Volcano, literally or metaphorically. (For example, I highlighted the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok which houses the statue of the deity with the four faces that answers prayers and where a bomb exploded in 2015 killing and injuring many, the 1000 origami crane tribute at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Usuki stone Buddhas carved from soft volcanic rock from nearby Mt. Aso, the sun rising from the Pacific, etc.). I compared and combined train and plane itineraries, google maps forecasts, tripadvisor tips, booking.com offers, drew points, connected them together and laid out a route on a piece of paper. Then I set out to test it. I brought with me my father’s analogue camera (which he had bought in Japan in 1970, when he visited the World Expo in Osaka) and shot slides of the sights. During my first trip to Japan, I had briefly met some people whom I befriended on Instagram. On my recent trip, I sometimes arrived to a place I had seen a post of earlier that day. Due to the very tight, almost impossible, schedule I had devised for myself on paper, I would often reach my destination after closing time, on the verge of darkness. In Kamakura, I only got to shoot an under-lit slide of the Great Buddha, his head protruding over the closed gate. But having liked a proper image of the statue posted by someone I follow a few hours ago made me feel as if I had seen him myself.
I quote from Lefcadio Hearn’s Of A Mirror And A Bell (Kwaidan 1904): “Now there are queer old Japanese beliefs in the magical efficacy of a certain mental operation implied, though not described, by the verb nazoraëru. The word itself cannot be adequately rendered by any English word. Common meanings of nazoraëru, according to dictionaries, are ‘to imitate’, ‘to compare’, ‘to liken’; but the esoteric meaning is to substitute, in imagination, one object or action for another, so as to bring about some magical or miraculous result.”
—Dora Economou, May 2019
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Την περασμένη Άνοιξη έκανα ένα μεγάλο ταξίδι στην Ανατολή. Ξεκίνησα από την Ταϊλάνδη όπου τον τελευταίο καιρό ζει και εργάζεται ο αδερφός μου, πέρασα στην Καμπότζη για να δω τους ναούς της Ανγκόρ και συνέχισα προς την Ιαπωνία την οποία διέσχισα με τρένο από το Νότο προς το Βορρά. Ήταν η δεύτερή μου φορά στην Ιαπωνία, είχα επισκεφτεί το Τόκιο και το Κιότο την Άνοιξη του 2016, έψαξα για το Φούτζι και είδα μερικούς περίφημους βραχόκηπους. Είχα πάει απροετοίμαστη, χωρίς smartphone και μεγάλο μέρος του ταξιδιού το πέρασα ψάχνοντας την έξοδο από το σταθμό του μετρό. Αυτή τη φορά προετοίμασα το ταξίδι όπως θα προετοίμαζα ένα έργο. Έκανα μια λίστα με αναφορές και προορισμούς έχοντας ως γνώμονα την ιδέα του Ηφαιστείου, κυριολεκτικά ή μεταφορικά. (Για παράδειγμα, σημείωσα τον Ναό Έραγουαν στην Μπανγκόκ, όπου φιλοξενείται το άγαλμα της θεότητας με τα τέσσερα πρόσωπα η οποία απαντάει στις προσευχές και όπου το 2015 εξερράγη μία βόμβα με πολλά θύματα. Τα αφιερώματα 1000 οριγκάμι γερανών στο Μνημείο Ειρήνης στην Χιροσίμα και στο Ναγκασάκι. Τους πέτρινους Βούδες στο Ουσούκι σκαλισμένους σε μαλακό ηφαιστειακό πέτρωμα από το βουνό Άσο. Τον ήλιο να ανατέλλει μέσα απ’ τον Ειρηνικό, κτλ.)
Σχεδίασα στο χαρτί μια διαδρομή συνδέοντας μεταξύ τους σημεία τα οποία προέκυψαν συγκρίνοντας και συνδυάζοντας δρομολόγια αεροπλάνων και τρένων, προβλέψεις του google maps, υποδείξεις του trip advisor, προσφορές ξενοδοχείων και ξεκίνησα να δω αν θα βγει. Πήρα μαζί μου την αναλογική κάμερα που έχω απ’ τον πατέρα μου (την οποία είχε αγοράσει στην Ιαπωνία το 70 όταν επισκέφτηκε την Διεθνή έκθεση στην Όσακα) και τράβηξα σλάιντ από τα αξιοθέατα. Στη διάρκεια του πρώτου ταξιδιού στην Ιαπωνία, γνώρισα περιστασιακά κάποιους Ιάπωνες τους οποίους έκανα φίλους στο Instagram. Στη διάρκεια του πρόσφατου ταξιδιού, έτυχε μερικές φορές να βρεθώ σε ένα μέρος από το οποίο είχα δει ποστ νωρίτερα την ίδια μέρα. Λόγω του πολύ στριμωγμένου και όχι πολύ ρεαλιστικού προγράμματος το οποίο είχα επινοήσει στο χαρτί, πολλές φορές έφτασα στον προορισμό μου μετά το κλείσιμο και λίγο πριν πέσει το φως. Στην Καμακούρα, κατάφερα να τραβήξω μόνο ένα υποφωτισμένο σλάιντ από το κεφάλι του Μεγάλου Βούδα να προεξέχει πάνω από την κλειστή πύλη. Ευτυχώς, κάποιος είχε νωρίτερα ποστάρει λεπτομέρειες από το άγαλμα, έτσι θεωρώ ότι κι εγώ τον είδα.
Σύντροφός μου σε αυτό το ταξίδι ήταν οι “Ιστορίες Φαντασμάτων από την Ιαπωνία” του Λευκάδιου Χερν. Από εκεί παραθέτω: “Υπάρχουν παλιές παράξενες γιαπωνέζικες δοξασίες για τη μαγική αποτελεσματικότητα μιας συγκεκριμένης πνευματικής διαδικασίας που υποδηλώνεται, αλλά δεν περιγράφεται ξεκάθαρα, με το ρήμα ναζοράερου. Η ίδια η λέξη δε μπορεί να αποδοθεί επαρκώς με καμία αντίστοιχη αγγλική. Τυπικές ερμηνείες του ναζοράερου, σύμφωνα με τα λεξικά, είναι ‘να μιμείσαι’, ‘να συγκρίνεις’, ‘να παρομοιάζεις’, αλλά η εσωτερική σημασία είναι να αντικαθιστάς στη φαντασία ένα αντικείμενο ή πράξη με ένα άλλο, ώστε να επιφέρεις κάποιο μαγικό ή θαυμαστό αποτέλεσμα.”
“Αυτήν την εποχή του χρόνου κλαδεύουν τα δέντρα της πόλης και συγκεντρώνουν τα κλαδιά σε ντάνες στα πεζοδρόμια. Αυτά τα δεμάτια μου φέρνουν στο μυαλό τη σκηνή από το Γύρο του Κόσμου σε 80 Μέρες όταν ο Πασπαρτού πηδάει μέσα στην πυρά και σώζει την Ινδή πριγκίπισσα την οποία ετοιμάζονται να κάψουν μαζί με το νεκρό σύζυγό της. Η αλήθεια είναι ότι δεν έχω διαβάσει Βερν (είναι απ' αυτά που πρέπει να τα κάνεις στην ώρα τους). Τις ιστορίες τις ξέρω από κινούμενα σχέδια και ταινίες. Χθες όμως βρήκα ένα pdf και κάθισα και το χάζεψα λίγο. Βρήκα μεγάλο ενδιαφέρον και σε συνάρτηση μάλιστα με τις πρόσφατες βόλτες στο V&A, το Λούβρο, το Βρετανικό, κτλ (και απολαυστικούς τίτλους όπως αυτός του κεφαλαίου 14: 'Οπου ο Φιλέας Φογκ κατεβαίνει όλη την υπέροχη κοιλάδα του Γάγγη, χωρίς να την δει καθόλου). Και μια ακόμη αναφορά: το στρώμα από ξερές πευκοβελόνες που σχηματίζεται κάτω απ' το δέντρο λέγεται "πούσι". Πούσι επίσης είναι η ομίχλη, μια λέξη που μου είναι οικία λόγω του δημοφιλούς δίσκου με τα μελοποιημένα ποιήματα του Νίκου Καββαδία”.
-Nτόρα Οικονόμου, Μάρτιος 2019
“It’s the time of year the Municipality trim the tops of the city trees and collect the branches in neat bundles on the sidewalks. These bundles make me think of a scene from Around the World in 80 Days when Passepartout jumps into the fire and rescues the Indian Princess whom they are about to burn alive together with her deceased husband. I must admit I’ve never read any of Vern’s books (I believe it’s one of these things you either do in good time or you don’t). But I’m familiar with the stories through animated and feature films. However, the other day I downloaded a pdf of the book and leafed through it. I found a lot of interesting references that somehow connect to my recent visits to the V&A, the Louvre, the British Museum, etc. (and great titles such as the title of chapter 14: In Which Phileas Fogg Descends the Whole Length of the Beautiful Valley of the Ganges Without Ever Thinking of Seeing It). The Greek word “pussi” refers to an accumulation of dry pine needles. The word has a second meaning: thick fog, I’m familiar with it because of the popular album based on Nikos Kavvadias’s poems”.
-Dora Economou, March 2019
A spatial work.
Representing something. Its form is drawn from the physical world.
Something direct is put in place in order for the indirect to emerge.
A rendition, an abduction, a transfiguration?
Cracking sounds, also.
Radio Athènes is pleased to announce its first collaboration with Athens based artist Dora Economou.
Dora Economou was born in Athens (1974) where she lives and works. She visits places, texts and materials she has had a relationship with, either literal or fictional, takes samples and builds them into three-dimensional objects. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include “Mountains & Valleys”, Francoise Heitsch Gallery, Munich (2016); “Naturalist”, Ribot Gallery, Milan (2015); “PREDEAL”, The Breeder, Athens (2014); and “A Modern Hug”, Francoise Heitsch Gallery, Munich (2014). Selected group exhibitions: “Imbat Ambit”, Francoise Heitsch Gallery, Munich (2019); “Voyage around my room”, Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municipality Arts Center (2019); “Geometries”, Agricultural University of Athens; “The Materiality of the Painterly Event”, City of Athens Arts Center (2018); “Reassembly”, Tinos Quarry Platform (2017); “Hypnos Project”, Onassis Foundation Cultural Center, Athens (2016); “Life Like”, Transmission, Glasgow (2015); “Family Ghosts” Calling at Family Business, New York (2013); “Monodrome”, 3rd Athens Biennial (2011); “Heaven”, 2nd Athens Biennial (2009); “Point of Origin”, Artspace Sydney (2008); “In Present Tense”, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2007); “Part time punks”, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2007); 4th DESTE Prize, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2005). Dora Economou has participated in the following residencies and workshops: “Experimental Education Protocol” by Angelo Plessas, Sterna Residency Projects, Nisyros (2016); “The violent No! of the sun burns the forehead of hills. Sand fleas arrive from salt lake and most of the theatres close.” by the Fiorucci Art Trust and 14th Istanbul Biennial, Kastelorizo, Greece (2015); Harold Arts, Ohio (2012), Palinesti, San Vito al Tagliamento (2009); Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney (2008; Scanning Istanbul (2005); Triangle Artist in Residence Program in DUMBO, Brooklyn; and Royal School of Architecture, Copenhagen (2004).
Opening hours are Wednesday 4-8pm, Saturday 1-5pm and by appointment. For further information please contact us at wave@radioathenes.org
AM is a zine of literature, poetry and theory that brings together texts which are now in the public domain, constructing an intimate anthology of readings related to each issue’s subject. The first issue, titled Love collects texts originating from antiquity to the mid 20th century. AM is produced in the hours before noon, between Andrea Metaxa and Agiou Markou St, Athens.
Parallel to being a publication project, AM functions as a collaborative workshop for the production of objects. For the launch of Love at Radio Athènes, AM is presenting a series of hand-blown glass vases and lamps, featuring ornamental texts based on freeware online-found fonts, derived from the publication’s titles.
This end-of-the-season evening will be accompanied by the sounds of a mixtape curated by Jay Glass Dubs, inspired by the zine’s texts.
AM is run by Lito Kattou and Petros Moris
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Lito Kattou (b. Nicosia, 1990) has graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Sculpture. Kattou is the recipient of the New Positions Award for Art Cologne 2018 and she was the invited artist for the 89plus Google Residency curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, 2017. Recent solo shows include: Days of San, Deste Foundation - Benaki Museum, Athens (2018), Siren Daylight, ROOM E10 27, Berlin (2018), San, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2018), Night Fight, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2017); Fighting with the Sun, Clearview.ltd, London (2017). Recent group shows include District 17, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Gallery, Berlin (2018), The Equilibrists, Benaki Museum, Athens (2016).
Petros Moris (b. Lamia, 1986) has graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and Goldsmiths University of London with an MFA in Curating. He is currently reading for a Phd at the Architectural Department of the University of Thessaly with a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation. He has been nominated for Deste Prize 2015 and is an ARTWORKS 2018 fellow. Recent solo exhibitions include Siren Daylight, ROOM E-10 27, Berlin (2018), Transformation of Commons, Embassy of Cyprus, Athens (2018) Transformation of Commons, Point Center for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2016). Recent group exhibitions include 4th New Museum Triennial - Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York (2018), Making Oddkin, Nisyros (2018), Geometries, Agricultural University, Athens (2018), Dangerous Together, Prairie, Chicago (2017) and The Equilibrists, Benaki Museum, Athens (2016).
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Wednesday, November 21st
at the Goethe-Institut Library
14-16 Omirou Street
7:30 pm
“How come, that people in Europe do not know love, but love knowledge?” (Friedrich Kittler)
“The beauty of truth lies in its revelation.” (Cornelia Vismann)
“Vom Griechenland” translates into many different meanings: “From Greece” (as in: a message from Greece, and: out of Greece, …) and “About Greece”, “On Greece”. It is the only book by Cornelia Vismann and Friedrich Kittler that started as a joint endeavor, even though it is composed of 5 essays, which are authored separately.
“To me – simplifying a bit here – this book represents a new approach in going back to the Greek origins of our thinking and turning them into something of incredibly contemporary relevance” .
-Tom Lamberty
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You are cordially invited on Wednesday November 21st for a “symposium” with Merve Verlag publisher Tom Lamberty who will present the iconic publishing house through publications spanning a period of almost 50 years.
Lamberty will be joined in conversation by his Athens based friends Dionysis Kavvathas (Philosophy and Media Aesthetics) and Martin Carlé (musicologist), former students of literary scholar, philosopher, music historian and media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011).
The conversation will be in Greek, German and English.
Seasonal snacks and drinks will be served during the ‘symposium’. Join us!
A BOOK AFFAIR is an 8-month long project organized by Radio Athènes and Goethe-Institut.
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
A is put under anesthesia, wakes in the midst of the operation and walks out without anyone noticing
B is initiated into the mysteries and achieves contact with the spirits
C is entirely awake and for this reason not entirely aware, but is used to travelling between realms
It is afternoon
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Aliki Panagiotopoulou lives and works in Athens. She studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Art and received her MFA from the Slade School of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include: Looooong, Arch, Athens (2018); 9+1, Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, Athens (2018); All: Collected Voices, Radio Athènes (2017); The Equilibrists, cur. by Gary Carrior Murayari & Helga Christoffersen with Massimiliano Gioni, Deste Foundation/New Museum at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2016).
Her solo exhibition Drawers is presented in the context of A BOOK AFFAIR, a 7-month long project organized by Radio Athènes and Goethe-Institut.
Hours: Wednesday 4-8, Saturday 1-5 pm, and by appointment
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Omblos Editions and PAT present their new publication with texts by Angela McRobbie and Gene Ray.
Discussion with Athina Athanassiou, professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.
At the Goethe-Institut library, Omirou 14, at 7pm.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Join us on Saturday November 3rd, at 12 noon at the small auditorium of the Benaki Museum, Koumpari 1 in Kolonaki for a conversation between Fitzcarraldo Editions publisher Jacques Testard and Patrick Langley on his debut novel "Arkady".
Patrick Langley is a writer who lives in London. He writes about art for frieze, Art Agenda, and other publications. He is a contributing editor at The White Review. Arkady is his first novel.
Jacques Testard is a co-founder of The White Review and the founder and publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher specializing in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. Founded in 2014, it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language. The series, designed by Ray O’Meara, are published as paperback originals with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface (called Fitzcarraldo). Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes, among other authors, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, and 2018 Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, Dan Fox, Brian Dillon, Ed Atkins, Claire-Louise Bennett and Mathias Enard.
‘Fitzcarraldo Editions is probably the most exciting publishing house in the UK right now.’
— Stuart Evers, New Statesman
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‘A distinctly post-Brexit novel, Arkady is set in an unnamed city that both is and isn’t London, thick with the atmosphere of the riots of 2011, and the stricken, devastated aura of the days after the Grenfell fire. It is oblique, and bleak: it is never quite clear what has happened or is happening, what is it about our world that has finally broken or overflowed. ... But there is always a flutter of hope in the dark, and in Arkady it dwells in the unshakeable brotherly love between the novel’s two heroes, Jackson and Frank [whose] relationship is so beautifully etched ... Arkady suggests that we’ll build
our own arcadias out of the dreams that haunt us, both threatening and protective.’
— Lauren Elkin, The Guardian
With thanks to the British Council for their generous support and the Benaki Museum for hosting us.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
With the support of
The British Council
With the kind collaboration of
Athens School of Fine Arts
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
Join us at Circuits & Currents, Navarhou Notara & Tositsa, Exarcheia on Wednesday 31st October at 7 pm
Sabeth Buchmann, co-editor of PoLyPen, a series of publications dedicated to art criticism and political theory will discuss Kerstin Stakemeier’s book in the series, "Entgrenzter Formalismus: Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (Deformed formalism: Processes of Antimodern Aesthetics)".
Laura Preston, editor of Next Spring, will present the second issue in the series entitled "Athens, June 18" which focuses on the work of Marianne Christofides and includes an essay by Elena Parpa.
The discussion will be held in English.
Sabeth Buchmann (Berlin/ Vienna), is Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. With Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb she is co-editor of PoLyPen, a series on art criticism and political theory, published by b_books, Berlin (since 2005); she is a board member of the art magazine Texte zur Kunst. Selected publications include: Co-ed. with Ilse Lafer and Constanze Ruhm: Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics (Berlin 2016); Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik. ed. with Rike Frank (Berlin 2015), Hélio Oiticica, Neville D'Almeida and others: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa, co-authored with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (London 2013), Film Avantgarde Biopolitik, ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene (Vienna 2009), Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion – Technologie – Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (Berlin 2007); Art After Conceptual Art, ed. with Alexander Alberrro (Cambridge / Mass. 2006).
Kerstin Stakemeier is a professor of art theory and mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. With Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall and Stephanie Weber she is the initiator of the long-term exhibition, magazine and discussion project Klassensprachen/ Class Languages (since 2017). She was the initiator of the "Space for Actualization" (with Nina Köller, Hamburg 07/08) and a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, 09/10). She published among others "Painting-The Implicit Horizon" (2012) with Avigail Moss and "Power of Materials/Politics of Material” and “The Present of the Future“ (2014-16) with Susanne Witzgall. She writes a.o. for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst. In 2016, “Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art“ (with Marina Vishmidt) was published by Mute Books, and in 2017 „Entgrenzter Formalismus“ by Polypen/b_books.
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Laura Preston is an artist and editor who lives and works in Berlin. She is currently working on her PhD with Sabeth Buchmann at the Institute of Art Theory and Critical Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her research relates to the performativity of the artwork, specifically sculpture at that cusp moment of modern art becoming post- to reconsider the nuanced relationships artists, mainly women, had with subjectivity and notions of difference. Her writing has featured on artforum, in frieze, and in the Reading Room journal. She has edited books including the ongoing series Next Spring: An Occasional Series of Reviews (Atlas Projectos, Berlin / Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington); Post-Apocalyptic Realism and Postapocalyptic Self-Reflection, with Tonio Kröner and Tanja Widmann (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne / Museum Brandhorst, Munich; University of Applied Arts, Vienna); Michael Stevenson: An Introduction (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne / Portikus, Frankfurt am Main / Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and Animal Spirits: Fables in the Parlance of Our Time (Christoph Keller Editions). Preston was an associate editor for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.
Next Spring is an occasional series of art reviews published in book form. Each new issue in the decade-long series is informed by a place where a member of the editorial and design collective is living at the time of publication, with invited authors given a year to write an in-depth piece of criticism focused on a time-based artwork. Published in English and the language of place.
Next Spring: Athens, June 18
Published by Atlas Projectos and Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington
With the support of the Society of Friends of the House of Cyprus
With thanks to Maria Panayides
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With thanks to The Athens School of Fine Arts for hosting us.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
With the support of
The British Council
With the collaboration of
The Athens School of Fine Arts
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Monday October 8
doors open at 7 pm
Radio Athènes
Petraki 15
Athens 10563
We are happy to announce Lenio Kaklea’s “An Encyclopaedia of Practices”, the 10th project in the context of A Book Affair, a collaboration between Goethe-Institut and Radio Athènes.
Lenio Kaklea will perform a segment of her new choreographic piece “Selected Portraits”, accompanied by a publication, “Portraits of Aubervilliers” and a sound piece of the same title.
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“I call technique a traditional and efficient act and it has to be both traditional and efficient. There is no technique or transmission without a tradition.” Marcel Mauss, Techniques du corps, 1934
Presentation
Everyone has practices — be they intimate or collective, spiritual or physical, original or dull; invented practices, learned practices; pleasant, fastidious practices, social practices, invisible practices. Gradually, habits establish themselves as rituals — doing the washing up, sewing, praying, going shopping, boxing, shaving, rendering, posting videos, masturbating, photographing cans on the street, listening to reggae, wandering around in construction sites...
Dance is a situated practice that permits the combining of multiple bodies. It assumes routine activities that lead to a familiarization with materials. It articulates different manners of moving in the world, of inventing deviations, shortcuts, or detours. In societies marked by mutation—globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, climate change—where all has become exploitable—work force, appearance, origins, sex—dance is likewise undergoing transformation. Taken in the movement of her own shifting orientations, Lenio Kaklea wanted to reflect more broadly on these phenomena by making the portrait of a city, Aubervilliers, through the practices of its inhabitants.
Aubervilliers is a French community of 77.452 inhabitants in the Seine Saint-Denis. In the frame of her yearlong residency (2017-2018) at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an interdisciplinary art institution in the city, she conducted an eight-month survey throughout the municipality, collecting three hundred practices that have been edited into portraits. They are assembled in a book, Encyclopedia of Practices, Portraits of Aubervilliers. Through these pages one navigates a landscape of gestures and habits—invisible, social, or intimate—that constitute a city.
In the solo performance Encyclopedia of Practices, Chosen Portraits, Lenio Kaklea adopted an intimate rapport with the bodies that she encountered. She embodied their gestures; She contemplated the desires and the emptiness that animates them, that links the practices between them. She explored the space where the individual is constructed, where one’s own emancipation and self-exploitation occur. Finally, in the video installation Portrait#7: Maryse Emel, she exposed a day of studio work with Maryse Emel, philosopher and inhabitant of the city.
The richness and complexity of her work in Aubervilliers, led Lenio Kaklea to continue her survey and expand Encyclopedie Pratique to different European cities. She’s currently conducting interviews with residents and travelers in six different European cities from four European countries: Guissény, Poitiers (France), Nyon (Switzerland), Essen (Germany) and Athens (Greece).
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Lenio Kaklea is a performer and choreographer. Together with Lou Forster she founded abd, a platform that develops choreographic and curatorial projects that explore the intersections of dance, research and critical theory. She is based in Paris, France.
Her work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, ImpulsTanz, the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Brest's Quartz-Scène National, Latitudes Contemporaines and the Menagerie de Verre, DansFabrik, Quartz-Scène Nationale in Brest. In 2017, she presented work in the public programs of documenta 14 curated by Paul.B Preciado.
Publication
Portraits d’Aubervilliers (Portraits of Aubervilliers)
Text: Lou Forster et Lenio Kaklea
Research assistant: Oscar Lozano
Editorial coordination: Alexandra Baudelot, Pierre Simon Copyediting and transcription: Anne-Laure Blusseau
Graphic design : Jean-Claude Chianale
Typography : Adobe Garamond Pro et
Rostand de Quesntin Schmerber (couverture)
Published by Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
Distribution : r-diffusion
Opening & Auction on Thursday September 20th at 7:30 pm
BILL, an annual magazine of photographic stories, edited and designed by Julie Peeters will be introduced at Radio Athènes by Julie together with artists and contributors of BILL’s first issue: Rosalind Nashashibi and Elena Narbutaitė. After a 20 minute introduction, the evening with BILL Ju Ju Banana Ash will continue at Heteroclito, Cave & Bar à Vin.
Julie Peeters, magazine editor
Rosalind Nashashibi, drummer
Elena Narbutaitė, we should call her
Before heading to the bar, three reworked copies of BILL will be auctioned.
Julie, Rosalind and Elena have added and removed parts, inserted original drawings and paintings creating three unique art objects.
Elena will be the auctioneer.
Regural copies of BILL will also be available for sale.
An evening not to be missed!
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Julie Peeters is a graphic designer, editor and educator based in Brussels, running her studio since 2006. Peeters worked for clients such as Wattis Institute, Centre Pompidou, Artspeak, and Kunstverein München, for which she also edits and designs a quarterly publication series. She has designed books for artists such as Nigel Shafran, Karel Martens, Haegue Yang, Yuji Agematsu and Anne-mie Van Kerckhoven. In 2015, she was awarded the Goldene Letter prize in Leipzig. Peeters has been teaching graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and HFG Karlsruhe and KASK Conservatorium, Ghent.
Born in Croydon in 1973, Rosalind Nashashibi is a London based filmmaker and painter. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017. She has participated in both Athens and Kassel episodes of Documenta14. Solo shows include Lux, London in 2017, a war artist commission at Imperial War Museum, UCI California, Objectif , Antwerp, ICA, London and Chisenhale. She has shown in Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial and Sharjah 10. She represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. She received the Paul Hamlyn Award for artists in 2014, and in 2003 was the first woman to win Becks Futures.
Elena Narbutaitė was born in Vilnius in 1984: “We should call her". She has participated in exhibitions internationally, including the Liverpool Biennial in 2016 and the joint Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Other recent group exhibitions include venues such as Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong-Kong, 2018, CACP Bordeaux, France, 2016, Escola De Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015; Marco Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Vigo, Spain, 2015; Art Department Di Tella University, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014. In 2017 Elena Narbutaitė presented “Prosperity” at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, her first solo exhibition in a public institution. She also has contributed to the periodicals The Federal, Nero, Bill and CAC Interview.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
With the support of
The British Council
With the kind collaboration of
The School of Fine Arts
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
As part of
Athens World Book Capital 2018
For more information on A Book Affair, please visit:
www.radioathenes.org
www.goethe.de/athen
www.radioathenes.tv
Please join us for an exhibition of archival ephemera, posters, artists' books, zines, lithographs and films by American artist Karl Wirsum. Born in 1939, Wirsum was a member of ‘Hairy Who’ a group of Chicago artists who decided to join forces and exhibit together in the 1960’s. Their work was characterized by a graphic sensibility, intensity of colour, movement and a sense of humour often expressed through wordplay, puns and inside jokes. Sourcing his material from everyday life-advertisments, comics, posters, but also influenced by Japanese prints, blues music and pre-Colombian art- Wirsum created a figurative vocabulary of zany characters in imaginary scenarios.
The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Andreas Melas.
'Drawing it On: 1965 to the present' a show of seminal drawings by Karl Wirsum opens on September 19th at Martinos in 50 Pandrossou Street. Organized by Andreas Melas, curated by Dan Nadel.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month long project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
With the support of
The British Council
With the kind collaboration of
The School of Fine Arts
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
As part of
Athens World Book Capital 2018
For more information on A Book Affair, please visit:
www.radioathenes.org
www.goethe.de/athen
www.radioathenes.tv
“I have been trying to live like that since I can remember. As a child, I wanted to escape my ugly neighbourhood that was pinning me down to reality and smelled of middle class staleness. I wanted to live in another world, even if I did not know its name yet. Maybe that place never existed. I wanted to make this magazine to share my version of life with you……
I like to think that a few people out there can live with me in this place with no name that never existed.”
Excerpt from “Romance”, Chris Kontos’s editor’s note in Kennedy No. 8.
Join us for the launch of the new issue of Kennedy, a biannual journal founded in 2013 by Chris Kontos and Angelo Pantelidis.
"I think that if contemporary writing is necessarily a lonely transaction of a four-dimensional human being, reading itself, and perhaps the need not only to tolerate this kind of loneliness but to love her, is a unmoveable event of my creative practice and of ways of reading, and one of the significant psychological events that I have to comprehend within it".
Theodoros Giannakis talks about his recent exhibition ‘Primitivism Mirage’ at Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Artificial Intelligence, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, sideway glances, More Common Mirrored Wild Flowers, Miscellaneous ambient traffic, Analytic eros synthetic eros, Boy ghost and more as he takes us through his writing and his literary readings.
A sculptural object in progress will also be on view.
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Theodoros Giannakis was born in Preveza in 1979. He lives and works in Athens. He is a member of the artist group KERNEL and is currently a PhD candidate at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Exhibitions that are still on view : 'Primitivism Mirage’, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (solo) and 'Unpacking my Library', curated by Anna Mykoniati and Tina Pandi, EMST, Athens (group). His work was included in the 2018 Triennial, 'Songs for Sabotage', curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, New Museum, New York; 'Driftwood, or how we surfaced through currents', Fondazione Prada, Athens; 'Roy Da Prince', Centre For Contemporary Art Futura, Prague; 'The Equilibrists', curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Helga Christoffersen, organized by the Deste Foundation and the New Museum, Benaki Μuseum, Athens.
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A Book Affair / Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen is a 7-month project organized by Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes.
With the support of
The British Council
Institut Français de Grèce
With the kind collaboration of
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
As part of
Athens World Book Capital 2018
For more information on A Book Affair, please visit:
www.radioathenes.org
www.goethe.de/athen
www.radioathenes.tv
In the context of A BOOK AFFAIR, the DESTE Foundation presents Codex DESTE, a special installation featuring all the publications that have accompanied the Foundation’s exhibitions from 1983 to this day, as well as the 2000 Words series of artist’s monographs. If an art catalogue, more than simply seeing images on paper, is a transcoding in book format of the event-making experience of an art exhibition or of an artwork, the installation Codex DESTE explores the physical dimension of publications in a specially designed environment. This is a material and rhizomatic inquiry into the constitutive role of art catalogues in the exhibitions’ history of the DESTE Foundation. The installation is complemented by the allegorical GOD (2013) by Drocco/Mello + TOILETPAPER and two video projections by Doug Aitken and Seth Price.
Codex DESTE will be on view at Radio Athènes (15 Petraki Street, Athens 105 63) between June 15 and June 30, 2018. The opening will take place on June 14, 2018.
A Book Affair is organized by the Goethe-Institut Athen and Radio Athènes
With the support of
The British Council
Institut Français de Grèce
With the kind collaboration of
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
As part of
Athens World Book Capital 2018
For more information on A Book Affair, please visit:
www.radioathenes.org
www.goethe.de/athen
www.radioathenes.tv
Author Makis Malafekas reads excerpts from his new novel De Les Kouventa.
"This was the worst possible moment to get a book out on John Coltrane. Launching a book on jazz in midsummer Athens and right in the middle of Documenta, a full house of art intelligentsia. Nobody would show up, not even my publisher. Where the fuck was I going?"
Michalis Krokos is in trouble. Athens bids him welcome with a heatwave and contemporary art, record numbers of tourists and drift driving, the third Memorandum and Airbnb, enlightened hackers, mental cabdrivers and maneater chicks, murders, kidnappings and the heist of a painting that bears the secrets of the world. A writer lost in the tidal whirlpool of his time. In the wrong town. In the wrong summer.
Makis Malafekas is a writer who lives in Brussels and Athens.
In English, entrance is free
Seating is limited and on a first-come first-served basis
With the support of
The British Council
Institut Français de Grèce
With the kind collaboration of
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Thomas Boutoux and Joachim Hamou, two of the members of the Paris-based cooperative publishing house Paraguay, go out on the stage conceived by Etienne Descloux at Radio Athènes to recount the trials and tribulations of an art imprint that was created in 2008.
« Ten years ago, starting une maison d’édition, independent, self-willed, principled, small in scale, collectively-run, etc. made a lot of sense. There was a terrain; there was a logic, and this is still all very clear to us. But why we called it Paraguay isn’t as clear. It was never that clear. Or, it’s only very recently that it became clear to us. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all — what now? What we will do, on the occasion of A Book Affair, if you like it Helena, is maybe to talk less about our affair with books than about our affair with Paraguay itself. »
Thomas Boutoux is a Paris-based writer, curator and publisher. He is a founding member of several collective-run small scale organizations in Paris: the imprint Metronome Press; the art space castillo/corrales; the bookstore Section 7 Books, and the most recent one, the publishing cooperative Paraguay. As a writer, Boutoux has a long-standing practice of close collaboration with visual artists on artists books, scripts for films, plays for the radio or the stage, songs and live events. He’s currently producing a new play co-authored with Guillaume Leblon for Front International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. He teaches social and contemporary art theory in the MA program of the School of Fine Arts, Bordeaux. In 2017, he co-organized with Helena Papadopoulos the long term project "All: Collected Voices" a Goethe-Institut and Radio Athènes collaboration.
Joachim Hamou is an artist, who works in multiple media (film, theatre and performances) and produces public events in collaboration with several community organizations. His collaborative art projects and films actively engage people in recognizing, understanding and participating in problem solving related to complex social issues. His latest film UIP 27 is a drama-documentary set in the year 2027 where a possible future scenario for Israel and Palestine is imagined. He is currently developing the feature film called “Colonie” which is being produced by Barberousse films. Born in France, growing up in Paris and Stockholm within a Moroccan and Swedish family, he was based for a long period in Copenhagen where he created many independent institutions, such as TV-TV, Rio Bravo, Trampoline House. He currently lives between London and Paris, where he is a member of the publishing cooperative Paraguay. (http://www.hamou.artcodeinc.com/)
Paraguay is a publishing cooperative based in Paris. It has published books and several periodicals since 2007, first functioning as the house imprint of the project space castillo/corrales, and since 2015 as an autonomous non-profit organization, which develops a model of publishing that comprises live events, talks, workshops, exhibitions and books. Paraguay associates a dozen of writers, artists, curators, and graphic designers from different generations and has its offices in the artist-run space and studios DOC in Paris 19th.
(http://www.paraguaypress.com)
With the support of
The British Council
Institut Français de Grèce
With the kind collaboration of
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Rare books on fashion, architecture, design, art
and original material from the early years of Maison Martin Margiela
"Late in 2013, a new feed appeared on Instagram. The first post was an image from a rare photobook by Dutch photographer and choreographer Hans van Manen. Subsequent posts featured an eclectic mix of printed material on architecture, fashion and interior design, artists’ books, magazines, lookbooks, art catalogues, and other ephemera: offbeat and imaginative, it was clearly the product of a singular vision. Started as a personal project, rarebooksparis is now a full-time concern for its owner. The Instagram feed has over 30,000 followers, and a growing reputation as a go-to site for exquisitely crafted, hard-to-find books and ephemera, most of it fashion related. The owner’s identity isn’t a huge secret, but nor is he interested in making it public. He runs rarebooksparis from his flat in Paris’s 19th arondissement, in an as-yet ungentrified neighbourhood”.
(excerpt from an editorial on RareBooksParis, Pylot, 2017)
This will be the first public presentation of Rare Books Paris.
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Launch of Giti Nourbakhsch’s newly published illustrated book within a special installation featuring works by the author, Dimitri Antonitsis and fashion designers Rubin & Chapelle, NY
Imbedded in the form of a play script, The Golden Jaguar with a Thin Red Stripe narrates loosely in monologues, which sometimes turn into dialogues, the coexistence of three characters, Bibi, Fzzi and Sitting Lady in an artificial space, a stage. Ix, a voice, is heard. A narrator connects the characters from a point of view perspective, visualizing the unspoken. He appears to describe each reality. Lonely Man is present.
Another mute main protagonist is the golden Jaguar. A single object on a stage, inspired and contextualized by stage designer Katrin Brack, a reminiscence.
The Golden Jaguar with a Thin Red Stripe is a collage of different found text fragments and various stories told. Illustrated.
Giti Nourbakhsch is an experimenting former art dealer.
She lives and works in Athens.
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
A BOOK AFFAIR is a term used to describe a situation in which one is reading a short casual fun book, while attempting to read a much longer more complex book. In this spirit, we are creating a temporary library/stage which will be open to the public for the run of several months (May-November 2018). Within this period we are inviting Greek and international publishers, authors, editors and artists to present their work in lectures, talks, performances, and book signings. The selection spans art, critical theory, fashion, literature, psychoanalysis, architecture and design, a mix of ‘fun books’ and more ‘complex reading'.
The link between editors, artists, publishers, writers, choreographers and theorists involved in A BOOK AFFAIR is contemporary art and reading as a state / activity that involves not only the mind but also the body, in creating meaning and a new poetics. Reading as a methodological and transformational bridge. A BOOK AFFAIR is an experiment that approaches the library as a space of inter-textuality, creation, un-creation, and recreation-to borrow some concepts that Michel Foucault evokes in his essay "Fantasia of the Library" (1977). Local audiences and invited guests can exchange ideas, information and have access to one of the oldest forms of pleasure: books.
Presentations / events, will take place in *the library and auditorium of the Goethe-Institut, *the auditorium of the Benaki Museum, *at Radio Athènes which is transformed by Berlin based architect Etienne Descloux into a stage and a vessel for the collection of objects, books and works of art that will be presented as the project evolves *and in surprising locations in the city, depending on the format each participant chooses. An organic part of A Book Affair is the Radio Athènes library which includes titles selected by artists and collaborators over the last three years.
Etienne Descloux (*1972, Biel, CH) lives and works in Berlin. He studied architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin. Since 2000 he works as an independant architect in Berlin with Tobias Engelschall. He has designed private homes in Neuchâtel, Falsterbo (under construction) and Hiddensee; galleries, art spaces, museums, shops, offices, restaurants, spas and apartments in Bad Driburg (under construction), Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Münich, Osnabrück, Athens (under construction), London, Lucinasco and Nicosia.
He has undertaken the architectural design for exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Galerie der HGB Leipzig and the Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem. He has participated in group shows at the Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Kunsthall Bergen and Kunstverein Bielefeld. And he has collaborated with artists such as Michael Beutler, Pablo Bronstein, Julian Goethe, David Lieske, Sharyar Nashat, Christodoulos Panayotou and Danh Vo.
With the support of
The British Council
Institut Français de Grèce
With the kind collaboration of
The Benaki Museum
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
The discussion is the closing event of apropos documenta, a Goethe-Institut project that run in Athens from October 2016 through September 2017. The invited speakers participated in one of the 'apropos' iterations, All: Collected Voices, an audio archive produced in collaboration with Radio Athènes institute for the advancement of contemporary visual culture, curated by Thomas Boutoux and Helena Papadopoulos. The archive consists of interviews, direct commissions and accidental encounters with artists, critics, gallerists, curators, writers and musicians assembled at a dedicated website conceived and designed by Dexter Sinister. All: Collected Voices was approached as a productive space of conflict in which unfinished and unpolished accounts on documenta 14, but also original soundworks, poetry readings and music unrelated to d14, produced parallel conversations.
In our attempt to continue to evaluate through the flow of words and the changes in voice what had/has been happening in Athens as site of collapse (of the indigenous and the foreign), of proposals (artistic and political), of drafts (of the past and for the future) Plädoyer der Jetztzeit (Call of the here-and-now) is a discussion in the form of a seminar that takes as its point of departure Walter Benjamin's use of the term "jetztzeit". In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin describes a notion of time ripe with possibility, time at "zero-hour", poised, filled with energy and ready to take the "tiger's leap" into the future. However, this isn't naturally occurring but takes the intervention of the artist (or revolutionary) to produce it by "blasting" it free from the ceaseless flow in which it would otherwise be trapped.
Through their individual practice as curators, critics, writers and artists, Kirsty Bell, Anthony Huberman, Rallou Panagiotou, Helena Papadopoulos and Eva Stefani will reflect on "Time filled by the presence of the now" and the possibility (or impossibility) of a "tiger's leap".
*
Kirsty Bell is a critic and writer living in Berlin. She is the author of The Artist's House: From Workplace to Artwork (2013, Sternberg Press) and contributing editor to frieze, art agenda and Mousse magazine.
Anthony Huberman is a writer and curator based in San Francisco where he is director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
Rallou Panagiotou is an artist who splits her time between Glasgow and Athens. Her work has been featured in exhibitions internationally, including Tate Britain (2015), Glasgow International (2016), Signal (2017) and Radio Athènes (2016). She is represented by Bernier Eliades, Athens and Ibid, Los Angeles.
Helena Papadopoulos is a writer and curator, cofounder and director of Radio Athènes institute for the advancement of contemporary visual culture.
Eva Stefani is an artist and filmmaker living in Athens and Berlin. She is assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Athens. Her work was recently featured in documenta 14.
On June 29, 2002, a failed bombing attempt at the port of Piraeus led Greek authorities to the arrest of Savvas Xiros, a member of the November 17 terrorist group. His arrest, the first ever of a member of the group that is also known as 17N, led to the discovery of two hideouts and the arrest of further suspects. The two hideouts, a ground-level apartment in Athens’s Kato Patissia district and a two-room flat in the Pagrati area, were chock full of all the material 17N used in its attacks: stolen license plates, many keys, a computer, proclamations, forging materials, explosives, guns and bomb-making materials.
'Objects to relate to a trial (Nov 17)' is the third in a series of projects that examine important political trials from the recent past. It involves extensive research on the two November 17 hideouts and on an emblematic Athenian hotel and its famous residents in 1999.
The exhibition at Radio Athènes includes two inventories of all the items seized from the two November 17 hideouts except for those used as evidence in the group’s trial or reported by the media, and the testimony of three plumbers in the 17N trial, in which they describe what they saw in one of the hideouts when they went to repair the plumbing. The exhibition also includes a series of photos documenting all the hotel room doors of the Intercontinental Hotel in Athens juxtaposed with a series of photos documenting all the politicians and other public figures who visited Athens and stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel in 1999.
The November 17 Revolutionary Organization was established in 1975 in the aftermath of the Greek dictatorship (1967-1974).
The group, the most durable of the militant Leftist revolutionary groups to emerge from the European radical milieu of the 1970s, assassinated 23 people in 103 attacks on US, British, Turkish and Greek targets over a period of 27 years.
In June 2002, a failed bombing attempt marked the beginning of the end for the group.
The 17N trial opened in Athens on 3 March 2003, and lasted nine months. It was one of the most publicly followed trials in the history of Greece.
Vangelis Vlahos was born in 1971 in Athens, Greece where he lives and works.
His projects have been included in: Antidoron, The EMST collection (part of Documenta 14), Fridericianum, Kassel (2017); The Kids Want Communism (Notes on Division), Museum of Fine Arts (MoBY), Tel Aviv (2017); On to what end?, Camera Austria, Graz (2015); On the moment of change there is always a new threshold of imagination, Artspace, Auckland (2014); Gesture, Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014); Current Pasts, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2012); The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011); To the Arts, Citizens!, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2010); 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009); ISLANDS+GHETTOS, NGBK & Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2009); Monument to transformation, City Gallery Prague, Prague (2009); A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2007); 27th Sao Paulo Biennale (2006); Behind Closed Doors, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2005); Manifesta 5, San Sebastian (2004), and the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004).
September 27 - October 29 2017
opening reception Wednesday September 27, 7:30-9:30 pm
screenings of The Film, every half hour starting at 7:30 pm
Radio Athènes, Petraki 15, Athens 10563
Opening hours: Wednesday 4-8 pm, Saturday 1-5 pm and by appointment
She wanted to be a filmmaker
She had no idea what to film though
How can making a film (as a process) become itself a strategy to process?
'A book, a film, and a soundtrack' draws inspiration from a failed romantic relationship between a female artist and a male filmmaker. They meet and try to become a couple. She wants to make a film. His script is bad. They break up. She keeps looking for a story to shoot when she realizes that the relationship itself, and the process of processing it through her art, should be the film. 'A book, a film, and a soundtrack' are brought together to challenge each other’s limitations. In the form of an exhibition, they become loosely or closely attached, depending on how and when one encounters them. In the end, the three elements make up a meeting—a meeting of story, scene, and mood.
Eleni Bagaki (b. 1979, Crete) holds a Master’s in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. Recent solo shows include: Economy Class, Signal, Malmö (2016–2017); Now you see me, oh now you don't, New Studio, London (2015–2016); Crack, Crack, Pop, Pop...Oh What a Relief It Is!, Radio Athènes, Athens (2015). Selected group exhibitions include: Vilniaus kontekstai, invited by Valentinas Klimašauskas, Vilnius (2017); Millennial Feminisms, L’Inconnue gallery, Montreal (2017); The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum, New York and the DESTE Foundation, Athens in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Athens (2016).
'A book, a film, and a soundtrack' is made possible with the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development.
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Join us to celebrate the new season with the book launch and book signing of Quinn Latimer's "Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems" (Sternberg Press, 2017)
Garden of the Numismatic Museum of Athens, 12 Panepistimiou Street
Tuesday September 5th, at 7:30 pm
Quinn Latimer will read excerpts from the publication
'Some three weeks later, the artist has gone. Her works remain. Inside the glass pavilion is a writer. She is watching the light brushing against the copper: staining it. Outside the pavilion is an elevator and a telephone booth—each its own kind of pavilion—and a sign that reads club. Some kind of orange light seeps through the glass door beneath the sign. Not quite copper—more artificial, fluorescent, like a light from a lottery machine.
Everywhere there are signs that do not read club, thinks the writer. What do they read? Well. Grid, glass, line, plane, leather, tile, light, bamboo, silence, plastic, precarity, violence, distance, austerity, desire, debt, metal, mineral, sex—for example.
What else?'
*
Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. Moving from Southern California to central and southern Europe, crossing geographies and genres, her texts record specters and realities of culture, migration, and displacement, compounding the vagaries of rhetoric and poetics with those of personal history and criticism.
Composed in the space between the page and live performance, Latimer’s recent essays and poems collected here examine issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making. Shifting between written language and live address, between the needs of the internal and the external voice, Like a Woman retrieves the refrain, the litany, and the chorus, exploring their serial ecstasies and political possibilities.
*
Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and editor from California whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 13, Part II, in Beirut. Her books include Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder, coedited with Adam Szymczyk (Sternberg Press, 2014); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013); Film as a Form of Writing, with Akram Zaatari (WIELS/Motto Books, 2013); and Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). Latimer is editor in chief of publications for documenta 14.
Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017)
Design by Sam de Groot
13.6 x 20.5 cm, 248 pages, 1 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-315-8
€20.00
Please join us on Saturday May 20th, at 7:30 pm for the fourth open recording of 'All: Collected Voices' with Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston and Clara Schulmann.
Writing is a line of work, they say. Editing is another, publishing another again. Writing is also a state of being or becoming. We write the time, and the clock turns differently. What is reading, though? For 'All: Collected Voices', Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, and Clara Schulmann give readings of their recent work and discuss language’s relationship to place, body, labor, influence, and all the gendered economies therein.
Quinn Latimer is a poet and critic from California. Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her books include "Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems", forthcoming from Sternberg Press this June, as well as "Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance"(Mousse, 2013) and "Film as a Form of Writing", with Akram Zaatari (Motto, 2013). She is editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14.
Laura Preston writes, edits, and programs artistic projects. She has published books and curated exhibitions, including at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and Witte de With, Rotterdam. The second issue in her edited series “Next Spring: An Occasional Series of Reviews” is entitled "Athens October 17" (Atlas Projectos). She is an associate editor for documenta 14.
Clara Schulmann is a writer living in Paris. She holds a PhD in Film Studies. She teaches art history at the Bordeaux school of art (EBABX). Among her recent publications: "Les Chercheurs d’or. Films d’artistes, Histoires de l’art" (Presses du réel, 2014), "Jeux sérieux. Cinéma et art contemporain transforment l’essai", (HEAD/Mamco, Genève, 2015), "Palmanova" (Form(e)s, Paris, 2016
All: Collected Voices is a project of Goethe-Institut Athen in collaboration with Radio Athènes, curated by Thomas Boutoux and Helena Papadopoulos.
The readings will be held in English. Entrance is free. Seating is limited and on a first-come first-served basis. Drinks to follow.
Despina Zefkili is an art critic and senior editor of Athinorama, the city guide of Athens. She is interested in a critical understanding of art in a wider sociopolitical context as well as its performative and educational aspects. She has published articles on the Athens art scene in international books and magazines including ‘On One Side of the Same Water’ (Hatje Cantz), ‘The Way between Belgrade and Prishtina’ (Stacion Center), Art Papers, Third Text, Ocula and has reviewed exhibitions for Frieze, artnet, Flash Art, ArtInfo.com and South Magazine. Zefkili is a member of the Temporary Art Academy (PAT), and was a member of the production team of the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA (The Non Serious Lectures). She has curated a series of events around performance lectures in the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens. Together with Vangelis Vlahos she co-curated the exhibition ‘Archaeology of Today?’ at Els Hanappe Underground and co-edited Local Folk from 2004 to 2008, a free press publication, focusing on a critical view of local art production and a dialogue with other art scenes.
Kostis Stafylakis is an art theorist and visual artist. He holds a PhD in Political Science and is adjunct professor at the University of Patras.
Makis Malafekas is a writer. His book Miles Davis was just released by Melani Pubs.
All: Collected Voices is a Goethe-Institut project in collaboration with Radio Athènes, curated by Thomas Boutoux and Helena Papadopoulos.
Building Fire, an improvised fire on the street, is a small fire with a chimney for people to sit around and talk, read, and tell stories. We will talk about the fires burning after Standing Rock, Public Space and feminist water protectors, and the music being produced in this turbulent moment.
The Oceti Sakowin, a Sioux term meaning the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation, was an ephemeral gathering that united hundreds of indigenous nations in defense of the right to clean water and the tribal sovereignty of the Standing Rock Sioux. The Seven Council Fires is an ancient legacy, last enacted before the Battle at Little Bighorn, fires that are lit in times of urgent change. Oceti Sakowin was ultimately consumed by fire in a final act of protest by the departing water protectors as they were forced from Standing Rock tribal lands by heavily armed state police, but while this temporary city existed it was defined by a sacred fire at its center, a small Lakota pitfire fed with donated wood that burned continuously for nearly a year.
Paris, LA devoted a special issue to listening to the music of the moment. During our stay in Athens, we will broadcast the Standing Rock Soundtrack, a musical report from Los Angeles, and what we’re listening to in our cars.
Technical / construction support Alexandros Gjinai
Building Fire is made possible through the generous support
of Andreas Melas
Radio Athènes is supported by Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
Curated by Helena Papadopoulos and Thomas Boutoux, the programme aims to cultivate, preserve and transmit the polyphony of responses to the exhibitions and events in Athens during the spring and summer of 2017 via a series of direct commissions, incidental invitations and accidental encounters.
All: Collected Voices channels readings, conversations, interviews and soundworks arranged and recorded at Radio Athènes, assembling itself over time into an oral/aural archive at www.all-collected-voices.org, a dedicated website designed by dexter sinister.
It will go live *ON AIR* from 8 April 2017, recording at Radio Athènes, 15 Petraki street, Athens, and therafter broadcasts from the æther to anyone anytime anyplace.
From its first issue in 1990, TZK addressed aesthetic developments in tandem with political change. We now take issue #105 “Wir sind ihr / They are us” to more closely consider the nationalist, conservative, and racist ideologies that have recently become markedly more visible across Europe and in the United States. At the core of this issue – which has been advised by Helmut Draxler, Isabelle Graw, and Susanne Leeb – are various forms of movement, migration and border politics (of humans, of data, of patrimony, of semiotic meaning), and the tipping point beyond which liberal institutions are incapable of arbitrating “truth”. Conceived prior to the US presidential election, and produced amid the chaos of the new administration’s first weeks, this issue resists the mode of immediate mediation (à la Twitter and the daily news it metabolizes), instead indulging what distinguishes the bound printed page from the digital feed: providing a cooler, more metered reflection of the moment we’re currently experiencing, an analysis of political-aesthetic thinking at a time so seemingly accelerated that the very terms and events used to discursively engage are shifting meaning literally overnight.
In the pages of issue #105, particular attention is paid to the question what challenge flight and migration poses to political thinking – framed, here, as a crisis of the EU and perhaps the Enlightenment values of the democratic West more broadly. In this sense, we ask, for example: How can “hospitality,” as Derrida called it (critiquing Kant’s belief that it is conditional) be understood under these circumstances? What happens when identity politics turn identitarian or are appropriated to bigoted ends? And when we speak of “integration” (and indeed, when we speak as a ‘we’), what are the contingencies? Which we? Who are they? And are they also us? This December, Helmut Draxler sat down with migration scholar Manuela Bojadžijev, political theorist Nikita Dhawan, and philosopher Christoph Menke at Texte zur Kunst’s Berlin office to discuss global refugee flows as a challenge to modern political thought. Their exchange, which opens this issue, demonstrates the elusiveness of left political discourse, which currently stands as equally vulnerable to being absorbed by the historical frame as by the fantastical theater of presently unfolding political events. PLUS: Susanne Leeb writes on archaeological museums in light of the destruction of Syria’s cultural heritage; Angela Melitopoulos discusses a project of hers that will be aired as part of the Greek sector of Documenta 14; Brigitte Kuster examines the “mobile under commons ” forms of self-determination devised by migrants and refugees; Daniel Keller offers his timeline of the “alt-fact”; Caroline Busta outlines the alt-feminism of Trump-era conservative female archetypes; and Sven Lütticken considers the influence of cybernetic practice and thought – from Cold War-era data processing to the accelerationist logic of Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” – on the current political media climate.
Caroline Busta is the editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst. Based in Berlin since 2014, she was previously an associate editor of Artforum magazine, and from 2006 to 2008, co-director of Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York. She has lectured and published catalogue essays on the work of artists such as Merlin Carpenter, Bernadette Corporation, and Bjarne Melgaard. Her current writing and research focuses on art’s relationship to pop culture and ideations of the body.
Anke Dyes is an artist and, since the summer of 2016, an editor of Texte zur Kunst. She previously served as junior lecturer in the Department of Media Arts at Leipzig HGB. Recent projects she has organized include, the online magazine "The Critical Ass" and the symposium "Hazy borders of the Heart.” Her work primarily engages issues of performance art and consumerism.
Organized by the Goethe Institut in collaboration with Radio Athènes, institute of contemporary art, as part of ‘apropos documenta’ a lateral project of film screenings, historical material, readings, conversations, live performances and the creation of a productive archive.
Responding to the forthcoming documenta 14 co-hosted by the cities of Kassel and Athens in 2017, ‘apropos’ offers a pool of material from past editions (1955-2012) while it invites Athenian audiences to meet with salient voices in contemporary art.
Starship publishers talk about artist-publishing introducing themes, artists, and texts that appeared in their magazine over the past two years.
"Starship gravitates toward the German word Zeitschrift, wherein the word Zeit (time) hints that it speaks out of and about a time, the one in which it is made. This also means that it most possibly wouldn’t mean anything, if it would not also take an active part in its time. In this, something like the Theme has always evolved by talking with friends and people we admire, and by inviting people, not in regard to an audience but by creating a relation between the contributions and contributors in the issue. This means it is multivocal- whatever direction the texts and pictures take whilst dissolving into the realms ofits readers, is not due to any clear, prescriptive intentions of the editors (or what may be called a programme), although we naturally support all we publish".
Starship is a Berlin based art-magazine, published by Gerry Bibby, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller and Henrik Olesen.
21.1.2017
14:00 – 17:00 Starship at Radio Athènes, Petraki 15, Athens 10563
An afternoon with music, Ariane Müller, Martin Ebner and the latest issues of Starship.
Starship: A presentation in five seasons is part of ‘apropos documenta’ a lateral project of film screenings, historical material, readings, conversations, live performances and the creation of a productive archive, organized by the Goethe-Institut, Athen.
Responding to the forthcoming documenta 14 co-hosted by the cities of Kassel and Athens in 2017, ‘apropos’ offers a pool of material from past editions (1955-2012) while it invites Athenian audiences to meet with salient voices in contemporary art.
Responding to an invitation by Signal, Radio Athènes is bringing to Malmö four distinct projects by Eleni Bagaki, BLESS, Rallou Panagiotou and Vangelis Vlahos as well as titles from its library in Athens, Greece assembled by artists, curators and writers we have worked with. Books selected by Darren Bader, Kirsty Bell, Quinn Latimer, Josephine Pryde, Teddy Coste, Thomas Boutoux, Kerstin Cmelka, to name a few, will become part of the Signal library available to peruse in the months to come and in an environment infused with the spirit of BLESS.
As the sequence of autonomous presentations unfolds,
I. Economy Class (Eleni Bagaki), II. Two-Hander (Rallou Panagiotou) and III. This Event has Now Ended (Vangelis Vlahos) facts and fictions derived from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting forces -corporeality and intangibility, exchange and reification, reality and mediation- operate at different levels and intensities.
A Ryan Air flight (Bagaki), a street-seller’s bench (Panagiotou) and the notes of Greece’s finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos (Vlahos) trigger these presentations, all conceived in 2016.
I. Economy Class, Eleni Bagaki
November 18 2016 - January 29 2017
II. Two-Hander, Rallou Panagiotou
February 3 - March 5 2017
III. This Event has Now Ended, Vangelis Vlahos
March 10 - April 9 2017
…this is Radio Athènes follows a series of events under the title Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes, the first part of which took place in October 2016 in Athens.
I put a picture on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls, and that if there weren't any walls, there would be no apartment. The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the place where I live, that which separates it from the other places where other people live, it is nothing more than a support for the picture. (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974).
Granted there is a picture, what’s going on behind it? *
Rey Akdogan examines, reveals, and particularizes exactly those diffident objects that lie hidden in the space between the picture and the wall, the supports that, ‘magical in their strength and simplicity,’ are known as “french cleats”.**
The work of art typically overshadows if not completely obliterates its support from sight. “Cleats, often camouflaged by being painted with the exact same paint that is also used on the edges of an artwork, are not made to be an evident part of a visual universe”, notes Akdogan.
Privileging tangible objects with a specific use over the imagined work they could be holding, the cleats make a direct claim for a different hierarchical structure.
Akdogan’s knack for subtle and studied interventions on otherwise workaday things creates a nuanced system that sets her sculptures as markers of internal and external space. Perhaps a metaphor for things we take refuge in, Rey Akdogan’s work can make us unusually clear-eyed and attentive to the infra-ordinary.
In addition to the para-sculptural works she will be showing at Radio Athènes, all titled “Faction”, Rey Akdogan will present a slide work comprised of 80 hand-made transparencies. Using as her primary material plastic bags and plastic packaging largely collected from supermarkets and corner stores in Greece, each diapositive frames seams extracted from these materials.
Akdogan notes: “The slides study the seams and how they are fused. Usually they are the sole bond that allows a surface to contain a volume. They are in the “background.” During production plastic layers are liquefied and fused with the impact of a weight that leaves its imprint. The imprint (the seam) becomes the support. The support (cleat) becomes the surface.”
*
I am substituting here the word ‘wall’ with ‘picture’, borrowing and slightly modifying Jean Tardieu’s famous aporia: ‘Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it?’
**
How to Build a French Cleat Shelf to Hold Virtually Anything, popularmechanics.com
Rey Akdogan completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004 after receiving her MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2001. Recent exhibitions dedicated to her work include Crash Rail (Miguel Abreu, New York, 2015) Rey Akdogan (Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, 2014), night curtain (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2012), off set (MoMA PS1, 2012), Silent Partner (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2012), carousels, rolls, and offcuts (Campoli Presti, London, 2011), and Universal Fittings (Common Room 2, 2008). She has also been included in group exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Real Fine Arts, Venetia Kapernekas Gallery, Simone Subal Gallery, Elisabeth Ivers Gallery (all in New York), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), Galerie Tatjana Pieters (Ghent) and Rodeo Gallery (Istanbul). #46, a book of the artist’s work, was published by PPP Editions in 2012. Conceived as an extended footnote to her use of slide carousels and lighting alterations, it unfolds as a handheld slide projection in book form.
The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Andreas Melas.
We are grateful to the Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York for their invaluable contribution.
With our warmest thanks to the New Hotel, member of Yes! Hotels and Design Hotels for their kind hospitality.
Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes
Merging the intimate story-telling aspect of the voice on the radio with the performative quality of bodies sharing this same experience in space “Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes” sets out on a meandering journey between art, music, dreams, desires, politics and life.
Project #2 Thomas Boutoux with Teddy Coste
MAYBE I'M NOT THE PERSON THAT I NEVER WANTED TO BE
Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 October 2016 8 pm
A two-episode radio drama written and performed by Thomas Boutoux and Teddy Coste. It follows a plot and a group of characters from Somewhere, France, on a random year in the early 1990s, to Athens, on the night that preceded this radio show.
Thomas Boutoux is a writer, curator and publisher from Paris. From 2007 to 2015, he was one of the persons behind castillo/corrales, and he’s now one of the members of the new collective entity Paraguay, Paris.
Teddy Coste is an artist who lives in Lisbon. In his sculptural and installation work, Coste stresses the adaptability of the art object as a carrier of alternative stories and anecdotes.
Curated by Elena Tzotzi and organised in collaboration with Signal, Malmö www.signalsignal.org
Elena Tzotzi is the Co-director of Signal - Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, a collaborative exhibition venue, committed to producing, presenting, and contextualizing art. Previously, Tzotzi worked at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art and Lunds Konsthall. She has curated numerous exhibitions as a freelance curator and contributes regularly to publications and magazines.
Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes
Merging the intimate story-telling aspect of the voice on the radio with the performative quality of bodies sharing this same experience in space “Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes” sets out on a meandering journey between art, music, dreams, desires, politics and life.
Project #1 Kerstin Cmelka
IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG, I DON'T WANNA BE RIGHT...
Friday 14 October 8 pm
Artist and occasional radio-host Kerstin Cmelka will perform a live DJ set and radio broadcast exploring female emotional desires and their attempts of expression in pop music.
Cmelka's practice spans from her early experimental films through photographic reworkings of film stills, ad images, and production shots to her performances—known as "microdramas"—which act as reflexive commentaries on the poles of art and life by blurring the line dividing staging from reality.
Curated by Elena Tzotzi and organised in collaboration with Signal, Malmö www.signalsignal.org
Elena Tzotzi is the Co-director of Signal - Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, a collaborative exhibition venue, committed to producing, presenting, and contextualizing art. Previously, Tzotzi worked at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art and Lunds Konsthall. She has curated numerous exhibitions as a freelance curator and contributes regularly to publications and magazines.
NEON Community Project was established in 2013, with two such projects to be realized annually in various neighbourhoods in the city. This initiative aims to expose the people of Athens to different forms of art, sharing materials with local communities and activating urban spaces. RADIO ATHÈNES, invited to organize a week of events at the disused open air municipal cinema STELLA, is reinstituting its original use with daily screenings and is in turn inviting artists, musicians, curators and visitors to use The Ring as both auditorium (open to the audience) and ‘theatre in the round’.
Screenings will include Perfect Lives (1984), a pathbreaking opera for television in 7 episodes by American composer and writer Robert Ashley; Employment Contract (1992), a short film by Documenta 14 curator Pierre Bal-Blanc which he will discuss with Helena Papadopoulos; and GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) a film by artist Mark Leckey selected by Dexter Sinister (the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) who will elaborate on The Ring and all things circular. Every evening will close with a live performance, bringing to Kypseli The Hydra, The Singing Head, Paolo Thorsen Nagel, Michalis Moschoutis and Ilan Mannouach, contemporary musicians exploring ideas around improvisation, the ephemeral, the material quality of sound, and the physicality of live music.
In his self-described ‘little book’ THE SHAPE OF TIME (1962), George Kubler proposes a realignment of art history based not on chronological procession (with one work following, updating and replacing the previous), but rather multiply-streamed parallel progressions moving through a constellation of distinct formal problems. One work does not necessarily exist at a fixed point in time, but rather connects to one or more form problems that may also have jumbled chronologies. With this rearrangement, he suggests that time moves not forward in a straight line, but intermittently and coincidentally in retreating and recursive loops – ‘more knot than arrow ’.
Maintaining this twisted logic, I’LL BE YOUR INTERFACE.* (RADIO ATHÈNES) will be instigated by a talk on the evening of Sunday, May 29 which unravels the complicated development of a simple typographic character – an asterisk with a Scottish accent. Afterwards, a version of the same talk will animate the space over the following month, only now it will be presented by Radio Athènes’ “house glyph” – a speaking asterisk who introduced herself like this in Mexico City, 2015:
I’ll be your interface. Please look and listen carefully to what I say ... I was born in 2011, in a piece of writing by Angie Keefer, called ‘An Octopus in Plan View’. That essay wonders what it might mean to communicate without language. My character is drawn from a shape shifting typeface, which is called Meta-The- Difference-Between-The-2-Font-4-D, also programmed by Dexter Sinister. My voice comes from Scotland, synthesized from the speech of Isla Leaver-Yap, then digitized by Cereproc Ltd. And all of this was overseen by James Langdon. I am an empty sign, ready for use. So let’s begin.
DEXTER SINISTER is the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, who work at the fringes of various disciplines, including publishing, programming, graphic design, and art.
In the late 1960s, Trisha Brown created a series of pieces dedicated to exploring every day movement and behavior. In order to denaturalize the dancer’s and the audience’s relationship to everyday uses of the body, Brown decided to stage the movement on a vertical wall, defying gravity using harnesses and ropes. Displaced to a vertical framework, ordinary movement was seen for the first time as a highly staged gesture, almost a virtuoso individual performance of an embodied normative cultural script.
A critic would say: Alexandra Bachzetsis’s solo Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me could be considered a sort of an “equipment piece,” where what it is to be explored is how everyday behaviors of gender and sexual identity are reproduced. Bringing Brown’s choreographic tradition into the highly techno-baroque world of global pop culture, PRIVATE is an unsolicited report, fifty-three minutes in duration, on how gender and sexual desire are fabricated through the ritualized repetition of bodily gestures within the neoliberal regime.
In PRIVATE, there are Oriental drag queen dances, gym and western yoga exercises mutating into football and porn poses, stock moves from theatrical training for advertising and the repetition of Michael Jackson’s rituals by teenagers. There is Trisha Brown transitioning into Rembetiko, and a single voice fighting to survive national and gender identity social theaters.
However, PRIVATE does not mobilize techniques of parody that have been developed within feminist and queer cultures during the last years. It doesn’t aim to represent the process of embodiment of gender and sexual norms, but rather it explores the instances of performative failure and inner transition that allow for agency and resistance to emerge. How much history of discipline and dissidence can be encapsulated within a single gesture? Can movement activate the memory of the subaltern bodies that have been buried underneath hegemonic codes?
I would say: I hear your voice singing to me when my own body falls in a void between cultural gender notations. Your voice, exhausted after fighting naturalized gender codes, reminds me that the void embodies an opportunity for agency and survival. PRIVATE is a timeless hymn to transitions. A notation of its inner development, but also a mourning sketch for possibilities that were once open but can no longer be realized. In the end, this dance is not about normative gender performativity, but rather about the somatic energy that allows us to introduce moments of what Jacques Derrida called “improvisatory anarchy” in order to interrupt history and trigger cultural change and political transformation.
Paul B. Preciado
CREDITS
CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY and PERFORMANCE Alexandra Bachzetsis // COLLABORATION CREATION OF PERFORMANCE AND MOUVEMENT RESEARCH Thibault Lac RESEARCH CURATOR Paul B. Preciado // COMMUNICATION DESIGN and PHOTOGRAPHY Julia Born and Blommers-Schumm // COSTUME DESIGN Cosima Gadient // COLLABORATION SOUND Lies Vanborm // LIGHT DESIGN AND TECHNIQUE Patrik Rimann // STAGE DESIGN AND PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Sotiris Vasiliou // PRODUCTION Association All Exclusive // PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Anna Geering // SUPPORTED BY Kooperative Förderververeinbarung between: Stadt Zürich, Fachausschuss Tanz und Theater BS/BL, Pro Helvetia-Schweizer Kulturstiftung, GGG Basel und Ernst Göhner Stiftung // COPRODUCED with Kaserne Basel, Zürich Tanzt, Art Night with ICA London, Rauschenberg Residency/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Tanzhaus Zürich // CO-COMMISSIONED by documenta 14 // THANKS TO Shannon Jackson, Mia Born, Oleg Houbrechts, Daphni Antoniou, Verena Bachzetsis, Jannis Tsingaris and Sakis Bachzetsis
Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me at Radio Athènes is made possible through the support of Andreas Melas.
Wednesday, April 20th at 7 pm
Library of the Goethe-Institut
Omirou 14-16
Athens 106 72
seating is on a first-come first-served basis
entrance is free
the talk will be held in English
Borrowing the title for this talk from the one she used for her exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, in 2014, Josephine Pryde will introduce images and ideas from her recent work.
The talk is both an accompaniment to the exhibition "Always starts with an encounter: Wols / Eileen Quinlan" currently on view at the Museum of Cycladic Art as well as a totally independent event, part of an on-going exploration of the language of photography.
Josephine Pryde
"Making use of the technical and iconic potential of photography in its various forms, Pryde creates visually arresting and conceptually precise images that play upon the relationship between two dominant historical uses of the camera: scientific analysis and artistic endeavor." (Press release, 'lapses in Thinking By the person i Am', CCA Wattis, 2015)
Recent exhibitions include 2015: 'lapses in Thinking By the person i Am', CCA Wattis, San Francisco and ICA Philadelphia. 2014: 'These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions', Arnolfini, Bristol and 'Knickers, Berlin', Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn; 2012: 'Miss Austen Enjoys Photography', Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 'Miss Austen Still Enjoys Photography', Kunsthalle Bern, and 'Night Out, Simon Lee Gallery, London. In 2015, the book 'The Enjoyment of Photography' was published by Kunsthalle Bern. Josephine Pryde delights in the title Professor of Contemporary Art and Photography, University of the Arts, Berlin.
Kalypso Vol II is an exhibition which acts as a topological anatomy of Kalypso, a cosmopolitan Greek resort of the late 70s- early 90s, now lying derelict.
By exploring the materiality of this ruined location, Rallou Panagiotou looks at the historical/cultural mechanisms through which Greece, as a marginal European periphery, received and absorbed pop cultural trends in the era before the full impact of globalisation and de-industrialisation.
The elements of the exhibition Kalypso Vol II, an homonymous film (Kalypso Vol II, 2016, 24min.8sec.) and a series of sculptures whose formal properties are drawn from the objects and architectural elements in the film, are bound together to create a continuous setting of temporal and formal connections.
The film is a visual essay on becoming, on the awareness of modernity, on finding one’s self in an environment full of copies. It is set within, and also re-enacts, a state of summer idleness, invoking the sensation of an infinite temporal stretch. In the film, the Kalypso resort is mapped according to the rules of the classical technique of the Art of Memory* as a place where ‘things’ and abstract notions are situated in order to be memorised.
Through the soundtrack of the film the abandoned resort is connected with the notion of a desert island. ‘The idea of a second origin gives the deserted island its whole meaning. In the ideal of beginning anew there is something that precedes the beginning itself, that takes it up to deepen it and delay it in the passage of time. The desert island is the material of this something immemorial, this something most profound.’ * The soundtrack of Kalypso Vol II by composer Aris Siafas, incorporates extracts from the book Suzanne and the Pacific, by Jean Giraudoux, 1921, where a teenage girl finds herself shipwrecked on a desert island. ‘Suzanne has nothing to create anew. The deserted island provides her with the double of every object from the city; it is a double without consistency, separated from the real, since it does not receive the solidity that objects ordinarily take on in human relations, amidst buying and selling’*.
In a sting of visual successions the architectural spaces of Kalypso are linked with ensembles of clothes such as t-shirts and lycra swimsuits, inexpensive copies of global fashion trends, mass-produced in Greece in the 80’s. Here, these ‘copies’ are rendered as artefacts, as prototypes with an educating role in transmitting an awareness of modernism and desire, connected to a matrix of becoming where dichotomies between past and present, now and not- now, potential and act are dissolved.
*1. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
*2. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
*3. Ibid.
Video projection: Kalypso Vol. II, 2016, 24 min. 8 sec.
music composition & vocals: Aris Siafas.
Appearing as The Bathers : Maria Hassabi, Quinn Latimer, Andreas Melas, Rea Panagiotou.
Rallou Panagiotou (born in Athens, 1978), lives in Glasgow, Scotland and Athens, Greece. Solo exhibitions include Proto Copies, Glasgow International, (2016), Kalypso (Vol.II), Radio Athènes, Athens (2016), Between Shampoo and Snakes, Ibid., Los Angeles, (2014); Second Plateau, Melas/Papadopoulos, Athens (2013); Liquid Degrade, Galleri Riis, Oslo (2013); Rallou Panagiotou, Ibid., Liste, Basel (2013), Artists and Engineers, Ibid., ReMap3, Athens (2011); Exaggerate the Classics, Ibid., London, UK (2010); Heavy Make Up, AMP, Athens (2010); 4x4:Rallou Panagiotou, Transmission, Glasgow (2009). Group Exhibitions include ArtNow: Vanilla and Concrete, Tate Britain (2015-2016); The Transparent Tortoiseshell and the Un-ripe Umbrella, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow (2016), Super SuperStudio, PAC, Milan (2015); Hell As Pavilion, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); All Masters at the Swing Door, Remap4, Athens, One Person's Materialism Is Another Person's Romanticism, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2012); Monodrome / 3rd Athens Biennial (2011); Deste Prize, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2009).
Eileen Quinlan: Artist’s talk &
Olivier Berggruen on ‘Wols and Surrealist Photography’
Museum of Cycladic Art
Auditorium
Neofytou Douka 4
Athens 106 74
Friday March 18, 7 pm
Eileen Quinlan was born in 1972 in Boston, where she received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University (1996). She earned her MFA from Columbia University, New York (2005) and is now based in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and LACMA, Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York among others. She is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York and Campoli/Presti, London/Paris. Recent exhibitions include Image Support, Bergen Kunsthal (2016) and Mind Craft, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2016).
Eileen Quinlan will talk about her work and discuss her participation in the exhibition ‘Always starts with an encounter: Wols / Eileen Quinlan’
Born in Switzerland in 1963, Olivier Berggruen grew up in Paris and graduated from Brown University, in Providence RI, before completing his graduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He worked at Sotheby's London and later became Associate Curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Over the last 15 years, he has curated exhibitions and lectured at a number of internationally acclaimed institutions, among them the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, on Picasso, Klee, Yves Klein and many more. Berggruen's first book, The Writing of Art, was published in 2011, and he has written extensively for various publications. He lives in New York with his wife and two children.
Wols and Surrealist Photography
Olivier Berrgruen will examine the impulse behind photography to give form to things, as well as a tendency to deny this, by engaging in randomness, by espousing the unstructured at the root of Surrealism and Automatism.
The talks will be held in English and are part of the parallel program of the exhibition
'Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan’
produced and organized by Radio Athènes
curated by Helena Papadopoulos.
‘…why is there a shadow in a kitchen, there is a shadow in a kitchen because every little thing is bigger’ writes Gertrude Stein under the entry ‘Roastbeef’ in the section "Food" of her 1914 volume “Tender Buttons” in which she looks at everyday, familiar, unexceptional objects.
Unpacking the photographic images of German born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), known as Wols, and American artist Eileen Quinlan (*1972) a similar encounter with familiar objects, -cheese, beans, mud, flesh, liquids, cloths, a hand or a face- produces indelible imprints, representations of temporal operations and elemental materiality.
Quinlan and Wols are separated by time, historical circumstances and distinct photographic processes. And yet, their works embody the ambiguity of time, and yet both appear to delegate a part of their process to matter itself, as they travel across several genres: ‘portraits’, ‘abstractions’, ‘fashion photographs’ and ‘still lifes’.
‘Always still to come, always in the past already, always present- …………“Ah”, says Goethe, “in another age you were my sister or my wife”.*
*Maurice Blanchot, "The Song of the Sirens, Encountering the Imaginary", 1959, translated by Lydia Davis, Station Hill, Barrytown, New York, 1981
Opening Reception Thursday 17 March, 8:00 pm
Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
Megaro Stathatou, Vasilisis Sofias & Irodotou 1
March 17 - May 8 2016
The exhibition is hosted by the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens and organized by Radio Athènes in collaboration with the Goethe Institut, Athen, the Federal Foreign Office, the Kupferstich-Kabinett Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, with additional support from Outset.Greece; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; New Hotel, member of Yes! Hotels and Design Hotels; Aegean and Olivier Berggruen
Opening reception sponsored by Heteroclito Cave & Bar à Vin
Our warmest thanks to Eileen Quinlan, Miguel Abreu, Olivier Berggruen, Stephanie Buck, Aphrodite Gonou, Michael Hering, Maria Joannou, Elina Kountouri, Samuel Merians, the Eileen Quinlan Studio and Juliane Stegner.
On the occassion of his exhibition ‘Objects to Relate to A Trial’ Vangelis Vlahos talks with writer and architect Aristide Antonas ignited by the question: “Why this research is not a book”*. They will explore the boundaries and qualifiers of processes of inquiry.
*the title of their conversation echoes Claire Bishop’s comment on Vangelis Vlahos’ project in the 27th São Paulo Biennial.
Seating is limited and on a first come first served basis. The talk will be held in Greek, join us at 7pm.
On the front page of the printed edition of the Serbian daily newspaper Politika, on May 26, 2011, the simple headline ‘Ratko Mladić Arrested’ tops a visual juxtaposition of the former Bosnian Serb General Mladić in the mid-1990s and Mladić on the day of his arrest. The portrait of a smiling general in uniform wearing his recognisable Sajkaca military hat is paired with the portrait of a much older man in civilian clothing wearing a baseball cap. The juxtaposition of the two images creates a visual equation The repeated key element of the front-billed hat appears to have been used as part of a forensic process of identification. Hats were always important to Mladić. During the war he was rarely seen without one. It is said that he had a huge collection of them. The former Serbian army leader, currently on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, had been photographed throughout the 1990s wearing approximately 13 different military hats of the same design.
The project is the result of extensive research on Mladic’s complex relationship with hats and the stories surrounding them, through which a network of events, people and places is developed. A former presidential candidate in the United States, a distinguished Greek lawyer, and a veteran British soldier are all part of a narrative that aims to trace the multiple dimensions and complexities that comprise a historical moment.
Mladic’s hat is merely a starting point in order to get involved in a loaded subject and produce a reading outside the official narratives.
V.V.
People: Ratko Mladić, Wesley Clark, Bill Foxton, Alexandros Lykourezos, Sir Michael Rose, Hermann Goering, Dennis Boxx, Robert Novak, Slobodan Milosevic, John Fleming, Bernard Madoff, Muammar Gaddafi, George Koskotas, Zoe Laskari, Alfons Orie, Branko Lukic, Alexander Mezyaev, Jelena Guskova
Locations: Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina / Dayton, Ohio / Southampton, England / Athens, Greece / The Hague, Netherlands
Vangelis Vlahos was born in 1971 in Athens, Greece where he lives and works. His projects have been included in: On to what end?, Camera Austria, Graz (2015); On the moment of change there is always a new threshold of imagination, Artspace, Auckland (2014); Gesture, Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014); Current Pasts, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2012); The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011); MONODROME, 3rd Athens Biennale (2011); To the Arts, Citizens!, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2010); tanzimat, Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2010); 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009); Monument to transformation, City Gallery Prague, Prague (2009); 27th Sao Paulo Biennale (2006); Behind Closed Doors, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2005); Manifesta 5, San Sebastian (2004), and the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004).
Crack, Crack, Pop, Pop...oh what a relief it is!
This is the sound of the exhibition.
Crack
Crack
the joints are cracking (cracking joints)
Pop
Pop
the joints are popping (popping joints)
knuckles, knees, ankles, back and neck
Crack
Crack
Pop
Pop
This is the sound of the exhibition.
Oh and the human body
The human body as a sound – cracking, popping
The human body as a gesture - touching, squeezing
The human body as an image – flattened, still
The human body as a movement – going up and down
Oh and the plants in the room breathing in and out – green air
Radio Athènes is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Eleni Bagaki who inaugurates our New Directions programme. New Directions is a platform dedicated exclusively to young artists working in Athens. The exhibitions are hosted in the 16 sq m ‘right’ gallery space at our headquarters on 15 Petraki Street.
Born in Crete in 1979, Eleni Bagaki lives and works in Athens. She studied at Central Saint Martins, London (MA Fine Art) and Middlesex University, London (BA Jewellery Design). Recent solo exhibitions include: My crap is BIGGER than yours!, Remap4, curated by Annie-Claire Geisinger (2013) and Sex, Birds and Rocks, curated by The Callas, Lust offices, Athens (2012). Selected group exhibitions: Areopagus Königin, curated by Jelena Seng, Parallel Vienna, Vienna; The Office, POP Montreal, Montreal (2015); I thought you were the real thing, Romantzo, curated by Elena Poughia, Athens (2014); You Are Here, Kingsgate Gallery, curated by TestBed and supported by Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); I Meet Together, I Agree, VITRINE gallery, London (2014); LUSTLANDS, curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Family Business, New York (2013). Her solo exhibition Now You See Me Now You Don't opens at New Studio, London on December 10th.
Join us for the opening on Friday the 20th of November from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition will run until December 20th. Opening hours are Wednesdays 4-8 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm and by appointment.
BLESS is a visionary substitute to make the near future worth living for. She has no nationality and thinks that sport is quite nice. She’s always attracted by temptations and loves change. She lives right now and her surroundings are charged by her presence. She tends to be future orientated.
The Paris and Berlin based duo BLESS (Désirée Heiss and Ines Kaag) refuse to capitalize on any one milieu, and instead explore the differences between, and the mixing of, the systems of art, fashion, and design. They glide over the conventions of production, distribution and display to create things (to wear, to use, to look at, to smile at) for now and forever. Their collections are titled to reflect a current mood that may ostensibly last for many seasons to come, questioning consumerist behavioral patterns and proposing instead a ‘Present Perfect Continuous’.
They come to Athens to inhabit the Radio Athènes headquarters at 15 Petraki Street and a private apartment on the first floor of the same building. They transform these interior spaces into a BLESSHome to present their ideal and artistic values to the greek public for the first time.
Special guest: EXOTERIIKA
BLESS Fits every style !
The work of BLESS has been exhibited internationally including the 1st Berlin Biennial, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Manifesta 4, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, the Goethe-Institut, Tokyo, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Istanbul Design Biennial.
Join us for the opening on Sunday November 1st from 12:30 to 5pm.
BLESS November 1- December 20, 2015
Wednesdays 4-8 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm
and by appointment
With the kind support of
The Austrian Embassy in Athens
New Hotel, Member of Yes! Hotels and Design Hotels
Outset.Greece
Encrypted in compressions - Queens and Jacks, Olympians, Rabbits, Dragons, Disciples and Principles - on the edge of replication, syntactical yet absurdist, invalidating and reformatting, Reading Writing Arithmetic, Darren Bader’s first solo exhibition in Athens opens at Radio Athènes on Wednesday September 16th.
Round Room, a collection of 15 poems by Darren Bader translated from English to Ancient Greek, Modern Greek and back into English, has been published on the occasion of the exhibition. The necessary precondition to revel in the cascades of language and dislocations of meaning more than once is bilinguality.
Darren Bader (*1978 Bridgeport, CT) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include The World as Will and Representation, Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2015) and Images, MOMA PS1, New York (2012). He has participated in the 13th Biennale de Lyon, La Vie Moderne, Lyon (2015) and the Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014) among others. He was the recipient of the Calder Prize in 2013. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. In 2015 his book 77 and/or 58 and/with 19 was published by Primary Information, New York and Photographs I Like/To Have and to Hold/[a show on a piece of paper at the front desk] was published by Karma, New York.
The exhibition Reading Writing Arithmetic and the publication of Round Room were made possible through the generous support of Andreas Melas.
With thanks to the New Hotel for its kind hospitality and Heteroclito Cave & Bar à Vin for offering a selection of wines on opening night. Special thanks to Athens Casting.
Radio Athènes director Helena Papadopoulos in conversation with literary scholar Maria Athanasopoulou at the invitation of NEON in the gardens of the French School at Athens. More information here.
A reading night on the poetics of de-extinction in the economy of clicks based on writings by Valentinas Klimašauskas. Using the structure of traditional Lithuanian polyphonic songs, the night will unite fragments, poems, quotes, stories about new friendships (as a metaphor for an old internet), 3D printing humans on Mars, teleporting cloned mammoths, the Radically Extended Time Residency of Jaromir Hladík, why Gertrude Stein would not pass the Turing test, the AI of language, and random companies of post-humanist assemblages.
Born after Voyager 1 left the Earth, Valentinas Klimašauskas is letters, but also a curator and writer interested in the robotics of belles-lettres and the uneven distribution of the future. His book “B and/or an Exhibition Guide In Search of Its Exhibition” published in 2014 by Torpedo Press, Oslo, contains written exhibitions that floated in time and space with or within a joke, one’s mind, Voyager 1, Chauvet Cave or inside the novel “2666” by Roberto Bolaño. Valentinas lives and works between Athens and Vilnius. More of his writings may be found at Selected Letters.
Join us at Radio Books in Petraki 15 at 8pm.
Seating is limited and on a first come first served basis.
The nearest metro stops are Syntagma and Monastiraki.
Quinn Latimer will read from Anthology, her book-in-process, which examines issues of language, class, and gender in texts that travel freely between critical and poetic registers. For her reading at Radio Athènes, she will specifically explore the form and function of the refrain, its serial ecstasies.
Latimer is an American poet, critic, and editor based in Basel and Athens. She is the author of Rumored Animals (2012), which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), which explores the work of Lucas as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Napoleon, Artaud, Beckett, and Sontag.
A regular contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor to frieze, her essays and poems also appear in many artist monographs and critical anthologies. Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; the Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; and Qalandia International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Publications for documenta 14.
Join us at Radio Books in Petraki 15 at 8pm.
Seating is limited and on a first come first served basis.
The nearest metro stops are Syntagma and Monastiraki.
Let’s talk about Order and Cleanliness, life, career, boredom, confusion, stupidity, animals, fashion, organized crime, brain driven persons, tyrants, heros……Join us on Thursday April 30th at the Radio Athènes bookstore to peruse Issue number
2 of The Bulletins of the Serving Library, the composite printed/electronic publication edited by Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer and David Reinfurt. This issue includes a reproduction of Ordnung und Reinlichkeit, a self-made booklet of diagrams that artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss distributed after a late night screening of their film The Least Resistance, at a cinema theater in Zurich in 1981.
The Radio Athènes bookstore is on Petraki 15. It’s a light traffic cobbled street parallel to Mitropoleos Street. The nearest metro stops are Syntagma and Monastiraki.
Radio Athènes is grateful to Stephen Alexander John Kelly
for his support.
Join us on Wednesday April 22nd, at 7pm for a slide lecture by writer Kirsty Bell, informed by her extensive research on the subject of the artist's house.
Bell's book, The Artist's House: From Workplace to Artwork, examines the role of artists' domestic spaces in relation to their work. In a series of close analyses of artists' homes, it not only explores the practice of each inhabitant, but also illuminates broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space.
The book is based on interviews and site visits with contemporary artists, including Jorge Pardo, Miroslaw Balka, Danh Vo, Frances Stark, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pawel Althamer, Mark Leckey, Monica Sosnowska, Gabriel Orozco and Andrea Zittel, and contextualizes them with key artists of the twentieth century such as Kurt Schwitters, Alice Neel, Edward Krasinski, Carlo Mollino and Louise Bourgeois.
Kirsty Bell lives in Berlin. A contributing editor to frieze and frieze d/e, she also writes regularly for Art in America, art agenda, Mousse Magazine and Camera Austria. She has written many catalogue essays for institutions including the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Tate Liverpool and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.
The slide lecture will take place at Apollonos 14, first floor, at 7pm.
Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go 1986-7) one of the most celebrated films of our time since its first appearance in Documenta 8 in Kassel, follows the precarious life of objects in a sequence of compelling, dramatic and hilarious events orchestrated by the artists in their studio.
In Der geringste Widerstand (The Point of Least Resistance 1980-1) and Der Rechte Weg (The Right Way 1982-3) Fischli and Weiss star as the Rat and the Bear wandering in the Swiss Alps and in the freeways and art galleries of Los Angeles. Reflecting on issues small and large the two artists in costume talk about life, nature, art, money, truth, the good and the beautiful.
The work of Fischli and Weiss has been exhibited at museums and biennials around the world. The artists represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2003. They also took part in Documenta 8 in 1987 and 10 in 1997. In 2006 Tate Modern presented a comprehensive career retrospective, Flowers and Questions, which traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. More recently, they have had exhibitions at the Art institute of Chicago in 2011 and the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2013.
The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the Benaki Museum, and OUTSET Contemporary Art Fund (Greece). Radio Athènes would like to thank Polyna Kosmadaki, Curator, Department of Paintings, Drawings, Prints at the Benaki Museum, and Eva Presenhuber and Markus Rischgasser of Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
Radio Athènes wishes to thank Heteroclito Cave & Bar à Vin that will be offering selections of greek wine varieties at the opening.
Looking forward to seeing you at the opening of Small Questions Big Questions 3 Films by Peter Fischli & David Weiss on Monday, April 6th at 8 pm. Visiting hours are Thursdays, Sundays 10 am to 6 pm and Fridays, Saturdays 10 am to 10 pm.
Kostas Sahpazis continues his material reveries with an exhibition of new sculptural works that find their way to the rooms of a former office space in a distinctive neo-classical building on 14 Apollonos Street. In The Gift of Screws, his first one-person show in Athens in 2012, Emily Dickinson’s poem Essential Oils was his departure point. In What a Tailor Can Do presented at Art Basel Statements in June 2013, he worked after Goya’s homonymous “Lo, que puede un sastre!”, the 52nd plate of Los Caprichos. The artist reflected on the maker and the model, the creation of a form made up of totally unstable, changing parts and how they are in the end, held together in a fantasy.
In Apollonos Street he follows the conditions of the space placing objects where there have been abrasions, as with accidents that take place with greater ease at the same spot where a previous one has occurred. In Old-Eyed Première, Kostas Sahpazis assembles a body of work around the ideas of repetition, movement and the instantané, taking his cue from Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1987 poem Boy Breaking Glass.
Kostas Sahpazis was the recipient of the Deste Prize in 2013. He lives and works in Athens.
Join us for the opening of Old-Eyed Première on Saturday, March 28th, at 12 noon. Visiting hours are 11 am to 5 pm on Saturdays and Sundays, and by appointment.
Radio Athènes wishes to thank Anastasia Sgoumbopoulou for her hospitality and Heteroclito Cave & Bar à Vin that will be offering selections of greek wine varieties at the opening.