AM Love
Lito Kattou & Petros Moris
music by Jay Glass Dubs
Wednesday 19 December, 7-9:30 pm
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 a 7-month long project organized by Radio Athènes and Goethe-Institut.
Radio Athènes is supported by
Outset. Contemporary Art Fund (Greece)
ALIKI PANAGIOTOPOULOU
Drawers
November 14 - December 8 2018
Opening reception: Wednesday November 14, 7:30-9:30 pm
Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 6-8 pm
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #13
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #12
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #11
SABETH BUCHMANN, KERSTIN STAKEMEIER,
LAURA PRESTON
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #10
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
An Encyclopaedia of Practices
A Project by LENIO KAKLEA
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
A BOOK AFFAIR #9
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
BILL: JULIE PEETERS, ROSALIND NASHASHIBI, ELENA NARBUTAITÈ
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
A BOOK AFFAIR #8
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
Karl Wirsum
11-17 September
Opening on Tuesday September 11 at 7:30 pm
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
A BOOK AFFAIR #7
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
Thursday July 5th at 8:30 pm
KENNEDY: Launch of issue No. 8
“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
A BOOK AFFAIR #4
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
Makis Malafekas: De Les Kouventa
Friday June 8th, 8:30 pm
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #3
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
Thomas Boutoux and Joachim Hamou present Paraguay Press
Friday June 8th, 7:30-9:30 pm
What does Paraguay stand for?
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #2
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
23 May - 7 June 2018
RareBooksParis
preview: Wednesday May 23rd, 7:30-9:30 pm
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)
A BOOK AFFAIR #1
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
11 May - 22 May 2018
Giti Nourbakhsch: The Golden Jaguar with a Thin Red Stripe
Friday 11 May, 7:30 pm @ Radio Athènes
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
Temporärer Kunst-Buchladen
May - November 2018
various locations
A Goethe-Institut & Radio Athènes project
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.
Vangelis Vlahos: Objects to relate to a trial (Nov17),
2016-2017
November 15 - December 16, 2017
Opening reception on Wednesday November 15, 7:30-9:30 pm
opening hours: Wednesday 4-8 pm, Saturday 1-5 pm or by appointment
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.
3 women reading, 3 women writing, 3 women working
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.
Join us on Saturday April 22nd at 7pm for an open recording in the context of 'All: Collected Voices' featuring:
Despina Zefkili
Definition of “From”
Kostis Stafylakis
Documenta 14 in Athens: some less joyful thoughts
Makis Malafekas
Le Déclic
The presentations will be in english.
Seating is limited and on a first come first served basis.
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.
Oscar Tuazon
Building Fire
with the participation of Paris, LA
April 8 - June 30 2017
Join us for the opening on April 8th, from 6:30 pm
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)
All: Collected Voices is an audio archive produced by Goethe Institut Athen as part of ‘apropos documenta’ together with Radio Athènes.
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.
Please join us for a conversation with TEXTE ZUR KUNST editor-in-chief Caroline Busta and editor Anke Dyes on Thursday, March 9th at 20:30
at the library of the Goethe-Institut, Athen, Omirou 14.
TZK #105 “Wir sind ihr / They are us / Είναι εμείς"
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.
November 18 2016 - April 9 2017
Signal, Malmö, Sweden
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.
October 25-December 10, 2016
Opening reception: Tuesday 25 October, 7:30-9:30 pm
Hours: Wednesdays 4-8 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm and by appointment
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.
& RADIO ATHÈNES
PRESENT
THE RING
@ STELLA CINEMA
30 MAY - 5 JUNE
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.
DEXTER SINISTER: I'LL BE YOUR INTERFACE. *
May 29 - June 29
Sunday 29 May, 8:00 PM Talk:
AN * WITH A SCOTTISH ACCENT
15 Petraki Street, Athens 10563
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.
Radio Athènes and the Goethe-Institut
are thrilled to announce a talk by artist
Josephine Pryde
These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions
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.
Rallou Panagiotou | Kalypso (Volume II)
Saturday 19 March - Wednesday 4 May 2016
Opening reception Saturday March 19, 7 pm
Opening hours: Wednesdays 4-8 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm
and by appointment
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.
Always starts with an encounter:
WOLS / EILEEN QUINLAN
‘…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.
(In Three Voices and With a Fisherman's Exaggeration)
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.
Join us from 5pm until late.
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.
Radio Athènes presents an installation of 3 films by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss at the Pireos annex of The Benaki Museum.
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.