4th THESSALONIKI BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
September 18, 2013- January 31, 2014
General title: “Old Intersections- Make it New»
Central Exhibition title: “Everywhere but Now”
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The official site of 4th THESSALONIKI BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART is
http://biennale3.thessalonikibiennale.gr/en/mainpage
Exhibitions, art events in museums and monuments; art installations, performances, workshops, conferences, educational programs, interventions in public spaces and guided tours will be taking place in Thessaloniki, Greece, during the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, from September 18, 2013 until January 31, 2014. This year’s Thessaloniki Biennale is being extended with a full program of events on a role, aiming to attract the art lovers’ interest in the city and internationally.
The 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is funded under the Operational Programme Macedonia-Thrace 2007-2013 and is co-financed by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund). The organization is run by the State Museum of Contemporary Art, realized with the participation of the “5 Museums’ Movement in Thessaloniki” (namely, the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the Museum of Byzantine Culture, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the State Museum of Contemporary Art, the Teloglion Foundation of Art of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) supported by the Municipality of Thessaloniki and with the collaboration of a number of other cultural and educational agencies and institutions.
Director of the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is Katerina Koskina, President of the Board of Trustees of the SMCA, Art Historian & Curator.
The Biennale opening will be held on September 18, with the inauguration of the exhibition “Everywhere but Now”, curated by Αdelina von Fürstenberg, Chief Curator of the Central Exhibition of the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, along with the opening the exhibitions by the “5 Museums’ Movement in Thessaloniki”, while other events and exhibitions will be inaugurated during the following months.
4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art -a Synopsis
(the final program will be announced on September)
The Mediterranean sea, as a geographical space, in which the current cultural and social reality is researched and studied, although yet vague and still extremely interesting due to the constant dramatic changes in recent years, with its traditional elements along with influence and impact of the global model indicated, will be again this year’s thematic of the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, under the general title “Old Intersections-Make it New”.
The Biennale program goes as following:
_ Central Exhibition
“Everywhere but Now” is the title given to the Central Exhibition by Αdelina von Fürstenberg the Chief Curator of the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Independent Curator and Film Producer, President of the NGO ART for The World.
Over 50 artists from 25 countries - from Brazil and Cuba to Iran and India, as well as many Mediterranean countries, including 14 artists from Greece - will present their works, using all media such as paintings, sculptures, photography, video installations, films and performances.
Αdelina von Fürstenberg’s comments on the exhibition title: “Everywhere but Now closely relates the question of space of different genius loci in the Mediterranean area with the question of time of creation in our contemporary world. It’s in fact, Ernst Jungers’s Hic et nunc that in the "Treaty of Rebel" describes the rebel as an independent and free man of action, very similar to the artist’s condition. Everywhere but Now broadens also the concept of hic and nunc by giving a wider significant: a vision that adheres to the ideals of existentialism and recognizes man’s fragility in his condition over: the Being there, Dasein of Heidegger. In addition, we can perceive in the title the fundamental character of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, in taking the world as horizon of the project.”
Participating artists and filmmakers: Marina Abramovic, Ghada Amer, John Armleder, Maja Bajević, Bill Balaskas, Lenora de Barros, Beforelight, Jacques Berthet, Nigol Bezjian, Mohamed Bourouissa, Marie Bovo, David Casini, Sheba Chhachhi, Claire Fontaine, Jordi Colomer, Marta Dell’Angelo, Desertmed Collective, Haris Epaminonda, Inci Eviner, Ymane Fakhir, Parastou Forouhar, Apostolos Georgiou, Khaled Jarrar, Hüseyin Karabey, Gülsün Karamustafa, Iseult Labote, Ange Leccia, Los Carpinteros, DeAnna Maganias, Marcello Maloberti, Miltos Manetas, Mark Mangion, Liliana Moro, Adrian Paci, Rosana Palazyan, Jafar Panahi, Maria Papadimitriou, Dan & Lia Perjovschi, Paris Petridis, Ivan Petrović, Khalil Rabah, Philip Rantzer, Zineb Sedira, Veronica Smirnoff, Priscilla Tea, Panos Tsagaris, Maria Tsagkari, Gal Weinstein, Peter Wüthrich, Raed Yassin, Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Vasilis Zografos.
Exhibition Designer: Arch. Uliva Velo.
Countries: Albania, Algeria, Bosnia, Brazil, Cuba, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Syria, Switzerland, Turkey, USA.
Central Exhibition venues: Alatza Imaret, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Geni Tzami, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Pavillion 6 (Thessaloniki International Trade Fair area), State Museum of Contemporary Art (Moni Lazariston)
For the first time, a large part of the Biennale Central Exhibition will be hosted in the Pavillion 6 (Thessaloniki International Trade Fair area), urging the visitors to explore the Thessaloniki city centre, and discover the monuments along with the old and contemporary history of the city.
The SMCA headquarters, Moni Lazariston, hosts the big exhibition “The Costakis collection and the Russian avant-garde. 100 since the collector’s birth”, putting in focus the collection and the collector’s work accordingly, through over 250 artworks. At the same time, some of the artists participating in the Central Exhibition will be in dialogue with Russian avant-garde period works, during the Biennale.
_Exhibitions organised by the “5 Museums’ Movement in Thessaloniki”
State Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition title: “The Costakis collection and the Russian avant-garde. 100 since the collector’s birth”
Venue: Moni Lazariston
Duration: April 5, 2013-January 31, 2014
Curators: Maria Tsantsanoglou, SMCA Director, Angeliki Charistou, SMCA Art Historian
2013 is an anniversary year for the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki-Greece, since it has been 100 years since the collector George Costakis was born in Moscow. On this occasion the SMCA holds a big exhibition, with over 250 artworks from the famous Russian avant-garde collection, dedicated to the collector himself, a large part of whose collection belongs to the Museum. The other part was donated by the collector himself in 1977 to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The Costakis collection is the largest collection of Russian avant-garde art (1900-1930) and has a great mobility in exhibitions all over Europe and the USA. It is a big presentation of the Costakis collection and the archive which follows and shows the collector’s gaze and method, through monographic artists’ presentations, enriched by guided tours, educational programs, talks, book presentations and lessons on the Russian avant- garde period.
State Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition title: “Tradition-Reversal”
Venue: Warehouse B1 (port area)
Duration: September 2013-December 2014
Curator: Katerina Koskina, SMCA President, Yannis Bolis, SMCA Art Historian
The exhibition consists of art works which emerged from donations and purchased acquisitions of the State Museum of Contemporary Art that took place the past few years. These works of art –paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and videos– aim to form a single language, an artistic intervention for the situation in the Mediterranean that they will stand at the same time as action, idiom, expression and image, in an era of intense and dramatic upheavals, rapid and unexpected changes. The artists come to tell stories of personal and collective experiences, or stories of contemporary political, social and cultural questionings such as alienation, violence, technology of information, relationships of the present and the past, communicational conditions of the work of art, structures and behaviors in the urban environment, economic crisis, globalization, as well as similarities and differences, convergences, unifying lines and deviations, the “old” and the “new” in the wider geographical area of Mediterranean.
Artists: Nikos Alexiou, Stephen Antonakos, Lydia Dampassina, Khaled Hafez, Nike Kanagini, Antigoni Kavvatha, Mahita Khatari, Nikolaj Bendix Skuym Larsen, Maria Loizidou, Dimitris Merantzas, Constantin Xenakis, Irfan Onürmen, Dennis Oppenheim, Leda Papaconstantinou, Eugenio Tibaldi, Gioros Tserionis, Costas Tsoclis, Yang Yongling and others.
Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
Exhibition title: “Mediterranean palimpsests: three enigmas of decay and incorruption”
Venue: Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
Duration: September 18, 2013-January 31, 2014
Curators: Dr. Archaeologist, Evangelia Stefani, Archeologist AMTh, Dr. Archaeologist, Angeliki Koukouvou, Archeologist AMTh, Dr. Art Historian, Themis Veleni
The exhibition “Mediterranean palimpsests: three enigmas of decay and incorruption” invites to an open dialogue two cultural derivatives of different eras of the same place. An ancient text, the earliest preserved Greek “book” in Europe, the Derveni papyrus, converses with two contemporary works of art, in the form of installation, by the artist Demetris Xonoglou.
The exhibition’s narrative is being unfolded in two different units, defined by two large in size installations by Demetris Xonoglou, in two halls of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The first raises the issue of the relationship between the political and institutional power with knowledge and cultural and material goods, while the second highlights the issue of personal responsibility towards knowledge and the choices, according to which everyone constructs, through the plethora of cultural information, their personal cultural palimpsest.
The exhibition addresses the perennial question regarding the acquisition and management of knowledge. Knowledge as a collection of cultural information units from different sources of provenance, as a dynamic multi-collective construction, which travels through the material and organic bodies in space and time. Knowledge as a personal case, but also as a collective condition for its existence, its definition and preservation. A question that rises urgently through a new prism, in a crucial for humanity era: “how knowledge is transmitted”, “how it is assimilated”, “who manages knowledge” and finally “how knowledge of the past is transformed into creation in the present.
Museum of Byzantine Culture
Exhibition title: "The veneration of Saint Mamas in the Mediterranean: a traveller, border defender Saint."
Venue: Museum of Byzantine Culture
Duration: October 19, 2013-January 19, 2014
Curator: Dr. Agathoniki Tsilipakou, MBP Director, Dr. Nikos Bonovas, Archaeologist MBP
For the first time, the exhibition presents the broad dissemination of Saint Mamas’, which until today remains alive among different peoples across the Mediterranean. Artifacts from Greece and Cyprus, but also rich photographic material cover a period from the 6th c. to our time.
Initially, the exhibition traces the identity of the saint, martyred in Caesarea during the years of the Emperor Aurelianus (270-275 a.D.), as well as the origin of the iconographic type as a shepherd boy. The main part of the exhibition focuses on the diffusion of Saint Mamas’ veneration in Cyprus, Constantinople, Eastern Mediterranean and Greece. A special reference is made to the relation between Mamas and Demetrius, patron-saint of Thessaloniki, highlighting their healing and myrrh-streaming powers. The exhibition ends with the diffusion of the saint’s veneration in the medieval West.
Through churches, wall-paintings, icons, objects of metalwork, religious fairs and place names a common tradition is displayed, a tradition that survives in several parts of the Mediterranean. The exhibits and the photographic material come from the collections of the Museum of Byzantine Culture, public museums, private collections and Ephorates of Antiquities around Greece, as well from museums and churches of Cyprus.
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition title: “The Mediterranean experience: The Mediterranean as a spatial paradigm for circulation of ideas and meaning”.
Venue: Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
Duration: September 18- December 31, 2013
Curator: Denys Zacharopoulos
Deputy Curators: Alexios Papazacharias, Maro Psyrra
This MMCA exhibition comprises more than 120 emblematic contemporary art works by Greek and foreign artists, who are negotiating the manifold concept of free public space. The Mediterranean is understood here, as spatial paradigm and structure in which the traditional notion of centre is substituted by the function of an “opposite side”, which gives place to communication and exchange. The exhibition explores systematically and for the first time, the formation of new cognitive and aesthetic categories as a topology of "The Mediterranean Experience”, within contemporary art, starting with Le Nouveau Réalisme and Arte Povera until the present times.
After the 2nd World War, public art stopped being exclusively identified with “statue-making” and monumental sculpture, and the unorthodox demand of artists for a unification of art with life came to the fore. Within this frame new forms of art appeared, such as the Environments, the Installations and the Performances, that inaugurated a conscious attempt at the incorporation of the artist’s creation into the real space and targeted the active participation of the audience in the artistic result.
Public art in the Mediterranean region was historically linked to the urban context. In time though, the new social, economic and political circumstances as well as the rapid advancement of technology created a different artistic context. Today, “public space” can be considered as the mental dimension of a monument such as the White Tower of Thessaloniki, of a private space like the house of Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, or even the potential spaces of the Mass Media or internet as well as archives –a locus of memory– of objects that testify to the existence of the Other, next to us or opposite.
Teloglion Foundation of Art – AUTh
Exhibition title: “Vasso Katraki: In Black and White”
Venue: Teloglion Foundation of Art – AUTh
Duration: September-December 2013
General Coordination: Prof. Alexandra Goulaki-Voutyra, Teloglion Foundation Gen. Secretary
Curator: Dr. Panagiotis Bikas, Art Historian
Artistic Curator: Marietta Panidou, Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Graphic Design, College of Creative Arts, School of Art and Design, West Virginia University, USA
The exhibition “Vasso Katraki: In Black and White” held at the Teloglion Foundation of Art is a major artistic event for the city of Thessaloniki. Vasso Katraki was the greatest female engraver in Greece and her work has illustrated the agony and the passing of the Greeks to the difficult post-war period. Her socially and politically charged work echoed a universal message of humanism and renewed essentially the art of engraving, with which dealt almost exclusively. Abroad, she was awarded with significant prizes. Among them a prominent position certainly has the one from the Biennale of Venice, in 1966, under the Commission of Tony Spiteris. This award served as a reference point for the Greek engravers. The presentation of key-moments of her artictic course, in which prevails the typical abstract line, along with matrices and the famous pebbles from Gyaros island, is accompanied by material from the Tony Spiteris’ Archive. All the above, enable the visitors to experience the emblematic artistic route of an engraver, who managed to connect the individual and the collective in a unique way.
The exhibition has as axis the politically charged work of Katraki, the emergence of the material and the folk art. The second axis is the imprinting of the Messolonghi’s lagoon, not only as an idyllic landscape, but also as an ecosystem in danger. This way is related to the contemporary environmental concerns about the use of water in the Mediterranean, a subject that also concerns the modern artists.
_Other events of the main program
3rd Thessaloniki Performance Festival
Duration: October 15-19, 2013
Curator and Coordination: Eirini Papakonstantinou
After the successful conduct of the first and the second Performance Festival, the public’s positive response and how it contributed to the spread of performance as an artistic expression and practice, the 3rd Festival is aiming to be an important project that will explore the concept and the development of performance, will instigate awareness and will set down an indelible mark on the city. The festival’s program will include live performances which will highlight the diverse elements that constitute the art of performance, master classes by artists participating in the festival and a workshop to be held a week before the opening of the Festival and will aim to broaden the relationship between performance and photography, as also the transition through the photographic lens. In addition, the Festival will include a conference with theorists/art historians and interventions by artists and participants of the Festival, experimental electronic music concerts and screenings of video performances. In addition, underlining the historical background of this artistic practice, the Festival will make tributes to two major art figures that throughout their longtime artistic trajectories, they excelled in the area of performance.
Live performances
Maria Jose Arjona (Colombia), Ron Athey (USA/UK), Aymeric Hainaux (France), Clarice, Lima (Brazil), Mara Maglione (Italy), Mohamed El Mahdaoui (Morocco), Monali Meher (India), Alekos Plomaritis (Greece), Tamar Raban (Israel), Maria Sideri (Greece)
Workshop by Manuel Vason
Tributes: Valie Export (screenings), Dimitris Alithinos (lecture, re-enactment, video)
Video-performance screenings: Sarah Trouche (France), Andres Galeano (Spain), Mary Zygouri (Greece), Performance Voyage by Artists’ Association MUU (Finland)
Young Artists’ Workshop of the 4th Thessaloniki biennale of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the ACTION FIELD KODRA, (Municipality of Kalamaria)
Venue: Action Filed Kodra, Kalamaria Thessaloniki
Duration: October 14-25, 2013
Curators: Areti Leopoulou, Theodore Markoglou, SMCA Art Historians
Collaboration: Dimitris Mihalaros, Director of Action Field Kodra
The artists’ workshop of this year’s Biennale is being held within a fertile collaboration with the Action Field Kodra. As a workshop, reasonably it is one of the most flexible programs, since the participants are called to work after the beginning of the Biennale and to configure their works throughout the process of the whole organization.
For this reason – inevitably – there are no pictures of the works to show you.
This year’s workshop will have an alternative and multilevel structure:
in charge, there will be two acclaimed artists who will be the “animators” of the program, alongside with the curators and the coordinators of the workshop. There will be also created a group of 7 to 10 artists from various creative fields and from different experience backgrounds, who will be asked collaborate and coexist in the framework of the workshop (established artists together with “fresh” graduates from the School of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki, Ioannina and Florina, who will be selected from a committee after reviewing portfolios from the Platform project of the Action Field Kodra).
Any kind of project that may come up from the workshop will be presented afterwards either in an exhibition or in an alternative way that the works themselves may provide.
Symposium
The theme of this year’s Biennale symposium will be linked again to the general title of the Biennale and subsequently to the Mediterranean area. At the same time, the symposium will be focused on the function of the archives and their practices in the contemporary art field.
Tribute to the experimental and visual arts cinema in collaboration with the 54th Thessaloniki Film Festival
November 1-10, 2013
Interventions in public spaces
At the same time, the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art will support, exhibitions and art actions organized by other institutions, and groups. The full program will be announced in the final press conference given before the officail opening on September 2013.
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