Ελένη Ζυμαράκη

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Art Athina 2018, Athens Conservatoire

From Thursday, June 21th until Sunday, June 24th Art Athina will be welcoming the visitors in the two basements of the Athens Conservatoire. The art fair will be inaugurated by the President of the Greek Republic, Prokopios Pavlopoulos on Wednesday June 20th, a day exclusively reserved for the previews.
This year’s Art Athina hosts 53 local and international galleries.
The program of the 23d Art Athina is organized as follows:
Main: The central section of the exhibition spreads in the two main spaces of the Athens Conservatoire, where local and international galleries present their booths.
Highlights: Young international galleries join Art Athina upon the invitation of the Artistic Director, Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos. The galleries hosted this year come from London, Porto, Athens, Paris, Antwerp, Los Angeles, Cologne and New York.


Feature: A section conceived and organized by an annually appointed curator. This year’s section is curated by Artemis Baltoyanni. Pseudomorphs borrows its title from minerals formed by chemical or structural change of another substance, though retaining their original external shape. Metaphrased both formally and conceptually, Pseydomorphs brings together artists exploring layered and ambiguous subject matter including formal investigations, identity politics and issues of displacement, so present in Greece at the moment. The galleries hosted in the Feature section come from London, Glasgow, Paris and New York.
Design: The design project of Art Athina will be taken over by Antiqua gallery (Athens) and will be presenting historical design furniture, lighting and decoratives from masters of design of the post war period, together with works of art by greek modernist artists. The New York based design studio objects of common interest, present an installation designed specially for Art Athina, in the entrance of the fair.
Video: This year’s video program runs in collaboration with the DESTE Foundation and presents the video artwork of the Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg and the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. The artwork consists of two video projections specially selected for Art Athina both of which delve, each one in their own artistic means, into the rich symbolic and emotional meanings within psychological states, in an attempt to shed some light to the contradictions in the human nature. The DESTE Foundation participates in Art Athina 2018 with works by two women artists, the Dutch Rineke Dijkstra (b.1959) and the Swedish Nathalie Djurberg (b.1978). Two different screenings were selected specifically for presentation in the unfinished facilities of the Athens Conservatoire, this emblematic building of Greek modernity designed by the architect Ioannis Despotopoulos. The two artists use different artistic languages to explore extreme psychological conditions rich in symbolic and emotional meanings as they attempt to render the contradictions of human existence more understandable.
Tribute: The Vienna based Gallery Charim in collaboration with the Austrian Embassy in Athens will pay a special tribute to late artist Tamuna Sirbiladze. Taking into account her special relation to Athens and to Art Athina as well, a selected choice of her works together with a work by Elisabeth Penker will be presented.
A discussion in honour of Tamuna Sirbiladze will be held on site at Art Athina, Thursday, 21 June, at 18.00 hours with contributions by Max Henry (Vienna), Benedikt Ledebur (Vienna) and Denys Zacharopoulos (Athens).
Independent Projects: Local and international Independent art spaces will participate in Art Athina 2018. Hypercomf, a newly founded, fictitious company, produces installations of a hybrid, soft and comfortable art, objects of everyday use and poetry. SERAPIS, a shipping company based in Greece, produces, among other things, clothes and art objects inspired by the realm of the shipping industry. Enterprise Projects, presents the EP Journal, its recent publishing initiative in the form of a bimonthly internet edition of a theoretical research text in relation to art in the Greek and English language. 3 137 presents its newly created institution, Gabriela, inviting Raja’a Khalid to create a sound work for the communication department of the new institute. A virus spreads across Art Athina in the form of posters and printed material informing about the number that allows the guests to enjoy the project.
Talks: The Talks program of Art Athina 2018 is curated by Katerina Nikou. The guest participants in Talks come from different cultural backgrounds in the field of contemporary culture and question issues related to curating, collecting and targeting audiences through their own practice. At the same time a series of performative lectures given by Haris Xanthoudakis are also scheduled.

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