Yiannis Pappas: A Key
Making his way through a sequence of “cells”, his only tool for escape is a key, which he uses to break through the walls. A lack of imagination — that is, a spiritual limitation — is offset by repetitious action and an insistence on escape.
Thanassis Akokkalidis: Don't Look Down
Thanassis Akokkalidis faces his fears and sets them apart from his phobias, adopting a different reality for his mind. Sat on the highest point of the building opposite the Benaki Museum, he is brought face to face with his biggest fear.
Anastasia Papatheodorou: A Woman in a State of Truth
The artist walks the fine dividing line between information and experience, and sets off down the path of self-awareness. She acts as a nomad, taking in the sounds, music, and moving image of a projection showing moments taken from the natural world, large-scale events, and the minutiae of daily life.
Yannis Adoniou + Stavros Apostolatos: Portrait of the Unknown Man
Taking movement as their tool, Yannis Adoniou and Stavros Apostolatos flirt with the idea of disappearance. The two performers seek to dissolve their forms — taking as their mainsprings walking, standing and immobility, leaps, collapses and micro-movements — to the point where they disappear completely from view.
Dimitris Chimonas: Birthday
The artist sings “happy birthday” to himself, over and again, endlessly. Compulsive repetition creates the opportunity for a new outcome. This universal song, perhaps the best known in the world, becomes a personal elegy to a lost innocence.
Katerina Oikonomou: And There Was Voice
Classical music training, opera and aesthetics face deconstruction and denudation in this work by Katerina Oikonomou, who uses her voice to discover the limits of body and spirit. She will produce sounds — classical arias, contemporary songs, voices, screams — that reveal her inner self and the very limits of her vocal chords.
Giannis Karounis: Orbital
A body and a ball on an orbit delineated by the constant, tortured attempts of one person to find their balance. Giannis Karounis will bring his body into a mutually dependent relationship with a ball — another body, another being that he will try to understand and fall in step with
PASHIAS: Diagrama (Training for performance #6)
Centred on the body as a vehicle for the energy, skill, aesthetic ideals and ability seen in the world of sport and physical training, PASHIAS explores here the concept of contest. With an eye on completing a specific task, the body is brought in touch with the parameters of its own self, with its material and social dimensions.
Alexandros Michail: The eternal fire which lights them up inside and makes them glow
Labouring under the weight of time itself, the artist transfers tonnes of sand using a punctured, leaking sack — an endless battle to understand an object in constant flux, his own self and, through himself, the world around him.
Thomas Diafas: Dance With Me
Thomas Diafas engages visitors in a metaphorical verbal “dance” of speech, expression and creation. Sat in a chair, the artist opens each conversation with visitors using the phrase “That is inhumane.”
Serafita Grigoriadou: The Never-Ending Song
Serafita Grigoriadou presents a work that references the voice and memory — that is, the voice as a special facet of the soul that is impressed in our memory.
Spyros Charalampopoulos: I Justify My Existence
The artist labors over hunks of wood, battling to sculpt them with human-made tools, to bring them down to his scale, to reshape them. The environment, both as a concept and as a material, has an effect on the loneliness people feel, provoking violent actions and a need for connection.
Marianna Kavallieratos: Skin
Surrounded by a pile of clothes, the artist dresses and undresses herself constantly, transforming herself over and again, changing and reshaping herself to become a doll that tries on different characters and silent roles.
Christina Vasileiou: bd | n | sl
in memoriam
Sound and the body, action and effect define this work by Christina Vasileiou. An experiment exploring the body’s reaction to constant, relentless sound. The artist freely submits to the biddings of the aural incitation channelled into her ears.
Nikolaos: Look at Pain in the Eyes, and the Pain Passes
The lack of freedom and prevailing enchainment of humankind today is only intensified by greater societal acceptance of the status quo, which brings, by extension, even greater societal constraints. The artist makes this lack of freedom literal, appearing bound, and hanging by a rope.
Elena Antoniou: An Eight-Hour Journey
A route delineated by a twenty-centimetre-wide white line that runs throughout the spaces of the Benaki Museum forms the predetermined path followed by the artist for eight hours.
Yiannis Pappas + Nikolaos: Semi-Glory
The lack of freedom and prevailing enchainment of humankind today is only intensified by greater societal acceptance of the status quo, which brings, by extension, even greater societal constraints. The artist makes this lack of freedom literal, appearing bound, and hanging by a rope.
*Evgenia Tsanana: The Office for Public Unburdening
The artist will create a participatory work, an office where visitors can relieve whatever is burdening them by describing their own nightmares. These nightmares are written down in pencil on paper, then wiped out with erasers. The rubbings left behind are then saved and stored. On the final day, the artist will walk down to Piraeus and throw the rubbings into the sea, before returning to close the Museum, both literally and figuratively.
*Rafael Abdala + Jessica Goes: Protovoulia
Rafael Abdala and Jessica Goes come together to enable a creative process through collaboration, opening spaces for others artists to join in on-site. Performers, igniters, with a desire to wander through the otherness.
*Kira O’Reilly: I came to the sea and I was scared. My heart is broken
Words of a fisherman who found the bodies of young refugees on the beaches of Greece flood this work by Kira O’Reilly, that speaks of loss, decay and despair.
*Maria Herranz: Medea: Impulse & Ear
The viewer and actress will engage in a symbiotic relationship that will result in the actress’ impulsive selection of a tract of text from Seneca’s Medea
