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transcendental nature.
[With Hara Kotsali, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou]
Georgia Vardarou lives and works in Belgium. She
will be returning to the Athens Festival with a small
exploratory solo, “Hardcore Research on Dance”, a
work she presented at the MOVE ME festival at the
STUK/Leuven arts centre.
Maria Gorgia and the Amalgama dance company
present their new work, “Hidden in the olive groves”,
which explores the relationship between female
identity and contemporary Greek political history.
[With Rania Glymitsa]
Marianna Kavallieratou, a performer and close asso-
ciate of Bob Wilson, creates “Auto Run”, a piece for
four dancers, a study of human weaknesses. With
Kalliopi Simou, Giorgos Tzavaras and the choreog-
rapher.
Visual Arts
A Gathering
The Athens Festival responds to an era in which
identities are being redefined, but symbols and
stereotypes continue to be used systematically and
provocatively, with “a gathering”, a visual project
curated by Maria-Thalia Carras and Olga Hatzidaki.
Artists from Greece and abroad talk about their rela-
tionship with, or impressions and experiences of,
Greece. The works will initially be shown individually
in various printed and electronic media in Greece
and abroad. They will then be posted up in public
spaces around Athens, before being gathered
together for a show at Peiraios 260. Participating
artists include Dan Perjovschi, Maria Papadimitriou,
Pia Roenicke, Vangelis Vlachos, Sarah Crowner,
Miltos Manetas, Claire Fontaine, Eirini Efstathiou,
Istvan Laszlo, Eftihis Patsourakis, Nasan Tur, Anjia
Kircher & David Panos.
The Museum of CycladicArt continues its annual col-
laborations with the Festival and adds two important
events to its visual arts parallel programme: the new
installation to be created by Jannis Kounellis in the
neoclassical wing of the Stathatos Mansion, which
will be inspired by the museum’s spaces and
exhibits, and the show by the Swiss artist, Ugo
Rondinone: Jannis Kounellis, a key figure in the rad-
ical and internationally influential Arte Povera move-
ment, left Greece when still very young to distance
himself from a country traumatized by the Civil War.
He is returning now to create a work amidst the eco-
nomic and social crisis facing Greece today.
Kounellis’ installation could hardly not constitute a
response to the current unsettled conditions; as he
put it himself: “a normal art exhibition in Greece is
inconceivable at this juncture”.
[Dates: 5 April-30 September 2012]
The Ugo Rondinone show will also engage with the
Museum’s Cycladic figurines, adding seven new
sculptures to their numbers – fragile, nude life-size
figures in wax. Rondinone’s poetic and atmospheric
work, which uses a range of media including paint-
ing, drawing, photography, video, installations and
sculpture, has earned him international recognition.
The seven new sculptures, which were made for the
specific space, will form the centrepiece of the exhi-
bition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, arranged in
relaxed poses and set against the white walls of the
Museum.
With joints like those of the mannequins in shop win-
dows, they are extremely detailed, having been cast
in wax directly from the human body.
[Dates: 24 May-19 September 2012]
The show by the American artist Edy Ferguson, who
lives and works in Athens, is to be staged in associ-
ation with the Benaki Museum, and curated by Paolo
Colombo.
[Benaki Museum on Peiraios Street – Dates: 31
May-27 July 2012]
This retrospective at the Benaki Museum will pro-
vide Festival-goers with an excellent opportunity
to view the ground-breaking cinematic and visual
work of two Paris-based Greek artists, Katerina
Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, gathered togeth-
er in one place. The artists and the commentators
who have written on their work, which has been
shown in some of the world’s most important
museums (from the Beaubourg to the MoMA), will
use a wealth of audio-visual material to delineate
some of the most important staging posts in their
radical and feminist careers – from avant-garde
theatre and performance to their ‘expanded’ ‘cin-
ema of the body’ in the nineteen seventies and
their more recent installations and sound movies.
Trade with Greece
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