"Deferred action: adaptations of artistic radicalism"

October 8, 2015 - January 9, 2016

Head of research lab & exhibition curator: Kostis Stafylakis
Dr of Political Science, adjunct at the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Unit, ASFA

Academic Head of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Unit: Vassilis Vlastaras,
artist, Assistant Professor, ASFA

 

Invitation_EN
As part of the art and research workshops of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Unit of the Athens School of Fine Arts, students, graduates and postgraduate students were invited to join an unusual experiment of “deferred action” using the archive of iset.
They were asked to revisit the work of 1970s artists who responded to social turmoil and political oppression by experimenting with the social reference and significance of the artistic act. The artists who attracted the participants’ interest included Maria Karavela, Chrysa Romanos, the New Greek Realists, Dimitris Alithinos, Niki Kanagini, Leda Papaconstantinou, et al.
The objective of the research was to trace the relation of these artistic practices with their time and its social conditions. The participants were called upon to come up with interventions, adaptations and deviations to reflect upon the effects of the dictatorship and the ideas of ‘metapolitefsi’ and thus critically examine the ‘legacies’ of the intergenerational narrative.
This project comes at a time when the notion of dictatorship and transition keep recurring in the public discourse to redefine conflict and the political-ideological identity in various ways. This research process understands itself as what psychoanalysis calls “deferred experience” — the a posteriori re-examination, codification and (re)production  of the trauma.
The fact that this show is taking place at iset, following some research in the same place, has its own significance. One aspect of this significance has to do with the very ‘role’ of iset which, in 2009, switched from an exhibition space for the various aesthetic trends of Greek post-war art to an archive/research mechanism. Isn’t this in itself a case of deferred action, highly rich in stimuli?
Participating artists:
Marilena Aligizaki, Stefania Ablianiti & Stavroula Morakea, Sophia Grigoriadou, Campus Novel (Ino Varvariti, Yannis Delagrammatikas, Fotini Palpana, Yannis Sinioroglou, Yannis Himonakis), Emilia Moraiti, Yorgos Nikas, Persephone Nikolakopoulou, Ada Petranaki and Maira Stefou. 
 
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