Athens Biennale
Each edition is defined by a different concept and curatorial team, tapping out the political zeitgeist and highlighting contemporary issues relating both to the international and the local sociocultural context.
The exhibition was curated by XYZ (the curatorial alias of Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio and Augustine Zenakos) and it took place in Technopolis, City of Athens, from September 10 to December 2, 2007, with the participation of a total of 110 artists.
[10] XYZ (Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, Augustine Zenakos), the founders and artistic directors of the Athens Biennale, invited an eclectic group of art professionals to contemplate the subject of HEAVEN.
The six exhibitions of the 2nd Athens Biennale took the form of autonomous approaches to that broad subject which nevertheless communicated creatively and claimed a degree of narrative cohesion.
Produced in a state of emergency, and through the synergy of all participants and a large group of volunteers, MONODROME assembled the diverse pieces of an exploratory puzzle, addressing the “here and now”.
At the same time the exhibition attempted to question historical narratives that have functioned as dictums of the Greek sociopolitical and aesthetic identity and resulted in the country's perennial suspension between a ‘before’ (tradition) and an ‘after’ (modernization).
Being usually perceived and promoted as an emblematic city, Athens today is the epicentre of the Greek upheaval, a place of massive demonstrations and public discussions.
While MONODROME attempted to reflect upon Modern Greek history and the origins of the crisis, AGORA set out to explore creative alternatives to a state of bankruptcy.
Conceived both as a living organism and an exquisite corpse, it was formulated through a succession of objects, collaborative events, performances, roundtable discussions, film screenings, workshops and educational programs.
[14] In AGORA works and theses evoked that which was urgently needed at this particular moment: an engaged subjectivity, an unearthing of timely attitudes, a reevaluation of artistic strategies, a deconstruction of mystifying narratives.
Bridging the past to the present and the future and by building on its successful previous edition, AB5 arose both as a reaction to the current political and social conditions and as a need to activate the public through art and contemporary theoretical viewpoints.
Unlike traditional Biennial formats, Massimiliano Mollona's role of Programme Director combined theory, curating and process-based urban interventions.
Functioning as an institutional space where the realm of the political is reframed through the lenses of art, OMONOIA hosted various cultural and activist groups that dealt with issues of co-production, self-organisation and urban commoning.
These meetings, laboratories and discussions were the experimental “engines” of the Athens Biennale, hosting two international conferences, numerous talks, performances, public interventions and works of art.
On 5 April 2017, the Athens Biennale declared a strategic postponing of AB6 in a year of “Active Waiting”, which was intended as a playful exercise on the political imagination of large-scale periodic exhibitions and functioned as a prelude to ANTI.
The Athens Biennale office relocated to Bagkeion Hotel and organised a series of performative pre-Biennale events, such as Klassenfahrt and Documena, under the title “Waiting for the Barbarians”.
The sixth edition of the Athens Biennale, titled “ANTI”, was curated by Stefanie Hessler, Poka-Yio, and Kostis Stafylakis, inhabiting four iconic neighboring venues in the area surrounding the Old Parliament at Syntagma Square.
It was held from October 26 to December 9, 2018, offering a six-week-long unique experience of contemporary art in which more than 100 Greek and international artists and collectives activated the different aspects of ANTI through their contributions.
The building, work of the architect Anastasios Metaxas, with its Kafkaesque, administrative architecture and interior design, is a symbol of the transition from analog to digital communication.
ANTI presented a distinct, idiosyncratic and uneasy screenshot of our political, social and cultural momentum, highlighting how opposition inhabits both power and resistance, reactionary and progressive outcries, and attitudes that demand new alternatives in the realms mostly shaping our lives today.
By inviting artists and other cultural producers to inhabit situations and devices mimicking, distorting, twisting, or amplifying contemporary life-theaters, ANTI was the departure point for numerous instead-ofs.
