Athens Biennale
The Athens Biennale is an international cultural event held every two years at various locations in Athens, consisting of a large-scale exhibition and a diverse programme of side events, such as performances, workshops, lectures etc. It is one of the largest international art events of contemporary culture in Greece and it has been acknowledged as one of the most significant and innovative cultural initiatives in Europe by the European Cultural Foundation.
It is organised by the Athens Biennial Non-Profit Organization, which was co-founded by Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, and Augustine Zenakos in November 2005 and was also co-directed by them until 2011. Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and Poka-Yio served as co-directors until 2016 and from then until today it is directed by Poka-Yio.
The Athens Biennale functions as an observatory of collective issues and as a platform for the designation of the contemporary culture of the Athenian metropolis within an international network of large-scale periodic contemporary art events. 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. Since the 1st edition “Destroy Athens” to the latest “ANTI”, AB promotes experimental formats and various curatorial approaches and connects the local artistic production with the international art scene of contemporary art.
The Athens Biennale has contributed to the establishment of Athens as a major cultural destination for contemporary art, on a par with the biggest capitals of Europe. Up to now, it has presented six editions under which over 800 artists and theorists, international and Greek, have participated, and more than 127 new art productions have been commissioned or premiered. AB has attracted more than 315.000 visitors from Greece and abroad, including thousands of art professionals and international journalists.
Editions
- AB1: DESTROY ATHENS
- AB2: HEAVEN
- AB3: MONODROME
- AB4: AGORA
- AB5to6: OMONOIA
- AB6: ANTI
- AB7: ECLIPSE
European Biennial Network
2015 Princess Margriet Award for Culture
In 2015, the Athens Biennale has been chosen by the ECF for the Princess Margriet Award for Culture for its work building on the public sphere, creating sorely needed open space for artistic imagination, as well as for its cultural contribution in creating a democratic Europe.As the European Cultural Foundation refers:
“Athens Biennale has re-imagined the model of the biennale as a space for cultural debate and grassroots organising in contemporary Greece. It has reinvented the art biennale as a structure that enables new forms of solidarity between local and international cultural communities and wider civic engagement. The most recent biennale in 2013 was organised in the format of an Agora, which in ancient times referred to a gathering space that had overlapping social, business and political uses. The biennale took an innovative collective curatorial approach that breaks radically from a consumer-oriented model of exhibition-making. Faced with severe funding cuts, the Athens Biennale proves the power of self-organisation and building common ground through culture.”
AB1: DESTROY ATHENS (2007)
The first edition of the Athens Biennale, titled “Destroy Athens”, was presented in 2007. The exhibition was curated by XYZ 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. Twenty-five new works of art were produced by the 1st Athens Biennale, while several works had their world or European premieres in Athens. Moreover, a series of parallel exhibitions, screenings and live events took place in the surrounding area of the main exhibition venue.Within the framework of the 1st Athens Biennale, a few additional activities were also held prior to the exhibition, such as the international conference “Prayer for Resistance”, which took place in the Old Parliament of Athens on February 17 & 18, 2007, as well as two online projects: artwave radio, an artist-run online radio station that provided a live audio arena for original audio art projects, interviews, talks and sound recordings created specifically to be broadcast, and a. the Athens contemporary art review, a monthly bilingual online magazine with theoretical essays, exhibition reviews, interviews and book reviews.
DESTROY ATHENS was an attempt to challenge the ways in which identities and behaviors are determined through stereotypical descriptions. The notion of Athens – as the archetypal city that has become emblematic in terms of stereotypes – was used as a metaphor for this feeling of extra-determination or entrapment that the stereotype inflicts upon the personal sense of identity and social behavior. DESTROY ATHENS aimed to function as a progression through various themes, where elements contradict, collide or cancel-out each other constantly. Successive realizations and disillusionments make up a fragmented acknowledgement of a dead-end, a kind of world, a dystopic environment of conceptual Waste Lands.
“DESTROY ATHENS tells a story. A story about ruptures and dead ends, which emerges from a completely empirical observation: we, each one of us, the subject of every action and every conscience is built through the eyes of others. What is important is that it is not being constructed by others — it is all an internal affair: the subject builds its own self, but its building material is the perception of others. And this fact is the precondition of any recognition, collectivity, connection, participation, sense of community. This precondition is a necessity, but at the same time that the subject feels it, lives it and depends on it, it will never accept it: we never want to be what we are; we claim the right not to be what we are. Rupture is constantly lurking in the possibility of claiming refusal: at every instant, we are entitled to deny the precondition of collectivity and abolish any connection or relationship. The story is divided in six chapters or “days” after the Six Days of Creation.”
–XYZ
AB2: HEAVEN (2009)
The second edition of the Athens Biennale, titled “Heaven”, was conceived as a multifaceted contemporary art festival that extended along the coastline of Athens. It was held in open and closed spaces along the Athenian coastline of Palaio Faliro, including the coastline promenade and the surrounding park along with the Floisvos building, from June 15 to October 4, 2009. The main venue was the Olympic properties building in Plateia Nerou, used for the first time since 2004.XYZ, the founders and artistic directors of the Athens Biennale, invited an eclectic group of art professionals to contemplate the subject of HEAVEN. The multiple visual art and performative interventions in the public spaces were curated by choreographer and stage director Dimitris Papaioannou and visual artist Zafos Xagoraris, while a series of exhibitions, installations, public interventions and projects were curated by Chus Martínez, chief curator of MACBA at the time, and independent curators Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Nadja Argyropoulou, Christopher Marinos and Diana Baldon. A rich programme of screenings, performances and music events/concerts complemented the exhibitions lasting through the summer.
HEAVEN as a wide topic touched upon notions such as lost innocence, nature and ecology, utopias and ideal communities. From that premise, a dialogue began which reflected upon the theme itself as well as the methodology surrounding large-scale periodical exhibitions. 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.
“They say a human body becomes lighter by twenty-one grams, once it has ceased living. This is how much a soul weighs. Although no science would confirm this, and although not all people believe that God ever breathed on Adam, most of them probably feel at one point or another that there must somehow be an ‘essence’ of life, something more than a mere body, something that encapsulates all that we are.
This therefore then becomes a metaphor for the intangible, that which is there and makes something be more than a sum of its parts, but can never be isolated, never separated as an ingredient. Thus ‘soul’ is what we have left when everything else is gone, ‘soul’ is what can carry us through seemingly insurmountable difficulty, ‘soul’ is what makes music more than a string of disparate sounds, a performance more than an articulation of actions. Far more than a religious notion, ‘soul’ may represent our belief in everything that matters, everything that deserves to continue.”
–XYZ
AB3: MONODROME (2011)
The third edition of the Athens Biennale, titled “Monodrome”, was curated by renowned curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud and the curatorial duo X&Y. It took place in various venues around Athens from October 23 to December 11, 2011. The largest part of the exhibition as well as a diverse programme of live events, performances, workshops and lectures were hosted in Diplareios School. The exhibition was also hosted in a complex of venues and museums at Eleftherias Park, including the Arts Centre and the Eleftherios Venizelos Museum, focal sites of Modern Greek history.The 3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME was considered the final part of a trilogy which started with DESTROY ATHENS 2007 and continued with HEAVEN 2009. It was drawn upon the life and work of Walter Benjamin and inspired by his book by the same title. MONODROME is a narrative broadcasting from historical venues in the centre of Athens and articulating an imaginary dialogue between The Little Prince and Walter Benjamin. As the intellectual retreats defeated in the face of the escalated distress, the Little Prince keeps questioning this condition with the disarming innocence and the plainspoken boldness of a child.
MONODROME was being realized despite the Crisis that affects Greece heavily. 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’ and an ‘after’. 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.
The 3rd Athens Biennale consisted of three intertwined modes: the MONODROME exhibition & projects, the MONODROME Debate, an ongoing body of lectures, interviews, discussions and performative presentations that took place at the auditorium of Diplareios School, and the MONODROME online Channel, an online platform that was transmitting the ongoing documentation of the MONODROME exhibitions and time based events and the MONODROME Debate programme. Furthermore, a series of exhibitions and events organized by cultural institutions, museums and galleries in Athens were included in MONODROME Parallel Events.