"Fermenting Selves" Adonis Volanakis 

 participatory installation (drawing, text, video, smell) 

In Fermenting Selves, fermentation becomes a framework for rethinking gender as fluid, evolving, and never static. Just as wine is shaped by a host of actors—human and non-human, visible and invisible—our identities are never solely our own. Gender, too, is not fixed; it ferments. It absorbs, responds, and transforms within the contexts of culture, body, and time. 

This installation invites participants into that process, where wine is both material and metaphor. The papers are prepared by Adonis Volanakis with quotes from poems. The act of drawing with wine—its stains bleeding into paper—embodies the messiness of identity. Our gendered selves are never singular, never purely contained, but in constant dialogue with what surrounds us: community, biology, memory. These drawings are acts of fermentation themselves, reminders that identity, like wine, evolves in layers, with unpredictable outcomes. 

Here, wine is not a quaint symbol of transformation; it’s a critical agent. It questions the boundaries between the human and the non-human, highlighting the assemblage of forces—both inside and outside of us—that shape how we move through the world. In thinking through wine, we think through how identity is made and remade, not in isolation but through relationships, through interactions. Fermentation becomes a way to consider how gender, too, is a relational process, never finished, always in flux. 

This work positions gender as something constantly negotiated, refusing the binaries and fixed categories that try to hold it still. By using wine—a substance alive with its own agency—participants explore how their identities, like fermentation, resist being fully controlled. The process is slow, imperfect, and continuous, just like the shifts and negotiations of gender over time. 

Fermenting Selves questions the ways we try to bottle identity, to make it a product, when in reality, it is an ongoing process of becoming, shaped by forces both material and immaterial. It is an invitation to consider how gender ferments within us—unpredictable, dynamic, always fermenting. 

texts used on paper and wall

your silence will not protectyou by audrelorde

I’m a woman/ Phenomenally. /Phenomenal woman, /That’s me by maya angelou

What you pay attention to grows by adrienne maree brown

When we liberate ourselves, we liberate the world around us by raquel willis

We must create spaces where the most marginalized among us are empowered to lead by ashlee marie preston

i found god in myself/ &i loved her/ i loved her fiercely by ntozake shange

A voice: I can’t/ bite through the glass. Ican’t /get out of the glass by margaret atwood

Exhibition La Bataille des Vins / Ο Πόλεμος των Κρασιών, at various locations in the village of Lania, Limassol. The exhibition featured works by Evelyn Anastasiou (Cyprus), Klitsa Antoniou (Cyprus), Adonis Volanakis (Greece), Jake Chapman (United Kingdom), Elina Ioannou (Cyprus), Stelios Kallinikou (Cyprus), Melita Couta (Cyprus), Phanos Kyriacou (Cyprus), Niamh O’Malley (Ireland), Natacha Antão Moutinho (Portugal) and Alexandros Psychoulis (Greece). The exhibition is supported with contextual, historical and theoretical texts by Dr Gabriel Koureas (Cyprus), Dr Niki Young (Malta) and Dr Prokopis Christou (Cyprus). The organization, production and art curating are by George Lazoglou (Cyprus) and the concept, research and art direction by Klitsa Antoniou (Cyprus). In the context of Cultural Decentralisation Programme of the Cultural Services of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Republic of Cyprus

YIKSA LOVE (Woman love)

Western Achaia experienced a rapid commercial development in the 19th and early 20th centuries due to the raisin trade. Cryptographic codes were created for business transactions. Do the entries woman and love exist in a code of commerce in a patriarchal society structure, which discovers Western consumerism? In the 93,718 entries of Bentley revised second edition (1945), a code of communication for the blackcurrant trade, the entry love is absent. In the coding instructions, the code states that for the exceptional words that do not have a code, they are written in normal, standard language. The entry woman exists as a simple word, without divisions, explanations and analyses. The entry lady, code YIKSA is detailed written in terms of being passangers in the cabins of the primarolia (the first ships of the good raisin season) almost as a commodity, and the entry is broken dowN by quantity and class: how many ladies and in what class (first, second, third) will travel. The author Athena Kakouri unfolds in her novel Primarolia, in Patras in 1890, the story of ayoung woman who decides to get married, thus claiming her freedom and receiving her dowry. What has changed after 130 years? How do single women in Patras today manage, think, claim their self-determination? The site specific installation YIKSA LOVE showcases codes and oral sound testimonies with messages from women who live in Patras today and did not claim their freedom through marriage while the 1900’s triple seat made for matchings smells of roses.

2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture presents Mystery 183 Apothéri Project on September 15 at the Megara Railway Station.

Artist: Adonis Volanakis
Chef/ Cook: Manolis Papoutsakis

Curator: Dimitris Michalaros
Artistic Collaborator and Project documentation: Lydia Matthews
Performed by the musician Anna Pangalou and the actors Antigoni Grigoropoulou, Dimitra Tarousi, Electra Fragiadaki
Assistants: Sotiria Inetzi (architectural/visual), Katerina Kataki (directing), Elena Tsavdari (organizational)

Graces Kneading is a socially engaged and performative sculpture led by visual artist Adonis Volanakis in collaboration with chef Manolis Papoutsakis and in dialogue with arts curator Lydia Matthews. For the last twenty years, Volanakis has been researching the female experience through his works, and correspondingly, Papoutsakis has been exploring possible applications of philosophy to food. The goal of this collaborative team's multiple artistic residencies in Megara was to connect with the life of the city. They were especially focused on actively listening to the voices of local women, who generously shared their experiences regarding evolving cultural traditions, locality and foreignness. These exchanges, some planned and some random, were augmented by visits to houses’ kitchens, local bakeries, recipe-sharing sessions and, ultimately, hands-on  workshops featuring long hours of kneading, embellishing and baking bread around a round table.  A traditional wood oven lights up and bakes the women's visual/verbal messages into each loaf.

Research conducted in the Archaeological Museum of Megara, the cultural association Theognis, farmers' gardens and wineries of the area, also informed the project. At the archeological museum, a site guarded by the wheat goddess Demeter, Volanakis became inspired by a 4th century BC votive relief picturing the Three Graces. This image soon functioned as a catalyst for Graces Kneading, with its culminating public performance  highlighting the living presence of three women dressed in white garments. Echoing the wedding dress as sculpture and signifying object that has often appeared in Volanakis’ works, this social sculpture explores what it means for women to come together--without necessarily having previously established friendly or family relations--to collectively prepare bread and uniquely embellish each loaf as an offering to their broader community members. Long-established as women's practices, the Megaran art of embellished bread-making may now raise  new questions about the need for community connection, intergenerational interaction and exchange of familial experiences in both private and public settings.  Can hospitality be radical, unconditional and absolute with Three Graces offering bread and wine?

36 Photos and two Video Projections, Exhibtion: We are here to serve you,

Curated by Natalia Almonte and Nicole Econimides, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries,

The New School/ Parsons, New York 2020

A retrospective photographic installation of socially engaged projects. In Set Out for Ithaca, I orchestrated a “blind date” between seven Greek and seven American poets, who were hosted by local residents on the island of Ithaca. Their exchanges culminated in a series of public workshops, discussions, and readings.

“Adonis Volanakis’ video points to the contents of the “pedagogy of the oppressed” by Paulo Freire, an influential text dedicated to honoring oppressed populations and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write. Freire’s exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized includes a detailed class analysis. Volanakis’ video subtly reveals power dynamics within a 1960s photograph of a group of economically privileged students from the Greek school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Greeks began immigrating to Ethiopia in the late 1800s and, by the time this photo was taken, had established themselves as wealthy businessmen and influential members of Ethiopian society, supporting Ethiopian emperor and Rastafarian messiah Haile Selassie. The students in the photo were the privileged children of these Greek immigrants, whose families were banished from Ethiopia in the 1970s following a nationalist revolution that overthrew the royal family.”

Nicole Economides, Curator

Community Engaged Performance Project,

Curated by Lydia Matthews and Barbara Benish,

KINO Horazdovice, West Bohemia, Czech Republic 2019

“In “Blind Date with Antigone in Bohemia,” Adonis Volanakis collaborates with renowned Czech theatre artist Jana Prekova to lead an intensive week-long theatre workshop for intergenerational members of the local community. Together they will explore the ideas and characters within Sophocles’ powerful Ancient Greek drama, Antigone. Adonis chose this poignant play because it focuses on the life of one young woman who is brave enough to follow the laws of her heart, even when her action breaks with societal conventions and established power structures.

Their staged performative reading took place and also included a response to the play by several of the Civic Women, as well as an open dialogue with the audience, who will be invited by Adonis Volanakis to share their thoughts. Questions to be explored include: what parts of this play, written centuries ago in Ancient Greece, resonate in people’s lives today in Bohemia?”

Lydia Matthews, Curator

Installation with 15 nursery chairs from the 1960’s,

Curated by Yota Tsotra and organized by University of Crete

and Xeniseum Museum of Education,

Venetian Church of Agia Sophia Church, Rethymno, Crete 2019

For this installation I placed fifteen chairs from an old nursery school from the sixties in a circle. The circle represents a horizontal gathering without an adult one to “chair” this imaginary meeting. The scale and formal shape of the chairs for the contemporary viewer has an awkwardness that translates the metaphor for the need of democratic and non-hierarchical decision-making gatherings in our worlds.

Installation, Participatory Photocopying, Performance documentation retrospective,

Exhibition space Nikos Kessanlis, Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens 2019

What is a collective body?

How is a collective body documented?

Site-specific Installation, 33 ceramic plates,

Curated by Kostas Prapoglou, Iera Odos 18-20, Athens 2019

“The site-specific installation Viomen (2019) (a made-up acronym deriving from the words violence and women) by Adonis Volanakis, receives its inspiration from the myth of Zeus whose birth involved the escape from his father’s, the titan Cronus, practice to consume all his new-born children. Cronus fed on a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes that Rhea offered to him instead of her baby Zeus, giving him the chance to grow up secretly and eventually fight to become the king of the gods. Volanakis juxtaposes the robustness of the physical material as narrated in the ancient myth against the fragility of a congregation of ceramic vessels. For him, these ceramics are representations of female identity and their number is associated with the number of Zeus’ consorts and lovers, which remains a titillating debate amongst scholars to this date. Greek mythology portrays the multitudinous ways that Zeus used to invent in order to capture his female prey and involve them in sexual activities mostly without their consent. Suspending his ceramics around the dark space of the venue, the artist creates a domain of uncertainty, isolation and despondency reflecting on the feelings of those women experiencing distress and desolation due to domestic and family violence. Employing the luminous cobalt blue to embellish the surface of his works, Volanakis’ otherworldly choreography mediates a prayer for the troubled souls and turns his installation into a sea of oneiric landscapes voiding all sadness, infusing them with hope and dreams. With mythology as the conduit of veiled meanings around patriarchy and male dominated societies, Viomen (2019) is a hymn to all mothers and all lovers who have played such an important role since the beginning of time, deserving a better place in every society and culture.”

Kostas Prapoglou, Curator, for the Exhibition Viomen

Frozen Education curated by Yota Tsotra and hosted by Dr.Kuckucks Labrador

14 - 27 October 2018 at Kaskadenkondensator
Warteck pp, 2. Stock, Burgweg 7, 4058 Basel

A retrospective photographic installation of some of the Blind Dates: social engaged projects in the cities of Heraklion, Ithaca, Patras and Piraeus. This installation is a windows’ facade of the Blind Date building with a reference to the Windows of J.B.Pontalis.

https://vimeo.com/294658328

Vizitsa School / Pilion Mountain / Greece curated by Maria Kenanidou Aug - Sep 2018

based on the Book of the Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

exhibition together with the “lectures in the mountain” organized by Chloe Koliri on Ethics, Philosophy, Psychoanalusis

Site-specific installation with ceramics, Crossings exhibition,

Curated by Maria Marangou, Late-Minoan Necropolis of Armeni,

Contemporary Art Museum of Crete, Rethymno 2018

The serial dot cobalt-blue painted ceramics are placed site-specifically within the carved tombs. Each artwork is inspired by and dedicated to a female writer whom I have read, admired and studied. The works are hand painted as a Pietà, as a prayer’s hug, while meditating on the writer’s texts. These ceramic prayers constitute the process of my practice: a present, past and future body. It is a reading/painting performance without an audience, as an embodied meditation. Each tomb represents a family group where the artworks are placed as grave gifts, connected to the natural environment, history, memory and continuity and to the ontological issue of life and death. I tried to build a bridge from the ancient women to the later generations as a hug of honor and acknowledgment. The series is created site-specifically for the Late Minoan Cemetery of Armeni with 220 tombs and the following women writers: Anne Carson, Emma Goldman, Anna Akhmatova, Peggy Phelan, Doris Lessing, Jeanette Winterson, Betty Friedan, Julia Kristeva, Marilyn Yalom, Margaret Atwood, Belle Hooks, Maya Angelou, Rhea Galanaki, Maro Douka, Mary Lionti, Ioanna Karistianni.

The Ephorate of Antiquities in Rethymno and the Contemporary Art Museum of Crete celebrate the August full moon with a visual intervention held in the Late - Minoan Necropolis of the Armenians. In this place, in the oak forest where 220 tombs have been excavated until today, four artists will present their artworks regarding this particular place.

The idea expressed by the curator Maria Marangou is a humble intervention which is not meant to compete the natural elements of this particular place. All artists, showing proper respect for the place, create works/ grave gifts connected to the natural environment, history, memory and continuity.  

An unexpected discovery of a vessel made by the young student Andreas Vourvahis, in the middle of the 60s, was the spark for the excavation of the well-known Post-Minoan Necropolis of the Armeni supervised by the emeritus Director-General, the archaeologist Mr. Giannis Tzedakis. The aforementioned excavation is still being carried on successfully until today.  
The exhibition’s title Crossings is related to the ontological issue of life and death. The arts that take part in the exhibition (in alphabetical order) are the following: Blind Adam (Thanos Kyriakides), Manousos Halkiadakis, Kalliopi Lemos and  Adonis Volanakis.

Stefanos Lazaridis: cynical romantic

Research / Curating: Adonis Volanakis

Production: Greek National Opera, in collaboration with the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (MIET), the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and the National Library of Greece

OPENING 4 FEBRUARY 2018
TILL 31 May 2018

National Library of Greece Patio (4th floor)
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center
Open: Monday to Sunday 09.30-21.00
Free admission

An exhibition dedicated to the work of the renowned Greek set designer-director and former Artistic Director of the Greek National Opera
Opening: Sunday 4 February at 18.00
Archive advisor / Organisations' coordinator: Orsia Sofra
Design: Adonis Volanakis, Yannis Arvanitis
Associate: Isma Toulatos
Lighting design: Valentina Tamiolaki
Prints and Drawings Paper Conservator of National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (MIET): Maria Alexiou
Curator of the Performing Arts Department of MIET/ELIA: Constantina Stamatoyannaki
Assistant curator: Yannis Thanasoulias
Architectural design collaborators: Lydia Antoniou, Giorgos Kalyvis, Sofia Tektonidou
Model reconstruction: Matt Deely

> Curator of the exhibition, Adonis Volanakis, gave more than 200 guided tours

 The tribute, as a reparation, of the Greek National Opera to the renowned set designer-director and former GNO Artistic Director (2005-2007) is completed with a major retrospective exhibition on his work. The exhibition is co-organised by the Greek National Opera, the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (MIET), the National Library of Greece and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. The exhibition is a donation by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. 

 
Curator of the exhibition, visual artist Adonis Volanakis,  apprenticed to Stefanos Lazaridis and collaborated with him at the English National Opera. Stefanos Lazaridis' tribute exhibition is the first solo exhibition of his artistic oeuvre globally. Lazaridis, based in London, extended the range of scenography to dramaturgical visual spaces, by raising meaningful questions rather than giving “scenographic solutions”, not only on Europe’s most important operatic stages but also in bigger spaces, like stadiums, where he designed historical performances breaking away from all conventional designs. 
The exhibition unfolds a visual timeline starting from the beginning of his career with paintings of set and costume designs, in which one can discern the influences from his apprenticeship with Nicholas Georgiadis, another world-wide famous artist; it continues with works of mixed techniques, collages and models, as well as videos from performances and interviews. The exhibition has a playful character and is completed by photographs from his own research on visual arts, his director’s notes on texts and letters. What is highly impressive in his work is the fact that it is hard for anyone to tell the difference between the photographs of his exceptionally detailed models and the photographs of the actual performances. 
The most common leitmotif in Lazaridis’ work is the cube; that is also the inspiration of the exhibition. It is thus in cube rooms where his most important collaborations with theater and opera directors evolve, such as with the famous Yuri Lyubimov - on Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1985) in London, Paris and Milan and Rigoletto (1983), which caused a scandal among the Italian conservative audiences; with David Pountney - transforming the history of the English National Opera with their numerous collaborations in the 80’s and their historical productions of The Flying Dutchman (1989) and Nabucco (1991) at the Bregenz Opera on the Lake in Austria with clear reference to the ancient Greek theater of Epidaurus; with Steven Pimlott - on Carmen (1989) at Earl’s Court with 15,000 spectators every night; and with Keith Warner - on Lohengrin (1999) in Bayreuth and Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) at Covent Garden. 

In the rest of the cubes one can come across the productions in which Lazaridis acted both as a director and a set-designer: the successful tour of Duran Duran in America (1993), Orpheus and Eurydice (1993) for Sydney Opera House, Oedipus (1989) and the Bluebeard's Castle (1990) for the Scottish Opera and Dimitris Dimitriadis’ the Beginning of Life (1995) at Amore Theater in Greece. In 2000, in his role as chief visionary, he undertook the artistic and visual design of eight productions for the Italian Season at the English National Opera.  

Since August 2013, the Stefanos Lazaridis archive is kept at the National Bank Cultural Foundation (ELIA/MIET), following the generous donation of his late partner, Timothy Williams. It covers a period from 1964 to 2010 and includes exhibits, designs and models from the artist's entire artistic creation. 

"Ravel/Unravel: Hidden Process" Co-curated by Chuka Kuprava, Mariam Shergelashvili, Lydia Matthews, Artisterium 10, Tbilisi History Museum (Karvasla) November 4-13, 2017, Tbilisi, Georgia

From the catalogue by Lydia Matthews:

“ Functioning as an imagined “museum within a museum,” Ravel/Unravel: Hidden Process features a dialogue between Tbilisi’s State Silk Museum and five contemporary artists/collaborative teams to explore the dynamic and intimate relationship between words, textile fibers and the human body.

The starting point of Ravel/Unravel: Hidden Process is the intangible spirit of The State Silk Museum, a 19th century “wunderkammer” located at 6 Giorgi Tsabadze Street in Tbilisi. Having once functioned as an active scientific center for silk research since its founding in 1887 and throughout the Soviet era, the museum has a rich and expansive collection of silk industry-related objects. Still committed to honoring its founding motto “Preserve and Share,” the museum hosts workshops and public events that encourage contemporary artists to engage silk and other textile materials, methods and histories within their work. It continues to catalyze visual research on fiber, exploring the aesthetic implications of new technologies and digital pixel structures through Jaquard weaving and direct weaving processes. The museum aims to strike a balance between permanence and temporality while reflecting the complex vitality of our multi-disciplinary, diverse and globalized world. 

Projects by artists Jen Bervin, Aziz + Cucher, Elana Herzog, and Adonis Volanakis—set alongside objects and images from The Silk Museum—investigate how personal stories, new and old technologies and textile histories are intimately intertwined, taken apart and then re-envisioned. Fusing fiber materials with immaterial memories, visual patterns, sound, performance and poetry, these artists’ creative processes demonstrate why haptic, multi-sensory and “embodied” forms of knowledge are essential to re-humanizing an otherwise speed-obsessed, screen-dominated and increasingly dangerous nationalistic age.

Adonis Volanakis grew up in a family of Greek textile artists: his grandmother was a weaver, his mother a wedding dressmaker. From an early age, he became interested in handmade textile skills and stories that are fervently passed down within a community of women through the generations. As a 2017 artist-in-residence at the Weaving School on the Cycladic Greek island of Tinos, Volanakis recognized that the school functioned as a local meeting hub for residents and tourists, located on the path towards the iconic Church of the Virgin Mary. Like the “motherboard” of a computer, the space held and facilitated communication between crucial components of an urban system. It held the potential to create new work and provided “plug-ins” for other mechanisms and external parties to connect. In “Motherboard Series”, Volanakis captured the sounds and motions of the Weaving School’s looms in his video/sound installation. This video is accompanied by another project entitled “Solomon Ate My Brain,” in which Volanakis echoes the inherent violence of the silk worm’s transformation into a butterfly, when he releases a woman by cutting open her wedding gown. During Artisterium 10’s opening, he will perform “Penelope 02” on The Silk Museum’s loom, inviting audience participants to rip apart inverted wedding dresses, transforming them into strips of cloth to collectively produce a rag rug. This performative action recalls the myth of Penelope, Odysseus’ loyal and cunning wife, who fended off suitors by weaving on her loom--secretly unraveling her work nightly so that her work could never be completed and her integrity could remain intact. “

Press

Ravel/Unravel Review Indigo (Georgian)

Τα Mητροπαράδοτα, Motherboard series

Adonis Volanakis

27 July – 2 September 2017

Weaving School of Tinos

In July 2017, Adonis Volanakis was invited by KINONO Tinos Art Gathering to be an artist in residence at the Weaving School  on the island of Tinos. Founded in 1898 by "Evangelismos", one of the first Women's Association in Greece, the Weaving School is located on Evangelistria’s street, one of the most important pedestrian streets on ​​the island connecting the sea with the iconic church of Virgin Mary. Visitors and locals go to the church daily, making the Weaving School a meeting hub and a kind of “Motherboard”. Like a computer, it acts as a circuit board holding and allowing communication between many of the crucial components of a system. It functions as a processor that generates new work and provides plug-in areas for external mechanisms to connect. As a guardian of memories, the Weaving School choreographs time and space.

«Πατροπαράδοτα» is one of the Greek words for "tradition" which means “giving to”—and yet it often loses its etymology in oral speech. Πατροπαράδοτα suggests a tradition that has been given “by the fathers”, which becomes an established part of local history. Volanakis coined the term “μητροπαράδοτα» in a conversation with Nadia Kalara in order to highlight the kinds of undervalued “herstories” and skills passed down through a community of women through the generations. The tradition of the mothers fervently supports handmade textile practices.

Τα Mητροπαράδοτα, Motherboard series reflects Volanakis’ daily experience meeting women in the school as well as in private houses of the island. The installation stores, processes and and documents the women’s local textile herstories, as well as inviting other external connections to be made. Its images include the women sharing their embroidery techniques and offering fragmentary stories. Their silences and body language function as unspoken prayers.

Volanakis transformed The Weaving School into a motherboard in which he  created a grid of photographs, videos and poetic hypertexts. The School is housed in an exceptional monumental building that includes four areas: a working space with nine looms, a storage space, a parlor that functions as communal meeting space and altar for the Virgin Mary, and a giftshop that sells tablecloths, aprons and hand towels. The School is maintained at a high level thanks to the love and care of the school's Director.

In the parlor where the general assemblies are typically held, Volanakis installed a documentary video on the history of the Evangelismos Women’s Association and the Weaving School, narrated by Maroulio Gizi, its current President. The room is normally decorated with an altarpiece that includes an icon of the Annunciation, photographs of the Women’s Association’s first elections and a portrait of Styliani Gafou, the founder and "Potent Protector", and images of the former royal family as well as other patrons from the 19th century. Intervening in this display, Volanakis added photographic portraits that began to challenge and expand the historical narrative. Images included the faces of contemporary craftswomen with close-ups of their hands and their textile work. One photograph featured a remarkable tablecloth that had been worked on by three different generations of one local family.

In the weaving room with nine looms, the artist presented a video installation with a poetic text that ran along the wall. Echoing the conversations of the women, it appeared to interlace in and out of the looms while a video projection focused on the movement of a single loom’s shuttle. Its gradually amplifying soundscape resonated in the room until all the looms were in full operation. 

How can a handmade towel contain not only a long tradition of femaile craftsmanship but also its own sense of local poetry?

comrade (she)

was working for Our Lady, up there

weaving with an old lamp

free she was, weeding, harvesting, kneading

I meet women with handicraft in their minds,

they crochet and then embroider one net

moving like the tide - beauty you see may come and go,

virtue remains through counting

as much as you unspool it, it will become tangle

sitting in a freshly mopped parlor

the work has begun

it is the prayer to the virgin

CULTURESCAPES 2017 Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig

Oct 2017 - Jan 2018

Exhibition Decline of the Heroes, Curated by Kateryna Botanova

“The succession of financial, economic, political, as well as social and moral crises that the ‘Western world’, and Greece in particular, have been going through in the recent years, dismantled the ideal of ‘noble heroes’ and, at the same time, rendered the idea of subversive and trickster-like heroes impossible. By juxtaposing the ancient and the contemporary, the artists of “The Decline of Heroes”—an exhibition in Antikenmuseum Basel within the framework of the festival CULTURESCAPES Greece 2017—clash with and question both the heroic ideals of the past and the heroic ambitions of the present, piling expectation towards Greece and growing mutual fatigue and intense othering between Greece and its neighbours. The works are threaded through the museum permanent collection, mirroring core issues in every room, such as ’identity’, ‘ideals’, ‘others’ or ‘war’. They comprise a backwards Odyssey, from the seemingly harmonious world back to chaos. The old heroes crumble, opening diverse possibilities for the new non-heroes and non-heroines, troubled and shaken, uncertain and marginalized, deprived, but empowered.

Adonis Volanakis’ installation “The Holly Bachelorette in the Wedding Cave” is a careful look into the position of women, torn between the burden of traditions and their own aspirations. It is a story on Penelope - reimagined and rewritten, opened to all women who dare to look at who they really are. The installation in the Antikenmuseum Basel is built as an (Ariadne’s) thread though the whole of exhibition. The white pillars of the wedding dresses start from the very staircase that leads into the exhibition floor and join the interplay between the original museum objects and works of other artists, going though the circle-shaped enfilade of rooms. The rhythm of this thread is composed with two high points: the intense noise of intertwining voices of talking women in one of the 8 exhibition rooms and the old Cretan loom in another. Six videos of Athenian and New Yorkian women revealing what it means to be a woman today are occupying a space, which in the museum is dedicated to heroes and ideals. “The heroes of these stories represent the ideal man, both on the battlefield and within his own community. Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, on the other hand, embodies the ideal woman, the modest and clever wife and talented craftswoman,”—reads the caption. Sculptural fluidity of the wedding dresses pillar and the 6 humming videos provide an alternative to the rigidness of ancient artifacts and their narratives. The loom—a symbol of binding tradition and emancipatory possibilities, at the same time—occupies the center of the room of ‘wars and conflicts’. The 7th video is projected over it. The storyline is punctuated with the reading table full of books on feminism and emancipation at the beginning of the enfilade and the roll of paper for question to be passed to other women on the wall of the last room.”

 Kateryna Botanova, curator

https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/23884/oracle-drawings

Curated by Sozita Goudouna and Paul B.Preciado

Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municipality Arts Center and Museum of Anti-dictatorial and Democratic Resistance, Vassilissis Sofias, Athens

Karen Finley and Adonis Volanakis met in New York in 2012. They have worked together as teaching colleagues in the department of Art and Public Policy at Tisch, New York University. Their collaborative practice is orchestrating a participatory live installation of a threshold of an opening and a closure. They like to drink Greek coffee. Their long discussions expanded from stock-market economy, to commodities, community-engaging projects, humanity and daily life exchanges, to crossing boundaries and borders, libations, and self-help groups.

Their collaboration was inspired to create an opportunity for imagining and gathering rather than focusing on reliving and triggering trauma and torture that dwells within the haunted edifice of interrogation.

Outside in the public entranceway in the park and nature, the artists create a poetic space for prophecy and wakefulness. The area is draped with white gauze symbolizing the sacred wounded or the bandaging of the space. Loosely draping the trees provides a curtain or drapes that marks the witnessing by the trees and the ground itself— entering and leaving. Once inside our curtained or closed-off area, the public is offered a Greek coffee. The coffee is made and served to them at tables. After drinking the coffee the person is instructed in the tradition of Coffee Reading. Turning the cup over where the coffee is ground creates residue in which each person reads her own grounds and write her words. Each person then has his coffee-cup image video recorded with a voice-over of what they see in the future.

Karen and Adonis keep posing questions and challenging each other: How do you read your own prophecy and how is it asked and given? Where is the agency? What are we erasing? Whose funeral is it? What would you breathe life into?

What are the grounds for the future? How do we define the divine? What is the political moment, how do we make oracle drawings, when do we read the grounds? What are the parts of a social closure and an individual opening?

common platforms: a blind date 2016 - 2017 - 2018

blindplatform.wordpress.com

A cross-cultural, multidisciplinary residency for local and international artists who are seeking refuge in art.

Adonis Volanakis and Rafika Chawishe started a platform of praxis and the first step was to create an art residency of daydreaming for permanent and transient artists: a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary residency for refugee, local and international artists.

For the last decade, Volanakis has developed a blind date practice: a trans-disciplinary and interethnic platform for collaboration, while his personal work engage with non-patriarchal and non-hegemonic narratives. He met Rafika Chawishe whose experience comes from the stage and film industry, researching on cross cultural and multidisciplinary collaborations. Her social commitment and dedication is specified on her work with unaccompanied minor refugees and the rights of children.

The next step is to ensure the residency’s sustainability and to grow the exchange network which begun with the first residency. Common Platforms, a blind date have started an identification and registration process of the artists within the refugee community in Elaionas Camp.  We are registering the artists tools, expertise and wishes to continue matching up the blind dates with local artists and organizations.

blind platform is constantly growing and more artists can join in our community. We are grateful to the artists that structured the first step of the platform; the art residency. During the residency the following artists participated:

Abdullah Ahmadi (sculptor) 

Almudena Blanco (photographer)

Angelica Cathariou (soprano)

Tamara Chalmpouni

Rafika Chawise (actress, director)

Abdlmhm Dhim (singer)

Leila Eftetahi (actress)

Malen Garmendia (activist)

Francisco Gentico (activist)

Soren Ghaedi (visual arts)

Farahnaz Ghorbani (actress)

Dora Giannaki (social worker)

Parya Rezaei Irani (actress)

Emma Jimenez

Nadia Kalara (visual artist)

Jo Kalavrou (visual artist)

Ebrahim Karimi-Arab (musician)

Manos Karatzogiannis (actor, director)

Christina Katsari (visual artist)

Amir Keshmeri (dancer)

Eftychia Kiourtidou (actress)

Maria Koliopoulou (dancer)

Alex Koromilas (photographer)

Ioko-Ioannis Kotidis (actor)

Rowena Ludford (visual artist)

Pavlina Marvin (writer)

Maro Mihalakakos ( visual artist)

Aggela Milonakou (actress) 

Mohammad-Ali Motamedi (musician -DJ)

Innamana Pettyll (musician) 

Anna Pangalou (mezzo soprano)

Eugenia Papageorgiou (actress)

Athina Pourea (visual artist)

Danae Sioziou (poet)

Dimitra Tzanou (photographer)

Salahedin Vahabpoor (visual artist, political activist)

Anastasia Vlachaki (photographer)

Adonis Volanakis (artist)

Konstadina Xafi (actress)

https://weddingcave.wordpress.com

https://issuu.com/adonis.volanakis

A site-specific multi-media installation commissioned by the Athens Festival and situated in the vast warehouse space in the Festival’s hub in Peiraios Avenue with a performance of “The Penelopiad: A Fragment” in collaboration with Margaret Atwood.

The installation includes video projections of fourteen women, dozens of second hand wedding dresses, and a one hundred year old loom where visitors cut pieces from the dresses to weave them into a new fabric. This installation is the first time I have interwoven the two practices that characterize my work of recent years: the use of wedding dresses and the process of blind dates.

Over the period of two years I simultaneously asked women for questions that they themselves were struggling with and what questions they would like to pose to other women. I then filmed more than thirty women in New York and Greece as they gave their answers directly to the camera. As part of the installation, these videos are projected on the walls, the floor and on immense pieces of white bridal cloth hung from the ceiling down to the floor. The space transforms into an interaction between the women’s answers as if they were on blind dates with each other and with the visitors. The absent body in the empty wedding dresses is substantiated by the video projections of women.

I am very much interested in how the woman-to-woman conversations are weaved. In my work, I try to listen carefully, understand and strengthen the female narrative. Let’s listen again to the known Penelope, Ulysses’s wife. I believe deep inside she didn’t wish her husband to return. In the installation I chose to display the wedding dresses turned inside-out in order to both emphasize their inner side that touches the female body and to reveal the toil that was used for its production, and fabric-design-sewing-labor, which is traditionally designated as “women’s work”.

The research procedure for the installation explored and included many tellings of the Penelope story. Of particular significance was “The Penelopiad” by the Canadian prize winning author Margaret Atwood. I first met with Atwood in New York, where we began a conversation about the project and established an on-going creative dialogue about the contemporary relevance of the story of Penelope.

This project does not have a curator. All the women I collaborated with are the curators. They provided both the questions and the answers. Their burning questions which they shared underscore motherhood, togetherness, and gender positionality as a daily identity building practice.

This work is deeply archetypal. Its apparatus has a contemporaneity to the context but not the content. While contemporary women may be more privileged than in previous decades, they still need their voices and screams to be heard. Recognizing this need pushed me to open up internally and hold space for these dialogues. I feel the need to be in female spaces. Women act on a plane of rhizomatic gestation, they realize space and for-give space.

photo (Lanbda print), plexiglass wall text, performance at Kappatos Gallery, curated by Irene Gerogianni ROOMS 2010

A byzantine icon of the forty virgins serves as an appropriated image for  a transmission which takes place in a hotel room where everybody is becoming a virgin again.

While white bridal gowns are now the dominant type of dress in the western world, that was not always the case. Though rare examples of white weddings are on record prior to the mid- 19th century, no particular color dominated bridal gowns in Western society until that time. Significantly, wedding dresses did not represent purity or virginity until after they were made primarily in white. Records from before that period testify to women marrying in colorful dresses, while pregnant, without social stigma. It was the color white, infused with racialized connotations of femininity and purity, which transformed the meaning of the wedding dress.

2’56” Performance Video,

Transleat me, curated by Z. Papa, D.art Space, Athens 2008

Exhibition I like to be adorned, Curated by M. Marangou, House of Cyprus, Athens 2009,

Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, Rethymnon 2009

The video performance refers to the painting entitled “The Tailor” by Giovanni Batista Moroni, located at the National Gallery in London, and to the odes of king Solomon. With a tailor’s scissors I start to cut the wedding dress and then continue with an industrial cloth-cutting machine. The intention is to emphasize the social greed for and the objectification of the woman for a performative wedding, where the garment is detached from the female body.

Curator Maria Marangou mentions in her exhibition listing: ... the woman - bride, is released from her painful adornment, through a violent image and audio process ...

video performance 3' in loop at House of Cyprus/ Athens 2009, Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete curated by Maria Maragkou/ Rethimno 2009, D.art Gallery curated by Zoe Pappa/ Athens 2008

According to Solomon’s proverbs “the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb: But her end is sharp as a twoedged sword” but in his songs he throws a orgy feast: “I have come into my garden, my bride; I have eaten my honeycomb: Eat friends; O lovers”. Cutting vertical a wedding dress with scissors, as a device for rite of passage, indicates a marginal non-place of whore identity that shifts to legal wife status or the inverse proportion? Lauren Blair and David Blair from Tennessee, married each other for the 83rd time in 2004. The apparent paradox of the infinite back and forth inclines to psychoanalytic transferenceς of manipulative hunger for each other. Mobility of conjugality works as transposition to translate the boundless honey that spreads out everywhere.

Sculpture with 136 forks 2,3m x 0,4m x 1,1 m

Ten Chapters, Artworks from the Permanent Collection of CCA, Curated by M. Maragkou, Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete 2017

Exhibition Transleat me, Curated by Z. Pappa D.art Space, Athens 2008

1st Mykonos Biennale, Curated by L. Venieri, Mykonos 2013

performance with Eftichia Kiourtidou, Antigone Avdi, Zulma Ramirez, Christina Lazoura at Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House/ Covent Garden 2003

curating a 4 hour long public performance commissioned from the State Acting School of Patras 2014

Working  with different communities: acting students, citizens and refugees imagining the city differently. Patras although it is an amazing coastal city, due to the fact that Port Authority holds a vast territory closed the majority of the residents of the city are turning their back to the sea and instead they are looking inwardly in the commercial centre. A series of performances and interventions re-enacting the space and performed poems, songs, openings of closed doors and romantic blind dates! Fiftly people started walking from the centre of Patras and at times we were four times the amount with the engagement of strangers at a total of five miles walking practice. The song which you listen vocalizes the need : imagine the city and make it your own :-)

The participating poets from both the United States and Greece were: Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Elana Bell, Yiorgos Chouliaras, Kathy Engel, Ross Gay, Panayotis Ioannidis, Robert Kocik, Patricia Kolaiti, Vassilis Manoussakis, Jamaika Osorio, Pat Rosal, Liana Sakelliou, Danai Sioziou and Samantha Thornhill. 

Set out for Ithaca was a live and evolving installation created by Adonis Volanakis, a Fulbright visiting artist in New York University/ Arts and Politics Department. He has invited seven Greek and seven American contemporary poets to convene in Ithaca, Greece, to create an artwork that stimulates dialogue and interaction between Ithaca residents -who hostedand created a human hotel for the writers-  and the summer visitors. The visiting poets encouraged local residents to participate in workshops, experience an alternative poetic sightseeing tour of the city and shared poetry in situ. In exchange, citizens hosted a participating poet and provided her/him with a unique insight of the island and offer the distinct experience of philoxenia/ hospitality. Designed to simulate a blind double date, between the poets, between poets and residents, all participants contributed to discussions, workshops and readings. In June 2013, these artists came together to explore the importance of poetry as a way to forge social relations and foster possible urban strategies for change. Set out for Ithaca was a socially engaged intervention that promoted the sharing of cross-cultural poetry to create platforms for community-based discussion and creative collective imagining.

 In the Set out for Ithaca environment everybody became a poet, exploring the language to embrace an open dialogue with the island, re-launching poetry as a vital way to connect us.

PROGRAM

Friday, 28 June/ re-activating the Municipality Library, Vathi

10:00- 13:00 blind date between poets from Greece and US and lecture/ discussion with Prof. Apostolos Athanassakis

17:30 - 20:30 language games and sharing stories with and for adults, teenagers and children

Saturday, 29 June/ in a beach during the morning and at the central square of Vathi during the afternoon

10:00- 13:00 language games for adults, teenagers and children using high protection sun lotion

17:30 - 20:30 poetic ‘bombs’, writing exercise in interaction with the participants, and many more

Sunday, 30 June/ in a beach during the morning and at PHIMIOS Cultural Center during the evening

10:00 - 13:00 language games for adults, teenagers and children using high protection sun lotion

19:00 - 21:00 Presentation of the project/ Open discussion/Readings in the Municipal Theater

city stories at Georgiadis Park and the city centre 

Orchestrating a community project addressed with an active open call to residents, for and with the Caravan Project and local -and international- choreographer  Constantin Tsakirelis. "come to share city stories with our bodies, how do we narrate our memories from the urban landscape beyond words? The city poetics are embodied with games and wandering greeting strangers. How do we meet our secret co-dancer?"

performance in a midst of  blind dates at Beton 7/ Athens 2015

In homage of Thanos Veloudios, an exhibition curated by Dimosthenis Agrafiotis,  who had many hats: he was an artist (photography, choreography, writer), a pilot, a war hero, an ethnographer who was also attending Cabaret Voltaire  where Dada started in Zurich! I forgot to tell you: he was openly gay which is huge thing together with being a war hero in Greece. I  matched up strangers from the gallery in a blind date, asked them kindly to sit on a bench, take off their shoes and then I choreographed their feet and asked them to drew their feet's outline with the smell of roses and sounds of a Tibetan singing bowl. 

photo (archival print) variable dimensions at Parlor/ New York 2013, Container Gallery/ Thessaloniki 2010

audio in collaboration with mezzo soprano Anna Pangalou and text on wall installation at ABOUT / Athens 2012

performance with the Flower Girls  at Mykonos Biennale  2013

I as a wedder at a paganistic party I performed a  marital ceremony for three women as a public declaration of artistic union.

blind performative date

creating space for getting to know each other and  share work, thoughts and feelings and as a bonus track a live performance. Artists, theoreticians and visitors came together from different countries and cities virtually and physically. 

Live performance: Aemilia Papafilipou (Athens)

Theory: Constantina Georgelou (Amsterdam), Maria Georgilaki (Chania), Akis Orfanos (Thessaloniki)

Praxis: Joulia Strauss (Berlin), Radim Labudha (Prague), Jeffrey Andreoni (Athens), Esther Lemi (Zurich) 

video performance 5' in loop, in collaboration with Eleni Philipaki at Action Field KODRA/ Thessaloniki 2011, Athens School of Fine Arts 2009, Athens Video Art Festival 2009, Blinddate #12 / Athens 2008

This video performance was created in the context of the interdisciplinary platform and joint exhibition blinddate12.blogspot.com. It is an allegory inspired by Cervantes’s story The Dialogue of the Dogs, a multi-layered literary text ladden with philosophical questions: can we rely on how things appear to be? Can we, in turn, rely on reason and rational discourse? What is the foundation of our moral distinctions between good and evil, “hunter” and “prey”? Relying on the topology of animal masks, the work raises issues of personal, social and political identity, but also calls on us to rethink the human/animal boundary and the limits of our presumed humanism.

… and so, one day, having seen myself punished unjustly, and seeing that my care, nimbleness and bravery were of no use in catching the wolf, I resolved to change my tactics and not charge off in search of him, as was my custom, far from the flock, but to remain close to the flock, but to remain close to the flock, for since the wolf always came there, it would be the likeliest place to catch him. Every week the alarm was raised for us, and no more than the flock could be guarded against. I crouched down behind a bush, my fellow dogs rushed past and onward, and from there I kept watch, and saw two shepherds seizing one of the best lambs of the fold and kill it, in a way that made it truly look like the wolf had been its executioner. I was astounded, and I was equally amazed to see that the shepherds were the wolves and that those who were attacking it. They immediately informed the owner about the attack of the wolf, and gave him the skin and some of the fresh, keeping the biggest and best bits for themselves to eat. The master admonished them once again, and once again the dogs were punished. There were no wolves, the flock was decreasing in size, I so wanted to tell all, but I could not speak. All this filled me with wonder and grief. “God help me”, I said to myself. “Who can put the a stop to this wickedness? “Who has the strength to reveal that the defenders attack, that the sentries sleep, that those you trust rob you and that those who guard you kill you?”  by Miguel Cervantes first published in 1613.

site specific installation with variable dimensions (wedding dresses, wood, steel) commisioned by the European Cultural Centre of Delphi 2009

Scattered wedding dresses trace a parallel route to a footpath. Glauce receives from Medea a bridal gown as gift and when she puts it on she is set on fire. The praxis of this offering repeats itself in multiple copies but turned inside-out, dresses that have already been worn, that violate time and the normal use of the path. Wedding dresses are an ephemeral kind of clothing meant to be worn for a few hours in the life of a woman and here they work in juxtaposition installed as they are outdoors, without a human body to support their volume, next to the trees which are living entities, bearers of registered time. Piles of billet-woods and kindling at the base of every empty- clothed body upheld in the air and threatened, fictionally burned, while forming an heterotopia in space/time. The bridal gown is a social uniform, a fulcrum that signifies convention. This gown functions as a tool for the Glauce’s rite of passage from daughter to bride, act that remains unfulfilled and the daughter is burned alive instead. As the self-annulling present, that alters its ideal meaning that of offer, carries the desire for revenge and becomes the medium for this fusion. In another reading, Medea, recognizing herself in a previous time as in a mirror, spares the young woman the fate she herself knows only too well. The rhizomatic outlook of the story enriches the triptych desire/ love/ revenge. In the anti-rite of passage and purification that the myth directs, this donation brings the identity of the giver and her social attributes as a foreigner, a king’s daughter. The act of giving means exchange but also authority that reflects the ethos of the giver. The gift- wedding dress as a mechanism of ritual suspension negotiates the marginal non-place of Glauce’s identity. 

video performance commissioned by the European Cultural Centre of Delphi 2009, French Institute of Athens 2010

Two men succeed the women where one is dressing the other in a female bridal dress, which becomes acidly unbearable and the other struggles to peel it off himself. This process of cross dressing of the male body transfers the social function of the dress from the female to the male field through an imaginary revenge.

The bridal gown is a social uniform, a fulcrum that signifies convention. This gown functions as a tool for the Glauce’s rite of passage from daughter to bride, act that remains unfulfilled and the daughter is burned alive instead. As the self-annulling present, that alters its ideal meaning that of offer, carries the desire for revenge and becomes the medium for this fusion. In another reading, Medea, recognizing herself in a previous time as in a mirror, spares the young woman the fate she herself knows only too well. The rhizomatic outlook of the story enriches the triptych desire/ love/ revenge. In the anti-rite of passage and purification that the myth directs, this donation brings the identity of the giver and her social attributes as a foreigner, a king’s daughter. The act of giving means exchange but also authority that reflects the ethos of the giver. The gift- wedding dress as a mechanism of ritual suspension negotiates the marginal non-place of Glauce’s identity. 

photo (archival print) variable sizes,

The term inertia is more properly understood as shorthand for "the principle of inertia" as described by Newton in his First Law of Motion; that an object not subject to any net external force moves at a constant velocity. Thus an object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change

blind walk

durational performance 2016 curated by Geert Vermeire / Milena Project

"How do I trust? How can I trust? Does it happen when a stranger and myself cross paths? How can my feet trust another? Meeting a stranger sharing a dream bringing a psychoanalysis chair upright. How do we walk and talk in our dreams?"

“The imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet. Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes, generated local and cross-continental senses of place, shaped cities, parks, generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ----Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Cultural History of Walking

Ceramics and weaved textiles, curated by Liana Zoza

Cube Gallery, Patras 2016

The process of weaving or painting is the reading of texts and herstories of women writers: Hypatia of Alexandria, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, Marilyn Yalom, Peggy Phelan, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Karen Finley, Jeanette Winterson, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Maya Angelou, Betty Friedan, Bell Hooks, Anna Akhmatova, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, Helene Cixous, Lucy Irigaray και Monique Wittig. The exhibition has a folder of bios, texts, photos and thoughts of these women.

Painting on ceramics. Artworks inspired by women-symbols of the feminist movements and their multiple waves. Each work is hand-painted in Pietà style - its diameter is 43cm same as my hug, like a prayer. Every brush and a prayer, like a rosary. I got inspired by their texts and biographical details. All of them are women from the Holy Women series, which I have started in 2013.

Plexiglass Triptych, Exhibition Mind the Gap, Curated by Maria Kenanidou,

Action Field Kodra, Thessaloniki 2016

This triptych has hidden phrases, which the viewer is called upon to disassemble and uncover, with all the context contained in the mirror material as narcissism is interweaved in the process of our reflection. The reflection of our image and the whole process of introspection separates the body from the gender and brings us back to a dialogue with a new Holy Trinity: the self, the Ego and the father. An invitation to castration, a threefold image of prayer as an encouragement for the father to dismiss his normative gender.

500 kserotigana, Food Performance in Washington Square,

Curated by Karen Finley,New York 2013

No other area has constributed as heavily to the country’ s dept mοuntain. If Athens had cut de-fence spending the levels similar to the other EU states over the past decade, economists claim it would have saved around 150 bn euros - more than bailout. Instead, Greece decicates up to 7bn euros a year to military expenditure. Greece is spending 7% of its GBP on defence when other European countries spent an average 2.2%.

Food Performance in Washington Square: I handed out kserotigana (Cretan sweets) that I produced with the help of a Greek womanh baker in Astoria, and a paper-plane with the above inscription which presents the purchase of weapon systems in Greece and how that has contributed to the Greek national debt.

Performance

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2012

The performance took place inside the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in the gallery of ancient Greek exhibits. On a stone seat for two, I waiting for unsuspecting visitors who shared the seat and I shared with them initially one text:

One question for you, the reader | a friend of mine called me a crazy but loveable Greek | is this true? | Am I lively [alive] and charismatic? | Am I crazy in a good sense ? | do I have passion and duende? | Am I a masterpiece? | Am I poor? | Am I rich? | Am I law-abiding? | Am I sexy and clever | Am I airswept, frantic and white? | Am I sensitive and islamophobic? | Am I a Balcan? | European? | Am I anti-semite? | Am I a lie? | Do I contradict myself? | What does it mean to be Greek nowadays?

I then asked them to read as much as they wanted from a text by the American hardcover magazine Venture from 1964 with a feature on Greece. In it there is mention of an arid, poor, estranged but beautiful country in which ‘all the poor inhabitants of the countryside are in contrast with cosmopolitan Athens’. Whilst the visitors read the text, I softly chanted a funeral song.

Audio and pencil Installation εγκατάσταση in collaboration with soprano Anna Pangalou, Curated by G. Tserionis,

ABOUT, Athens 2012

The emblematic text of Emma Goldman ‘If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution’ was penciled on the wall. The sound heard and danced by the the viewers was a variation on a dance piece of intense tempo with operatic singing of ‘I am empty and I know it’ by Anna Pangalou. This artwork is placed in the framework of poetic political parody. The play was accompanied by a broader text by Emma Goldman.

Photographic series, steel display 40cm x 80cm x 115cm

CAMP, Athens 2012

The photographic work I Li-eave is made of a series of documentation polaroids that I took in the early hours in the historic centre of Athens when it was burnt down as reaction to the murder of the sixteen year old Alexis Grigoropoulos by a police officer. The camera follows the outline of a man who follows and mourns for the dead boy but not for the broken windows. The photographs were displayed in a showcase of one of the shops that had burnt down.

Participatory Performance

Performance Studies International Cluster, BIOS, Athens 2010

Performance Studies International Conference, University of Leeds, Leeds 2011

The synchronous kissing therapy or I hope you have washed your teeth

I kiss you like a brother

I kiss you like a father

I kiss you like a lover

I kiss you like a fucker

I kiss you all the way

The kissing synchronicity is being acted out in a participatory performance with the audience/ witnesses. Alternating projected portraits of artists with visible and invisible teeth who have in a number of ways kissed me in my practice. The varied ways of kissing are transported from one guest participant to the one next to them as per my instruction: Anna Akhmatova=kiss of the hand, Joseph Βeuys=kiss on the forehead, Jannis Kounelis=kiss the nose, Paul Celan= eyelash flashing, Thomas Hirschhorn=smack on the lips, Sophie Calle=kiss teh shoulder, Antonin Artaud=kiss on the eyelid, Marina Abramovic=kiss on the cheek, Bill Viola=kiss my marking Χ on the hand with a marker.

Site-specific Project, Drawing 1m x 1,5m, Exhibiton Greek Island,

Memorial Site Korai 1941-1944, Korai 4, ART ATHINA, Athens 2011

In the Memorial Site 1941-1944, Korai 4, there are over 145 etched on the wall portraits. I created a photographic archive of all the portraits and then re-did all the portraits, with blind contour drawing (looking at them without looking at the surface I was drawing on) in an endurance sketching spree, over a year. My intention was not to exhibit the results only a series of site specific installations but to re-exhibit the actual space. As we co-wrote with Nadia Kalara in the press release ‘Across the two levels of the bunkers, one has the feeling of being in the unconscious of the most recent Greek history. Text on the walls’ surfaces transform the space to a ‘magical notebook’ in which the mechanism of infinite provision of continual mnemonic traces have frozen’.

During my wanderings through the Memorial Site spaces, opening up several hatchlings and safety doors to the air vents, I discovered a wooden ladder which obviously had not been constructed by someone proficient in a carpenters workshop as the steps were uneven, extremely thin and clearly improvised, presumably in an effort of creating a means of escape. Up the steps I placed figures wandering in a spaceography of climbing.

Maria Marangou wrote in her critic in Eleftherotypia newspaper 21 May 2011

“The artists worked leaving behind discreet traces in the space. What else could they do anyway, as there remain so intense the traces of those who lived there, before getting to the firing squad? The advantage of the exhibition remains in the absence of narcissism, the disadvantage being that you can not see the works of modern visual art production in a space so charged-up and dramatic. And from this viewpoint, the mistake in exhibiting in such a space where the only one perhaps who could stand up to would be Marina Abramovic washing bones or Christian Boltanksi setting up cenotaphs. We’ll see then, as a tender, humble offering the idea by Adonis Volanakis to draw on paper people, one piece of paper backing the other, honoring those whom in the same space leant back-to-back to get warm.

Public Intervention in City Magazine 324.000 copies,

Action Field Kodra, Thessaloniki 2011

A public statement of visibility of artists and their hardships, with humorous commentary on the materialistic despair of the community. The persona of Mr Madera Alamez came up from the discussions in the visual arts community, where artists share out amongst them the anxieties of which is the best path to follow in regards with their work and their indecision to contact collectors, theorists, museum directors and so on. The creation of this graphic template happened following study and research in the marketing leaflets handed out by travelling magicians and mediums, and I placed Marchel Duchamp’s Fountain as the visual logo. Initially it began as performance, given that I as a beneficiary artist was handing out such leaflets outside galleries and art conferences to support this imaginary parody savior . Then followed an entry by the press in the 2011 August and September editions of the City magazine in Thessaloniki, in several thousands of printed copies.

Drawing 2.6m x 0,25m with HB pencil on the wall,

Exhibition AGORA/ANGER, Curated by G. Gryntaki and D. Halatsis

Cheap Art, Athens 2011

“Certainly under these conditions the unique and undeniable measure for evaluation of the artist becomes the commercial recognition. -In the age of risk, writes Nicholas Kalas in the essay with the same title, criterion of ‘good’ is success- a fact that feeds the despair of the artist in obtaining some sort of position in the narrow podium of the marketplace. The game of art is open and the weight of failure unbearable, points out Kalas within the same document. Across two sides of this phrase Adonis Volanakis recognises the ambivalence- through the anti-commercial conceptual medium which realises itself as contradictory in a cynical statement- the survival in the game of art as the end justifies the means- Survival is the name of the game.”

Gelly Gruntaki, Curator, in the exhibition catalogue

Installation 1m x 4m, 3rd On the Move Festival

Exhibition WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON FEST, Curated by D.Halatsis

Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens 2010

In September 2010 the Greek Parliament voted laws 3846/2010 and 3863/2010, with common feature the promotion of labour elasticity and the further degradation of work rights. From the small writing and the initial 30 pages of the older laws, the bill ended up with 130 pages. I created a palimpsest, in collaboration with a political scientist and a lawyer, in which there is the whole text of the new law in the pages of the older one. The 120 pages were converted into 30 with over layering of words.

Installation of photographs, plexiglass, painting

Based on Judith, a parting from the body by Howard Barker,

Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki 2010

A parting from the body, the text by Howard Barker was the springboard in order to create a series of digital photographic collages with the bodies and faces. The photographic works were created by documenting my continuous engagement with the performers, for four months. I met with Howard Barker in London and I shared my vision in order to create an installation on his text. The installation was not a site but a text-specific one but still in a subtle conversation with the works of the Iola collection, from the upper floor in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. In the morning and afternoon the museum visitors enjoy the installation and then in the evening the performance was taking place.

The professor of semiotics at the University of Patras Dimitris Tsatsoulis reports in Nea Estia, volume 167, January 2010:

The performance involved the installation and necessarily distances itself with its poetic quality. So, from the beginning, with the entrance of the spectators, the complex of the three performers on the ground, half-naked under the diaphanous textiles and the appropriate lighting, refers to a visual composition of living bodies, to a sculpture that will come to life to represent the story. The visual vocabulary prevail throughout the performance, both with the installation of ​​Adonis Volanakis and the videos of Alexandros Mistriotis. Impressive are the beige-brown suits-mantles designed by Volanakis, which left either the naked body of Olofernes to show the vigour of the conqueror and his vulnerability that will be confirmed by his love and beheading by Judith, or the half-naked bodies of the two women, who under the cloaks wore transparent silk cloth - denial of giving and coverage of the ultimate goals.

Research Project, Painting triptych 130cm x 40cm, Installation, Performance,

Curated by Gelly Gryntaki and Christina Sgouromiti,

Municipal Gallery Molyvos, Lesvos, 2010

The Greek Sale project took place during the summer of 2010 in London for the *Memorandum exhibition at the Municipal Gallery of Molyvos in Lesvos. The painting triptych was the base on which I stood for the performance of thirty disappeared paintings. To each and every visitor from the village I gave a small paper-plane with a text of protest about the lost works, as many of them had no idea about the collection works of their municipality, which had been donated by artists. Inside the Gallery, on the table were exhibited the estimates that I had ordered from a company in London for the works of A. Akrithakis, G. Halepas, Ch. Botsoglou and G. Gaitis from the permanent collection that I was invited by the curators to be in a dilogue with.

“And if the new “reading” of the selected part of the Collection that Volanakis attempts

through the prism of the modern financial institution of art, our current social and cultural landscape, Tetsi’s original expressionism, talks carelessly with Molivos himself in the light of the eternal midsummer.”

Gelly Gryntaki, Curator, in the catalogue of the exhibition

Ink Drawing 1,50m X 2,50m on Fabriano paper,

Cacoyannis Foundation, Bicycle Festival, Athens 2010

Performance in collaboration with Nadia Kalara, artistic residency The Siblings, ilMotorediRicerca group and Filopappou group

Pelion, 2009

Two bodies follow the railway tracks, joined by bedsheets on a train route in Pelion. Nadia Kalara walks forward with her eyes closed while I walk backwards. This indiosyncratic practice of contact and awareness changed the way our bodies moved and the way they connected with the environment.

The performance took place as part of an artistic residency with members from the Filopappou group and other Italian artists from the ilmotorediricerca group. The research process included the artistic family of Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio

Site-specific outdoor Installation, Video Performance (wedding dresses, concrete steel bars, chunks of wood), Commission of European Cultural Centre of Delphi 2009

Assistant Professor in Performance Theory at the University of Patras, George Sampatakakis mentions in his review of the volume The Crisis of Representation, ERGO (ed. G. Ioannidis):

“Glauce by Volanakis functions as an optical supplementum of the Euripidean Medea,

presenting a new version of what took place in the marital structures of Glauce, when Medea met Creon’s daughter and the wedding dress became an unbearable gift [offering]. The field where the communication with the ancient context takes place is the male body upon and around which, a ceremony of enclosing the male subject in the bridal costume is set up ... Although in every video performance there is a risk of deification of new technologies, the purity and understatement of Volanakis’ “vocabulary” counteract any such possibility. The starting point for the creation of the video was the text of Euripides (and the macabre description of the death of Creon’s daughter in Medea, 1136-230), which the artist had certainly studied, since on the one hand in his note he reproduces Euripides’ vocabulary ( and mainly the word gift [δώρημα]), and on the other hand the shaking of the garment that we see in the video, typically refers to the shaking of the Euripide nymph.

More specifically in this video performance the ancient text functions as a multi-sensor foundation for re-negotiating Glauce’s identity through the male body of dancer Yannis Nikolaidis: producing a new extended video-body with the dressing and mostly of undressing out of a wedding gown which Creon’s daughter never have worn.”

At the same time, indoors, in a video performance, two men succeed the two women (Medea and Glauce). One prepares and dresses the other in women’s wedding attire, which becomes caustically unbearable and he tries to slip off it. This process of deviant clothing of the male body shifts the social function of this dress from the female to the male field.

The rhizomatic way of looking at the story enriches the triptych of desire / love / revenge. In the anti-ceremony of transition and purification that the legend directs, the offering bears the identity of the donor and her social qualities as a foreign, daughter of the king. The act of offering reflects morality, it means exchange but also power. The gift - wedding-dress as a mechanism of inhibition of the transition negotiates the marginal non-place of Glauce’s identity.

Circles, on the occasion of the arrival of Joseph Beuys’s Omnibus

Curated by Gelly Gryntaki and Margarita Kataga,

Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens 2009

The medical ophthalmoscope has three cycles, which flash voluntarily.

Secretly each of them has a name:

CYCLE one: Who has the power to reveal?

-The Dialogue of Dogs, by Miguel de Cervantes

CYCLE two: Let some artifacts to do on their own

- The Finnegans wake, by James Joyce

CYCLE three: One is forced to translate thought into action and action into objext [object merging with text]

- Interview with Willoughby Sharp, by Joseph Bush

“Adonis Volanakis creates a idiosyncratic art triptych starting from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner - a great inspiration of Beuys - and challenging the viewer to explain in his own way to the hare - who is waiting still in the exhibition - the images produced by the triple ideal social model of Steiner, the sharp political - but also poetic - way of Cervantes and the circular - and far endless - dreamy world of the Finnegan literary. And in whatever order he wishes.”

Gely Gryntaki, Curator, for the catalogue of the exhibition

DEMO

Felt Sculpture 1.7m x 1.5m x 0.7m

Exhibition Direct Democracy, on the occasion of the arrival of Joseph Beuys’s Omnibus and Archives, Curated by Gelis Gryntaki and Margarita Kataga

School of Fine Arts, Athens 2009

This project was commission for the exhibition Joseph Beuys and Direct Democracy since the famous Omnibus, bus with Beuys’s archives, documents, objects and videos came to Athens. I was invited to produce works specifically in reference, curated by Margarita Kataga and Gelis Gryntaki.

The Hare is a super-magnification of a children’s toy from the 1970s and its material is felt, with clear references to Beuys’ work both in terms of the material and the performance he made with the hare. On his back it reads DEMO, a reference to both the concept of the original and the first synthetic of Democracy. In the exhibition, the hare was on the floor, as a democratic hug-space.

Organizing and curating poetic performances at the installation of the Filopappou Group,

2nd Athens Biennale, HEAVEN, Curated by Z. Xagorari and D. Papaioannou, Athens 2009

For the Filopappou Group’s Arcadia installation, I invited poets from different backgrounds for a poetic “Et in Arcadia Ego” residence. The words with the people met at the installation’s site for five hours and the poets shared with the visitors words that sparked the experience of the work. Spoken words as whispers broke the usual practices of uttering words in a poetic manner. The writing was done with chalks on the concrete, on RAVASAKI? secrets from one hand to the other, on glued papers on benches, sewn on pillows, behind a blackboard, inside small bottles travelling in the ocean.

Participating poets: Alexandra Plastira, Katerina Iliopoulou, Phoebe Giannisi,

Panagiotis Ioannidis, Patricia Kolaiti, Gianna Boukova, Iordanis Papadopoulos, George Hantzis, Thanos Stathopoulos, Doukas Kapantais, Giannis Stigas, Yuli Volanaki, Theoni Kotini.

Photo + Audio Installation

Tracing Traces exhibition, Curated by A. Potamianou and G. Kotretsos

Gianna Grammatopoulou Gallery, Athens 2012

Dromonero Oil Factory, Chania 2009

the o-live song, a sound and archive project

Relational practices incorporate languages, rhythms and musical instruments. There are 23 countries in the Mediterranean region with olive groves. The process of the project was to ask one artist, one per country, to send a song containing the word olive. The presentation was made with a printed map of the Mediterranean basin upside down, a folder with all the emails I exchanged with the participating artists and an archival document with our telephone communications.

Photographic Installation based on Paul Celan

(c-prints 1,5m x 1,15m (x1), 0,9m x 0,7m (x2)

Exhibition I like to be adorned, Curated by M. Marangou, House of Cyprus, Athens 2009

Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, Rethimno 2009

I was handed by a dear friend an archive with gelatin glass negatives of an unknown photographer from Brussels as a birthday gift. I started to research and find more about her or him with no luck. I inquired at the FOMU ( Photo Museum of Antwerp) and the State Photo Archives in Brussels there was no indication of this photographer. Throughout the search process I would read Paul Chelan’s poetry for and to this unknown artist and created a triptych by remaking the woman many times with the phrase “all things are less than they are, all are more” as a mantra by Celan’s Cello entry. I was researching how female identity and social weight of beautification is embedded in the original photograph and then how it can be deconstructed in the process of overlayering images and the text.

“Adonis Volanakis, in his tribute to Paul Celan’s essay, All is Less, expresses his opinion on the issue of the adornment of his subject; a blonde Western European beauty, in an old-fashioned pose and next to her two well-worked frames with paper pulp, in reversal of the same subject. The artist turns time upside down, by invading elements of art history, into a dialogue between the forms of classical photography and the possibilities it acquires with technology.”

Maria Marangou, Curator, in the exhibition catalogue

Installation, based on Beckett’s Breath

Cacoyannis Foundation, Athens 2009

The text from a Catholic prayer, which sings breathe on me, breath of God was the trigger for an erotic urge: breathe on me, breath of yours. If our life is a breath and this can be a comma in brackets, then our life is a break in the whole and that should be a pleasure. The breath in the vagina (,) is the original symbol printed on the balloon and the viewer gets what he or she wants, inflated or untouched.

Mixed media sculpture 1m x 1,40m x 0,8m,

Exhibition About the End, Curated by T. Moutsopoulos

Athens Municipality Cultural Center, Athens 2008

The sculpture Je, moi et papa is an imaginary delayed collaboration with the lost father. The creation of technical drawings from the existing model of a church which the father built out of match-sticks before I was born. As the spectator approaches the table they see the inverted image of the church in the mirror, while on the surface of the table is like an epitaph the phrase of the title of the work. On the wall behind the table are the technical drawings of the floor plan, facade and section of the church building.

Plexiglass Installation, paper with instructions for use of the medicine, video duration 6’ 17’’

Exhibition I create therefore I exist, Curated by A. Leopoulou and D. Gounari

Art Panorama in Greece 3, Center for Contemporary Art, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki 2008

Biomorphs2 exhibition, Curated by M. Aggeli, Cheap Art Gallery, Athens 2007

Morphometrox plus is a commercial for an imaginary iconic medicine which cures all physical ailments, - a comment on the drug lust of our time. In addition, I created a fake company which “hired” me for the visual identity of the medicine. The video represents the process by which trophomeron alpha, the made-up active drug substance, after being embedded in the cell nucleus, reaches - due to chemical affinity - the genetic code and breaks down the double helix by causing a potential difference. The visual research process was done with the contribution of a doctor from the N.I.M.TS. Hospital and a pharmacist-researcher from the National Hellenic Research Foundation.

Curator Maria Aggeli mentions in the catalogue of the exhibition:

“The agony of the contemporary human in the often frantic pursuit of the good, the true, the “complete” and the illusionary traps of the perfect (!) as the inevitable trajectory of every unrelenting search, come up as varied topics for collective questions in the video-installation of Adonis Volanakis’ Morphometrox Plus, on the occasion of the brand name of a fictional medicine. The artwork, reference to the body, as part of an entity - trilogy, highlights the need to minimize any imperfections in the human body and metaphorically senses the synapses of cells during the “action” of the drug. The visual vocabulary, strongly political at the same time, against the pseudo-need of human for the chemical element that will intervene - even genetically - in its biomorphic structures, in the hunt for the perfect, the invulnerable, the image of perfection.”

MORPHOMETROX® PLUS

1. DESCRIPTION OF THE MEDICAL PRODUCT

1.1 MORPHOMETROX® PLUS

1.2 Qualitative composition

Active ingredient : Trophomeron alpha

Excipients: Trimentilol, Eferium sodate, Vabrionic acid, Aquatronic sodium, Microcrystalline

1.3 Pharmaceutical Form

Capsules for oral use

1.4 Quantitative composition in terms of active ingredient

Each capsule contains 500 mg of Trophomeron alpha

1.5 Pharmacotherapeutic category

The absolute equilibrating of cell function

1.6 Distributor

PHARMAKO LAB

1.7 Manufacturer

PHARMAKO LAB

2. NECESSARY INFORMATION CONCERNING THE MEDICINE

2.1 General Information

Morphometrox capsules contain the active ingredient trophomeron alpha, which is a brand new medical category named as multi-powered equilibrator of cell functions. Trophomeron alpha penetrates the cell membrane and reaches the nucleus of somatic cells, where it recognises the existing mutations of the DNA and restores the original functional structure. That way, each cell gains its full potential.

Site-specific Installation in collaboration with writer T.Chimonas,

Exhibition blinddate 2007

Palco Factory, Athens 2007

This installation functions as a sacred space of reflection of lost siblings. My self-fugitive brother’s face appears on towels I placed in the wash basins as a reference to the Holy Shroud and between them the flag of the country of self-exile. The visitor can read the text that is written in mirror-image on the wall only when she/he /they come close to the sink to wash their hands and read it through the mirror.

Video 5 min, DVD for Visibility project,

Curated by M. Paschalidou, Attiki Farmers’ Market, Athens 2007

Visibility, 9 hours

Non monetary exchange Action in the public sphere with video art currency,

Curated by M. Paschalidou, Attiki Farmers’ Market, Athens 2007

The video Sentisalvox plus is a fake advertisement for the imaginary medicine Sentisalvox, which is the ideal medicine for all emotional difficulties. This video was my work in the DVD that we exchanged with absolutely anything at the Farmer’s Market of Attiki Square.

Curator Maria Paschalidou mentions in the catalogue of the exhibition:

“At the first level it raises the issue of the visibility of the artworks and the artists. As artists in this action, we are transported out of the “familiar circle” into a direct negotiation of our work with our wider and less known audience. It is a process of redefining our position in the daily life of the city. At the second level, it brings to the fore the issue of the visibility of a specific neighborhood of Athens. The densely populated area of ​​Attica Square in which populations, cultures, habits and commercial products are mixed plays its own role in the game of visibility and invisibility. Visibility project aims to explore the area of ​​art in public space through various artistic experiments and practices, collaborations and performative actions.

40cm x 50cm, Drawings and c-print Photos,

Kappatos Gallery, Athens 2010

Exhibition AICA Hellas and www.thelossproject.net 2006

3 hour Performance praying to Rodin

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin 2003

Directing Post-operatic Performance,

Wimbledon College of Art, London 2002

This performative approach to the Wagner’s Ring tetralogy emerged through a love-hate relationship for the composer. With the performance I approach the concept of the post-operatic, dealing with different documentary / visual means and developing a fragmentary version of the original composition.

This concept does not require the classic opera audience to sit securely in its seats but to coexist with Wagner’s ideological rival, Rousseau, who proposes immediacy, creative participation instead of passivity. The notion of everyday life is introduced in opera: greatness gives way to simple everyday moments, transporting heroes and gods in human forms, in boring moments, almost televised.

The viewer will recreate the performativity of everyday life, in the way that many

20th century thinkers [Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certau, Guy Debord ...] analyzed

theoretically. Performers Despina Panagiotopoulou, Hiroe Takei, Antigone Avdi are coming

as co-creators in the re-deconstruction of Wagner’s tetralogy, with my apparent presence as

conductor, who orchestrates music and video projections on a deck. The performers moved throughout the space, occupying spaces within breathing distance of each spectator.

site specific installation,

Αthens 2006