When: Opening: Friday, February 22, 18:00 – 22:00
Duration: February 22 – March 23, 2019

Where: ACG Art Gallery

Organized by: Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts as part of the Arts Festival 2019

Opening hours: Mon-Fri: 14:00 – 18:00, Sat: 12:00 – 16:00

Guided tours by ACG students every Tuesday during Activity Hour (13:40-15:00)

The Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts (FRSFPA) of Deree – The American College of Greece is pleased to present the exhibition ‘The Collection as an Automaton’, curated by invited curator Elpida Karaba. The exhibition is part of the Arts Festival organized by the FRSFPA. The opening of the exhibition will take place on February 22, 18:00 – 22:00, at the ACG Art Gallery.

Participating artists: Α-dash team (Noemi Niederhauser, Eva Isleifs, Zoe Hatziyannaki), Natasa Biza, Kostas Christopoulos (with the students of the 8th studio of painting of ASFA Olga Vlassi, Thanos Kardoulas & Katerina Messini), Effie Halivopoulou (in collaboration with Deree – The American College of Greece alumnae Dimitra Prifti and Afroditi Andreou and the student Aliki Ntounia), Dimitris Ioannou, Lito Kattou, Georgia Kotretsos, Jesper List Thomsen, Petros Moris, Yiannis Papadopoulos/Olga Mexa, Cally Spooner.

The analogy of the automaton for a collection is used whereas the finite mechanism of the automaton condenses all the limitations one has to face, challenge and transcend within a collecting praxis. The interest for the automaton has different and diverse connotations. It is related a lot to modernism’s vision of a broader life enhanced by the automaton but at the same time it is connected with a lot of modernism’s disillusions. The automatization of life through indexes, taxonomy, archives, registers and machines became the mechanism par excellence of canonization and surveillance of life, of what Foucault called biopolitics. And furthermore nowadays the automaton has been connected to another aspiration for the future related to the post-human condition. So, proposing the collection as an automaton asks, how do we evaluate the inclusion and exclusion processes of automata? How do we redefine in our current condition, our relationship to apparatuses of power or empowerment, emancipation that at the same time are the apparatuses of control and oppression? What are the visions and dystopias of (post)humanity?

Artists, Α-dash team, Natasha Biza, Kostas Christopoulos, Effie Halivopoulou, Dimitris Ioannou, Litto Kattou, Georgia Kotretsos, Jesper List Thomsen, Petros Moris, Yiannis Papadopoulos / Olga Mexa, and Cally Spooner, were invited to work with the content of The American College of Greece Art Collection in the broader sense. This addresses not only works of art and objects but documents, correspondence, oral history, storage space, in order to create new works or proposals for the existing works, the history of the collection, the management of belongings, the history of the College, the backgrounds, the gender and the personal history of the donors. Artists consider different methodologies as well as critical questioning on the ontology vs the epistemology of a collection as working tools that aim to create diverse and critical narratives not only for The American College of Greece Art Collection but also within its specific context as a consignment of an educational institution. The works of art, the research as well as the final product of the exhibition will become part of broader discourse on what it means to collect in our new changing world. If and how nowadays the bigger and bigger collective and accumulative impulse manages to find new meanings? How it is to collect in the virtual world, in a world where our relationship with material things is drastically changing, in a world where issues of identity, personal and political becomes radical, where collecting practices, cultural hierarchies and global economy become one?

The exhibition ‘The Collection as an Automaton’ is not a thematic exhibition having as a subject ‘the collection’, but it belongs to a genre of artistic and curatorial practice of the collection as (research based) art or archival art, a genre that developed a lot in the last quarter of the 20^th century as an outcome of institutional critique, postcolonial and post Eastern Bloc discourse. It is a genre that refers, as every genre, to aesthetic as well as to discursive challenges, conflicts and developments. So, the exhibition aims to be part of this genre in a critical manner, investigating (as a theme) the locality of the specific collection of The American College of Greece and its history and the locus of collecting as theory and art praxis, revealing a lot of diverse connotations asking: What are the powers connected and played out when a collection is formed, distributed or redistributed? What are the powers connected in narrating history or creating value and surplus? Is it the history of patriarchy or a feminist history? Who holds the power amongst the involved individuals, the involved objects and the involved institutions? What power holds a certain mode of categorization or taxonomy? Questions that in other words affirm that an institutional collection is a political matter as it asks the prospects and the limits of being public or private, accessible or restricted, transcended in physicality and virtuality, suspended between real and imaginary.

During the exhibition the curator, artists, as well as students from different disciplines will give scheduled guided tours, proposing different narratives for the displays, the context and the content of the exhibition.

‘The Collection as an Automaton’

Opening: February 22, 18:00 – 22:00
ACG Art Gallery – The American College of Greece, 6 Gravias Street, Aghia Paraskevi

Duration: February 22 – March 23, 2019
Opening hours: Mon-Fri: 14:00 – 18:00, Sat: 12:00 – 16:00

For more information contact Ms. Niki Kladakis at 210 600 9800 (ext.1456), from 9:00 – 16:00, or at [email protected]