What we saw on the Third Week of AGORA

The third week of the 4th Athens Biennale was a full week that started with the Uncommon Commons Re (Projected) workshop by Jenny Marketou, with guest speakers from Greece and abroad and closed with music by bands of the Generation 2.0 festival. Audience attendance was particularly impressive on Saturday, when Blitz Theatre Group presented GALAXY at Sofokleous, while at the same time the third and very interesting meeting of the VALUE workshop was in progress at the Machine room. The speakers' participation proved to be substantial as well as revealing both at the roundtable discussion realized by Generation 2.0 and the KYKLOS panel on Sunday, focused on human rights. On the same day, ROMVOS realized their performance in collaboration with the Scavengers Association at the Korean Market of Iera Odos.

Liveblog
Everything that has already happened and will be introduced to the 4th Athens Biennale can be found from now onwards on the new LiveBlog page on the AGORA website. The Documentation Team of the 4th Athens Biennale concentrates there pictures and sounds from the AGORA happenings creating its live calendar.

The program of the fourth week of AGORA:

For a detailed program of the second week of the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA, please visit our Calendar page.

Ianna Andreadis

ATHINA THEA
Discussion

ATHINA THEA is a collective photography project of Ianna Andreadis open to everyone that attempts to show an unpublished "home" and a personal perspective of Athens. The window defines the frame of photography/view (thea) as a visual art context. Every view tends to be a part of "work" that highlights/utilizes each daily perspective. The project circulates through the ATHINA THEA page on facebook

Tuesday, 22/10 , 17:30 – 18:30, Sofokleous 8–10

Eva Fotiadi, Nikos Doulos

Event as a Process, Cities in an Ongoing State of Emergency and the Artists' Stance
Presentation/Discussion

Recent protest marches and other events involving the expression of public disobedience, coupled with the manifold implications of the financial crisis have left their marks on urban space. These marks are far more than 'static' vestiges, but also include the ongoing processes of abandoning commercial and residential spaces, various forms of reappropriating such spaces, the flows of online news and blogging, an increase in the rates of violence and the respective mobilization of the repressive apparatus. Such traces and responses feed a constant transition and reconfiguration of the public space and the public sphere. Therefore they ought to be seen as both effects and causes, which call for a reading beyond their assessment as an event's aftermath. The platform's aim is to explore the city as narrative, as mediated portrait and the artist as public intellectual.

The launch of the platform will be hosted by Eva Fotiadi & Nikos Doulos and will include contributions/responses by Sofia Dona, Vasillis Noulas & FOUNDLAND

You can access the platform through the 4th Athens Biennale website: http://athensbiennale.org/event-as-process/

Tuesday, 22/10, 19:00–20:30, Sofokleous 8–10

Amund Sjollie Sveen

Working primarily in the field of the abstract, Amund Sjolie Sveen, a trained percussionist and composer, has transformed his artistic practice in recent years into a very concrete discussion of political and economic challenges both in the globalized world and his native Norway.
The lecture performance The Norwegian Way (2010) is a dive into the self-image of Norway, the problem of the oil, the possible connection between money and happiness and an exploration of art's potential to change the world.
His most recent project, Economic Theory for Dummies (2013), is an attempt to fulfill his own dire need to understand economy, a small contribution to the public demand to regain power from politicians and financial experts who disguise their politics as economic laws of nature.

Economic Theory for Dummies
lecture/performance
Wednesday , 23/10, 19:00-20:00, Sofokleous 8–10

Τhe Norwegian Way
lecture/performance
Thursday , 24/10, 19:30-21:00, Sofokleous 8–10

Matei Bejenaru

My Head, My Street...
lecture performance

Matei Bejenaru is an artist and initiator of the Periferic Biennial of Contemporary Art (1997-2008) in Iaşi, Romania, and co-founder of the Vector Association, a contemporary art institution that supports the locally emerging contemporary art scene. In his artistic practice, which is based on documentary photographs, videos and performances, Bejenaru analyses the impact of globalization on the labor forces of post-communist countries and their rapidly changing mentalities and lifestyles. The lecture performance My head, my street... (2013) is an invitation to contemplate the way an individual relates to the events of which history is made in times of uncertainty and unrest. Together with an actor and a drummer, the artist explores the concepts of utopia and singularity through speech, rhythm and body language.

Friday, 25/10, 19:00–20:00, Sofokleous 8–10

VALUE

workshop

Education + Value = Employment ↔ Value = Education + Employment, discussion Grigoris Papazafeiriou (scholar, visual artist, William Morris College) will discuss the topic 'Determinant or determined?' and Nelly Askouni (Associate Professor Sociology of educational practices, University of Athens) the topic of 'Meritocracy and equality in education'.
Galini Iliopoulou (occupational psychologist, co-founder of the network Women on Top) intervenes with the topic 'Women on Top: Giving value to experience'.
Participants: Stella Kasdagli (journalist, writer and translator, co-founder of the network Women on Top), Kelly Sokou (mentor) and Asimenia Petsi (mentoree).

Visual arts project You Are Here by Marilena Synodinou (architect-visual artist). The project addresses to visitors the question 'what are your skills and talents?', to move on to 'an in-depth presentation, distillation of career guides, Y and internet propaganda will clarify for you where you are and where you are going in this life'.

Happening Unforgiving Measurements by Eva Marathaki (visual artist) and Io Chaviara (visual artist). The happening focuses on the evaluation process through a simulation of this experience. What are the motives for someone to participate in this process? What do they expect? How often and with which criteria is an evaluation evaluated? How does the person evaluated react when confronted with the evaluation results?

Are the different aspects of value (economic, moral, aesthetic etc.) connected to each other and if so in what ways? Is the present situation experienced as a multilayered "crisis of values"? How does the "market" redefine today the value of life along with the value of things? The VALUE workshop proposes a two months' collaboration of visual artists, social scientists, and theorists from different fields, who will take the anthropological perspective on "exchange" as a point of reference, while attempting to comprehend and comment on the ways value is created and experienced in everyday life. Visitors to the 2013 Athens Biennale are invited to participate in the weekly meetings, in the discussions and production of artistic work by the workshop's curatorial team, as well as by invited artists and theorists. The workshop's program can be found online at valueab4.wordpress.com.
Coordination: Elpida Rikou (social anthropology / visual arts).

Saturday 26/10, 17:00-20:00, 8-10 Sofokleous st. (machine room)

Pil & Galia Kollektiv

A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards
live performance

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their interest lies in the relationship between art and politics, as well as in the post-Fordist condition of labor. Their work deals with modernist utopias as failures, but ones from which there is still much to be salvaged.
In A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards (2013) the Kollectivs interpret a corporate manual from 1960 in a live performance. The pamphlet is focused on the time necessary for the accomplishment of minute labor procedures in the office, from the depressing and releasing of typewriter keys to the opening and closing of file cabinet drawers.

Sunday, 25/10, 20:00–21:30, Sofokleous 8–10

AGORA – ΚΥΚLΟΣ

Collaboration
discussions

For the realization of the basic purpose of AGORA, the main exhibition space, the ground floor of the Former Athens Stock exchange, where the trading of stocks used to take place, will remain free of exhibits at latrge so as to change functions depending on the circumstances. Kyklos is a series of losely structured and pluralistic approaches on crucial issues that take place in AGORA Every Sunday afternoon. Invited to Kyklos, the teams and initiatives that actively touch these subjects will have 10-15 minutes in order to share their practical approaches as answers to the question Now what?

On Sunday 27 October at 6:00 pm, Collaboration will be the centre of the third thematic unit of Kyklos.

Participants: Joint and Collaborative Economy Festival, Time Bank, Surfers4Life, The other Person, Nomadic Kitchen, Synallois, Plato Academy.

Sunday, 27/10, 18:00-20:00 Sofokleous 8–10

The program of the 4th week of AGORA is as follows:

TUESDAY 22/10

WEDNSDAY 23/10

THURSDAY 24/10

FRIDAY 25/10

SATURDAY 26/10

SUNDAY 27/10

4th ATHENS BIENNALE 2013 AGORA

OPENING HOURS

ADMISSION