Curating as Instituting: Peripheries and Precarity

Wolverhampton School of Art / Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation / FEINART 

By iLiana Fokianaki, founder of State of Concept Athens

Abstract

The artistic life of places with weak or absent public infrastructures for arts and culture is possible largely due to the work of independent organisations. In Greece, the absence of a cultural infrastructure for decades, and the long-time financial and social crisis has made curating and running a non-profit space an almost clandestine operation; existing at the margins of the economy, self-initiating and imagining new forms of work and labour and alternative economies. However precarious the conditions, these entities manage to develop ways of building institutions, of researching, of curating, or creating and imagining spaces for thought. And although they entail underpaid labour, improvised technical solutions and a use of resources based on collective sharing, friendship and exchange of skills, they also enable an approach to thinking and operating that is emancipated from pressures relating to audience numbers, formal behaviours, and expectations of growth and expansion. This is what characterises the independent institutional landscape in which State of Concept was founded. iLiana Fokianaki will offer a reading into how these ways of operating within the curatorial context turn curating into instituting and will propose models for institutional languages that provide new routes in building innovative ways of connecting audiences and cultural practice.

Biography

iLiana Fokianaki is a curator and theorist based in Athens and Rotterdam. In 2013, she founded State of Concept Athens, the first non-profit institution in the city that promotes Greek and international artists through solo exhibitions, but also invites international curators to create exhibitions that comment on the current socio-political landscape of Greece and beyond. In 2016, together with Antonia Alampi she founded Future Climates, a platform that aims to propose viable futures for small-scale organizations of contemporary art and culture, which was first presented in Athens in March 2017 with a three-month school. She was curator of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp (2017-2019) and is a lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute, and has taught, lectured and taken part in panel discussions in various independent spaces and institutions worldwide.

Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation

The Centre for Art, Design, Research & Experimentation (CADRE) accommodates researchers within the Wolverhampton School of Art. It was established in 2006 to explore and develop the beneficial effect of art and design upon society. The Centre is clustered into three focused areas of research interests: Art, Society and Social Practice; Digital Technology Theory and Practice; Material and Theoretical Practice.