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Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data
Listen to your body. Believe in your dreams. Watch your data.

One year after ‘You and AI’ a new exhibition returns to Pedion tou Areos Park in Athens May 23rd to July 10th, 2022!

Commissioned by Onassis Foundation, ‘Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data’ is a curated journey unfolding through Pedion tou Areos – Athens’ largest public park – presenting work by international artists exploring themes and ideas around bodies after technology, constructed worlds, identities and boundaries, but also imagining new territories, connections and places of co-existence.

Curated by FutureEverything Creative Director Irini Papadimitriou and commissioned by ONASSIS Foundation

 

Lead image – Eclipse by Tony Oursler (Credits Thibault Voisin)

Digital technology is both entering into the human body and extending it beyond its bounds. This network of bodies, an offshoot of both surveillance and entertainment technologies, is calling upon us to seek out the very limits of the ‘plásmata’ (Greek for creatures) that we ourselves create and actually are.

How do we understand gender within a digital setting? How do we see our own selves in the reflections we ourselves create? What does disability mean, or the extension of our abilities? How do pharmaceutical and medical technologies help mold our intentions? And what sorts of bodies does a machine imagine, and how can it make them?

Taking place in Pedion tou Areos Park setting once more – a space that started out as an army training ground before becoming a recreation ground for the city’s inhabitants – the exhibition speaks about the body not just as the locus of subjectivity, but also as the field of identitive, political, and social conflict, as the core of both pleasure and pain, and ultimately of our very existence.

Through technologies and technological interfaces we desire and imagine ways to become something else, to change our human condition, extend and augment our bodies, escape them or maybe escape our mortality.

This year, the exhibition will follow pathways that ask us to discover parts of the park that are not, in the main, known to the general public. We’re inviting exhibition visitors to explore those Pedion tou Areos areas that run alongside Alexandras Avenue – the side where the statue of the goddess Athena stands – and to wander around the digital pavilions and events sited in the clearings and flowerbeds hidden away inside the park. This is a conscious curatorial approach that allows visitors to engage with the exhibition in Pedion tou Areos’ most popular areas before being invited to lose themselves within the park in order to discover startling exhibits, collective activities, and events.

With 25 international pieces, new commissions, more than 250 square meters of LED works, 40 solar batteries collecting the energy of the Attic sun by day to create an artificial moon 70 meters above the ground using laser beams by night, a humanoid handing out medicine in an abandoned pharmacy at the edge of the park, and a huge red planet that reminds us of our overheating Earth and of our inability to formulate a collective political subjectivity, ‘Plásmata’ promises to entertain us but also to give us pause for thought in the Athenian summertime.

Participating artists include…

Morehshin Allahyari, Refik Anadol, LaTurbo Avedon, The Alternative Limb Project, Frederik Hayman, Ekene Ijeoma, Keiken & Clifford Sage, Kimchi & Chips, Nick Knight (SHOWstudio), Marshmallow Laser Feast, Eva & Franco Mattes, Christian Mio Loclair, NOWNESS, Tony Oursler, Maria Papadimitriou, Eva Papamargariti, Annie Saunders, Sensorium, SpY, SUPERFLEX, Dries Verhoeven, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Saya Woolfalk, & Liam Young

Visit the exhibition from May 23rd to July 10th, and to find out more information about ‘Plásmata’ and the works featured, visit the Onassis website.

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Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data’ has been commissioned by Onassis Foundation and curated by FutureEverything Creative Director Irini Mirena Papadimitriou

Image credits

EARTH DIVIDED by SpY Studios 2022, Planet City by Liam Young, Eclipse by Tony Oursler, Another Moon by Kimchi and Chips, An alive and dying avatar with spirits inside by KEIKEN x Clifford Sage, We Live in an Ocean of Air Video Edition by Marshmallow Laser Feast (photo by David Levene), Happiness by Dries Verhoeven (photo by Willem Popelier), Breathing Pavilion by Ekene Ijeoma (photo by Kris Graves), and Permanent Sunset by LaTurbo Avedon