One year after ‘You and AI’ a new exhibition comes to Pedion tou Areos Park in Athens May 23rd to July 10th, 2022!
Commissioned by Onassis Foundation, ‘Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data’ was 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 – Divided by SpY (Image credits Pinelopi Gerasimou)
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 – a space that started out as an army training ground before becoming a recreation ground for the city’s inhabitants – this 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.
The exhibition followed pathways that asked us to discover parts of the park that are not, in the main, known to the general public, 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 was a conscious curatorial approach that allowed 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’ promised to entertain but also to give pause for thought in the Athenian summertime.
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
Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data’ has been commissioned by Onassis Foundation and curated by FutureEverything Creative Director Irini Mirena Papadimitriou
Image credits
Eclipse by Tony Oursler (Image credits Pinelopi Gerasimou), We Are Having The Time Of Our Lives by SUPERFLEX (Image credits Pinelopi Gerasimou), Among Us, Among Others by Eva Papamargariti (Image credits Stelios Tzetzias), Polymorphic by Matthew Niederhauser, Elie Zananiri, John Fitzgerald (Image credits Stelios Tzetzias), NOWNESS (Image credits Stelios Tzetzias), Happiness by Dries Verhoeven (Image credits Pinelopi Gerasimou), Breathing Pavilion by Ekene Ijeoma (Image credits Stelios Tzetzias), Another Moon by Kimchi and Chips (Image credits Pinelopi Gerasimou)
