Curator and writer Marina Fokidis, chose to join the premises of Harabel Contemporary Art Platform”, on the 6th of March 2020, for a talk with other guests from the visual arts field: artists, curators, art researchers and students, art followers etc. The conversation was focused on the topic of curating and it’s “entanglements”. Our guest also talked about her activity in “South as a State of Mind” magazine, as well as her role during “Dokumenta 14”.
Marina Fokidis is convinced that especially during the last decade, the focal point of art in the world, has exploded into a multiplicity of artistic communities diffused everywhere; as a result, the cultural vitality no longer belongs only to specific spaces, but it’s also become a “property” of the suburbs, thus expanding the geographical map of contemporary art.
The main topics that Marina brought up during the talk are related to the attempts of finding different ways to decentralize the system (center/suburbs), in response to what time itself requires: another example of art diffusion and cultural intermediation; the searching of new forms of human solidarity and interconnections beyond the hegemonic relationship between the “center” and the “border”. Among other things, she focused on the terms of “space” and “time”of an exhibition, a biennial, a major artistic event or some kind of curatorial endeavour, emphasizing the role of contemporary art in the shaping of a democratic public space. But what’s the notion of “public space” within the meaning of an exhibition? “Could this be a place between places, in a time between times?” Marina asks.
Marina Fokidis, with a long and diverse experience in various positions: organizational, directive, curatorial, lecturing, connected to many things that relate to contemporary visual arts activities, with a wide participation in conferences and artistic discussions, with a rich experience even in writing essays and from the position of a person who finely knows the field she’s talking about, she tried to draw the interlocutor’s attention not only to the importance of the formation of curatorial ideas, but also to the necessity of the constant change of the nature of contemporary art exhibitions; all of this within the rapid socio-economic, political, environmental and technological transformation of our time.
* Marina Fokidis is a curator and writer based in Athens, Greece. Amongst other projects she is the founding and artistic director of the newly established Kunsthalle Athena. From 2000 to 2008 she served as the director of Oxymoron, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of contemporary visual art in Greece and on an international level. She has been the commissioner and the curator of the Greek Pavillion at the 51st Venice Biennial (2003) and one of the curators of the 1st Tirana Biennial (2001). She has curated a number of exhibitions, such as: Her(His)tory, an exhibition of the major video collections of the last decades, which has joined the permanent historical collections, at the Cycladic Museum of Art in Athens (2007); Anathena, an exhibition held at the DESTE Foundation, based on the Athenian underground scene (2006), etc.; Random Rules – Youtube channel of Selected Artists, presented live online and displayed on Pulse Art Fair (New York, 2009); Midsummer Night’s Dream, a three months screening program – part of Remap 2 (a program parallel to the 2009 Athens Biennale). She has written essays for various edited collections and for many international art magazines, and is the chief art editor of LIFO, an important cultural free press magazine in Greece.
