Context

South as a State of Mind 
Marina Fokidis 

Video

Please note that this video is available in English.

In the context of the exhibition Europe: Ancient Future, Marina Fokidis gives an online lecture and talks about her curatorial work, contemporary art in Athens, as well as her projects in connection with documenta 14. Her curatorial practice reveals an exciting and unusual approach to Greek culture and the heritage of antiquity, which also repeatedly raises questions about authorship, cultural appropriation, and colonialism. Fokidis explains the role that the ancient concept of methexis plays for her, how it allows her to rethink the cultural medium of the monument and how she always manages to create new connections between very different people.

Marina Fokidis lives and works as a curator and writer in Athens. She is the founder of Kunsthalle Athena and the art and culture magazine South as a State of Mind. In 2014 she became the director of the Athens Artistic Office and curatorial advisor to documenta 14. Fokidis was a co-curator of 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art (2011), the commissioner and curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2003) and one of the curators of T.I.C.A.B. – Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual 1 (2001). She was associate curator of the Schwarz Foundation’s Pythagorion Art Space, for which she oversaw solo exhibitions of newly commissioned works by Slavs and Tatars (2013) and Nevin Aladağ (2014). From 2001 to 2008, she served as co-director of Oxymoron, an Athens-based non-profit organization promoting contemporary visual art in Greece internationally.

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