It is our pleasure, on behalf of NeMe, to invite and welcome you to Through the Roadblocks: realities in raw motion conference which is co-organised by NeMe, the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts (Art History and Theory Research Lab) of the Cyprus University of Technology, and the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.
Programme for Friday, 23rd November 2012
Download the complete conference programme
11.00 - 13.30
In Context: art in Translation
Moderator: Denise Robinson
Introduction
Helene Black CY, Antonis Danos CY
Berengaria Room, Evagoras Lanitis Centre, Limassol
Narcissus
Iannis Zannos GR, Jean-Pierre Hébert FR/US
The Utopia Disaster
Marianna Christofides CY/DE, Bernd Bräunlich DE
The Negotiation Table
George Alexander AU, Phil George AU
Considerations on Reactions and a Small Picture
Lanfranco Aceti IT/UK/TR, Çağlar Çetin TR
The Persistence of Image
Gabriel Koureas CY/UK, Klitsa Antoniou CY
15.00 - 17.30
In Context: art in Translation
Moderator: Yiannis Colakides
Global economic crisis, simulacra, maps, and simulated borderlines
Antonis Danos CY, Nicos Synnos CY, Yiannis Christidis GR/CY, Yannos Economou CY, Yannis Yapanis CY
Berengaria Room, Evagoras Lanitis Centre, Limassol
The Shock of Modernity
Guli Silberstein IL/UK, Tal Kaminer IL/UK
Destination Is Never A Place
Peter Lyssiotis CY/AU, Helene Black CY
Hybrid spacial experiences overcoming physical boundaries
Dimitris Charitos GR, Coti K IT/GR
Roaming Trans_cities and Airborne Fiction
Sharmeen Syed UAE, George Katodrytis CY/UAE
20.00 - 22.00
Distinguished keynote speaker
Introduction
Srećko Horvat HR
Pefkios Georgiades Amphitheatre, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol
No Definitions for Activism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Directions
View TTR - Limassol in a larger map
Speakers’ Bios
Dr Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian theorist, philosopher and University Professor at Columbia University, where she is a founding member of the school’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is best known for the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie.
Spivak is best known for her contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the “legacy of colonialism” and the way readers engage with literature and culture. She often focuses on the cultural texts of those who are marginalized by dominant western culture: the new immigrant; the working class; women; and other positions of the subaltern.
Srećko Horvat, Croatian philosopher and activist. He published seven books, including, Against Political Correctness, Totalitarianism Today, The Discourse of Terrorism, and various articles published in Monthly Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Eurozine, and translated into German, French, Hungarian and Polish. He translated several books from German and English into Croatian, among which are the works of Slavoj Žižek, Norbert Elias, Frank Furedi, Peter Sloterdijk and others. He is the director of the Subversive Forum, an annual conference and activist meeting held traditionally in May in Zagreb, gathering renowned personalities such as Zygmunt Bauman, David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Žižek, Tariq Ali, Saskia Sassen, Gayatri Spivak, Samir Amin and others, serving as a network and platform for progressive movements and organisations from Eastern and Western Europe.
Dr Iannis Zannos has a background in music composition, ethnomusicology and interactive performance. He has worked as Director of the Music Technology and Documentation section at the State Institute for Music Research (S.I.M) in Berlin, Germany, and Research Director at the Center for Research for Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taken part at numerous international collaborative Media Arts projects and has realized multimedia performances both alone and in cooperation with other artists. He is teaching audio and interactive media arts at the Department of Audiovisual Arts and at the postgraduate course in Arts and Technologies of Sound of the Music Department at the Ionian University, Corfu.
Jean-Pierre Hébert is an independent artist of algorithmic art, drawings, and mixed media. Artist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He co-founded the Algorists in 1995 with Roman Verostko. Hébert lives and works in Santa Barbara, California. He is a pioneer in the field of computer art from the mid 70s on, merging traditional art media and techniques, personal software, plotters, and custom built devices to create an original body of work. He is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the David Bermant Foundation awards. Hébert produces works on paper, including ink and pencil drawings, paintings, etchings and dry points from polymer and copper plates, and recently, digital prints. He also creates sand, water and sound installations, algorithmic visual music, works for wall displays, physics based algorithmic pieces, and much more. His work has been exhibited extensively and has been frequently juried in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. It is present in several museums and institutional collections, including the digital art collections of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University, Chicago) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). Since 2003, he has been an artist in residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he has organised several Algorists group shows. These shows have included Hans Dehlinger, Channa Horwitz, Roman Verostko (in 2006), Jean-François Colonna, Helaman Ferguson, Casey Reas (in 2008), and David Em, Paul Hertz, Robert Lang (in 2009).
Marianna Christofides studied Visual and Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Athens and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She completed her Postgraduate Degree in Media Arts and Film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2011 she co-represented Cyprus at the 54th International Art Exhibition-la Biennale di Venezia, curated by Yiannis Toumazis. In 2011 she received the Jean-Claude Reynal Scholarship, France and in 2010 the Friedrich-Vordemberge Grant for Visual Arts by the City of Cologne. In 2009, Christofides represented Cyprus in the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe where she won the Resartis-Worldwide-Network-of-Artist-Residencies Award. In the same year she also received the 1st prize for Best Documentary in the 5th Cyprus Short Film and Documentary Festival, for her film Pathways in The Dust: A Topography out of Fragments. Since 2000 she has received numerous scholarships and prizes, among which, by the A.S. Onassis Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD, the Michelis and the Eurobank Foundation and the National-Scholarship-Foundations of Greece and Cyprus. Marianna Christofides presents her work in international exhibitions and film festivals.
Bernd Bräunlich is a lecturer for German as a foreign language. After having resided and worked in Athens for several years, he is currently teaching at the University of Cologne. He has studied German Literature and Linguistics as well as Classical Philology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Gutenberg University Mainz where he worked as a scientific assistant in Latin literature. During the past few years he has been collaborating in several art projects together with Marianna Christofides. His interest lies in the fields of Cultural Studies and German History, especially in the reception of ancient Greece and its impact on the formation of German identity.
George Alexander has worked as coordinator of Contemporary Art Programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1997-2010. He is currently Australian desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific. In the early 1980s he worked with Sylvere Lotringer in New York on the Italian Autonomia and the Oasis issues (Semiotexte). Since the early 1970s he has worn a diagonal path between literature and the visual arts, writing for performance, radio, and the printed page. His works include book-length monographs on artists. He has been editor and advisory editor on many Australian journals. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Russian, and German. His literary works include, The Book of the Dead (1985), Sparagmos (1989), and the novels Mortal Divide (1999) and Slow Burn (2009). A long poem based on Yiannis Ritsos and Heinrich Schliemann entitled The Dead Travel Fast (with images by Peter Lyssiotis) was published in November 2009 by NeMe, Cyprus, in Greek, Turkish and English. His latest book, a graphic novel, was published in 2012.
Dr Phillip George lives and works in Sydney Australia. George has held 25 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include: the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Thesalonika, Art Tower Agora Athens, Stills Gallery Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, National Gallery of Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, and National Museum of Australia, Canberra. George’s digital photographs and multi-media installations are images of the collisions of East and West. They are distinctive by their-tech, seamless moulding of positive historical continuum. His vivid condensation of artistically and scientific analogies contributes to the resolution of particularly difficult millennial double bind occupying theorists and artists nationally and internationally. George’s practice over the past eight years has focused on concepts of contrivance and the handmade. Through this we can retrace the artists specific trajectory throughout the discourse on art, photography and politics, which ranges from the conceptual debates in art to the technological shifts from analogue to the digital. George’s practise and extensive travels gives form to his contrapuntal perceptions within contemporary art.
Dr Lanfranco Aceti works as an academic, artist and curator. He is Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, Department of Art and Computing, London; teaches Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul; and is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (the MIT Press, Leonardo journal and ISAST). He is the Gallery Director at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul and worked as the Artistic Director and Conference Chair for ISEA 2011 Istanbul. He has a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. His work has been published in Leonardo, Art Inquiry and Routledge and his interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between digital arts, visual culture and new media technologies. Lanfranco Aceti specialises in contemporary art, inter-semiotic translations between classic media and new media, contemporary digital hybridisation processes, avant-garde film and new media studies and their practice-based applications in the field of fine arts. He has worked as an Honorary Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Virtual Reality Environments at University College London. He has exhibited works at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London and done digital interventions at TATE Modern, The Venice Biennale, MoMA, Neue Nationalgalerie, the ICA and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Previously an Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, Dr Aceti has also worked as an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, School of History of Art, Film & Visual Media and as Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Çağlar Çetin is a master’s student in the Visual Art and Communication Design programme at Sabancı University, Istanbul. He received his BA with honors in Film and Television and Management of Performing Arts from Istanbul Bilgi University. Although he began to work at an early age in television screenwriting, short filmmaking, and acting and directing for theatre, lately the focus of his work has shifted to contemporary art with an emphasis on conceptual art and curating. He is a civil society activist who works on gender equality, and currently he is a project developer and facilitator in Erkek Muhabbeti (Men’s Talk) in SOGEP (Social Development and Gender Equality Policy Centre). His current research is focused on masculinity awareness in Turkish contemporary art.
Dr Gabriel Koureas is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London. Koureas’ research interests are in the relationship of memory, conflict and commemoration in the construction of national and gender identities. Current research interests concentrate on issues of conflict and commemoration in relation to postcolonial memory and gender as well as the possibilities of reconciliation offered through visual culture with special emphasis on trauma and the senses. His past research and recently published book concentrate on the commemoration of the First World War in relation to the visual culture of the 1920s, and offers an innovative way of looking at ways in which intimacy, cultural expressions of sexuality, emotion and affect are encoded in diverse forms in visual culture and commemorative objects with particular emphasis on the performative nature of gender and various sites of memory.
Klitsa Antoniou is Associate Professor at Frederick University, Cyprus, and, currently, she is a PhD candidate and Research Associate in the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology. She studied Fine Arts at Wimbledon School of Art, St. Martins School of Art, Pratt Institute New York, and New York University. She has had several solo exhibitions in Cyprus, the United States, China, Finland, and the UK. Some of the her most important international participations are: 2011: Roaming Images: The Persistence of the Image, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Biennale. 2010: Exterritory Project, curator of the Cyprus Participation; Beijing Biennale; The Little Land Fish, Antrepo, Istanbul European Capital of Culture; Breaking Walls-Building Networks, Macedonian Museum, Thessaloniki. 2009: Personal-Political, Thessaloniki Biennale; Tempus Arti, Brussels; Project Launch, Exhibit Gallery, London. 2008: OPEN, Venice; Action Field Codra, Thessaloniki; Umedalen Skulptur, Gallery Sandström Andersson, Sweden. 2007: Atlantis is Lost, New Delhi; Memory, Wallon d’Art Contemporain Centre, La Chataigneraie, Liege; I linguaggi del Mediterraneo, Associazione Culturale En Plein Air, Turin; International Biennial of Cuenca, Equador. 2006: Boarders, Goyang, South Korea; Memory, Apollonia Venue, Strasbourg. 2005: A View to the Mediterranean Sea, The Cyprus Case, Herzliya Artists’ Residence, Israel. Lulea Biennale, Sweden. 2004: Terra Vita, Xiamen. 2003: Biennale of Jeollabuk, South Korea. 2002: OPEN Venice. 2001: Cairo Biennial. 2000: De-Core-Instanz: Deconstruction, Installation, Orensanz, New York. 1999: Six workshops in Sarajevo, Rome. 1997: Biennale of Young Artists, Cable Factory Helsinki; Biennale of Young Artists, Turin. 1995: Biennale of Young Artists, Rijeka. She has been awarded several prizes and scholarships.
Dr Antonis Danos is Assistant Professor in Art History and Theory, in the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology. His research interests include theories of nationalism and post-colonialism, the ideological and aesthetic construction of collective identities, Modern Greek and contemporary Cypriot art, art criticism and historiography, and issues of gender and sexuality in art. He has published on Modern Greek and contemporary Cypriot art and culture, in journals (Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing), a two-volume book (Cypriot Artists: the second generation, 2010), articles in edited volumes, as well as texts in several Cypriot artists’ monographs. He has curated, and edited the catalogues of exhibitions on modern and contemporary Cypriot art, in Cyprus, Greece, the UK and Turkey. He collaborated with film director Yannis Yapanis, for the creation of the documentary Christoforos Savva 1924-1968 (2011). He is the founder and coordinator of the Art History and Theory Research Lab, at CUT
Nicos Synnos is Special Teaching Staff in the Multimedia and Graphic Arts Department of the Cyprus University of Technology. He holds a Master’s in Visual Communication with concentration on Cartoon Imagery and Animation from BIAD, Birmingham City University (former UCE) and a BA(Hons) in Visual Communication – Graphic Design from the University of Wolverhampton and California State University in Long Beach. He worked in the film, television and internet industries in New York and London and formed “toonachunks” an experimental film and animation studio in Cyprus. As an animator/filmmaker he participated in several film festivals in Europe, USA and Canada. He is a member of the organising body of two international film festivals in Cyprus (Nicosia Documentary Festival and Countryside Animation and Documentary Festival). Between 2001 and 2009 he taught graphic & advertising design subjects, photography and animation at Frederick Institute of Technology. He is a PhD Candidate at CUT and his research interests focus on animation, graphic communication, experimental filmmaking, and the creative process and results from the use of hand made, camera-less and digital animation techniques, along with alternative projection technologies (holographic and stereoscopic).
Yiannis Christidis has studied Cultural Technology and Communication at the University of the Aegean and has an MSc in Sound Design from the University of Edinburgh. He has designed sound and music for audiovisual products, web applications, radio productions and theatrical activities. He is a PhD candidate at Cyprus University of Technology, and his research focuses on the relationship between sound and image, soundscape studies, sound culture, noise and their effects and applications through new technologies and the Internet.
Yiannos Economou studied Economics in the UK, and later re-entered full time education and obtained a Fine Arts Degree and Masters from the Kent Institute of Fine Arts in Kent. Though mainly a video-artist, has also worked with film, photography and animation. He participated in many shows such as GIGUK in Germany, Raising Dust in London, Cinesonika in Canada, The Little Land Fish in Istanbul, Breaking Walls in Thessaloniki [2010], Vidoeholica in Varna, Kunstifilmtag in Dusseldorf [2009], In Transition Russia in Yekaterinburg and Moscow, The Mirror Stage in Limassol, Zero Visibility in Diyarbakir, Isolomania in Nicosia, Disaster and Oblivion in Nicosia [2008], Ideodrome in Limassol 2007 and 2008, Screens: Telling Stories in Greece, Somatopia in London [2006] and others. He has had three solo shows in Cyprus and Germany and collaborated with dance company Echo Arts. His short film The Machine Dream won the best experimental short film award at the Cyprus Short Film Festival 2005.
Yannis Yapanis studied Advertising and Communication in New York, and Cinema in Florence. He has been working as a director of photography and director for films and documentaries, and as a freelance photographer and video artist. He is currently a research associate at the Cyprus University of Technology, in the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts. His film credits, as cinematographer and/or script writer and director, include short films and documentaries: Christoforos Savva (2011), Hippolytus de Marsiliis (2010), Offerta Speciale (2009), Bernardo Di Quintavalle (2007), Taxi (2006), The Order (2006), Bristle Heart (2006), Little Black Riding Hood Constellation (2006), Informercial (2005), Virtus FC (2004), Mavroscoufitsa [Little Black Riding Hood] (2002 — Official Selection/Shorts, Cannes Film Festival), Silent Pipers (2002), Sherlock Barman (2001), 27 years later (2001), Polis (1999), Il Fular (1998), Jungle Hop (2nd unit) (1998), Solo (1997), Il Piu Alto Statodi Vita (1997).
Guli Silberstein is an Israeli-born (1969), London-based video artist and video editor. He received a BA in Film & TV from Tel-Aviv University in 1997 and an MA in Media Studies, specialising in video production, from New School University, NYC, USA in 2000. Since then, he has been working with appropriation to produce video art works dealing with situations of war & terror, cognitive processes and electronic media. His work has been extensively presented in festivals, museums and galleries including: Transmediale Berlin, Kassel Film and Video Festival, EMAF Osnabrueck Germany, Human Frames exhibition & DVD Lowave Paris, Museum on the Seam Jerusalem and the National Centre of Contemporary Art Moscow.
Dr Tahl Kaminer is Lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh. His research studies the relation of architecture to society. Tahl completed his PhD in 2008 at TU Delft, received his MSc in Architecture Theory and History from the Bartlett in 2003, and an architectural diploma (B. Arch) from the Technion in 1998. Tahl co-founded the nonprofit 66 East, which ran group exhibitions, presentations, lectures and screenings at a space in East Amsterdam, 2004-7. Tahl is a co-founder of the academic journal Footprint, and edited two of its issues. Routledge recently published his doctoral dissertation as Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth- Century Architecture. He has also co-edited the volumes Houses in Transformation (NAi, 2008), Urban Asymmetries (2010, 2011) and Critical Tools (Lettre Voilee, 2012).
Peter Lyssiotis is a photomonteur, film maker, writer, photographer and book artist. He has exhibited widely in both solo and group shows. His work is in private collections, State Libraries and State Galleries throughout Australia. His work has also been collected in France, Switzerland, England and the Netherlands. His work A Gardener At Midnight, Travels In The Holy Land has been widely exhibited and filmed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a two part documentary (2006).
Helene Black is an artist and co-founder of the interdisciplinary NGO NeMe. Since 1992, she lives and works in Limassol, Cyprus. To date, she has had 14 one person shows and numerous group shows both in Cyprus and abroad. In addition, she has curated and co-curated several exhibitions such as “In Transition Russia” with Sheila Pinkel and Alisa Prudnikova, Museum of Modern Art, Ekaterinburg and National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia 2008, “In Transition Cyprus” with Sheila Pinkel, Evagoras Lanitis Centre 2006, “…SO NOW WHAT?” for Scope New York and Basel with Yiannis Colakides 2008, “COR UNUM” for the National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow with Yiannis Colakides 2008, “Isolomania” at NIMAC 2008 and “Margins of Time”, Evagoras Lanitis Centre 2009.
Dr Dimitris Charitos is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has studied architectural design (National Technical University of Athens, 1990), computer aided design (University of Strathclyde, 1993) and was awarded a PhD on interactive design and virtual environments (University of Strathclyde, 1998). He has taught at an undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1994 in Scotland and Greece in 4 different Departments (Information Technology, Architecture, Communication and Media Studies). He has co-ordinated or worked as a researcher in more than 12 research projects funded by Greek or European funding bodies since 1994 on areas such as: interactive design, virtual environment design, locative media, interactive art, environmental behaviour. He was awarded the Human Capital and Mobility (1994-1996) and the Marie Curie (1997-1998) fellowships. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications in books, journals or conference proceedings. His artistic work involves electronic music, audiovisual, interactive, site-specific installations and virtual environments.
Costantino Luca Rolando Kiriakos (Coti k), born in Milan, Italy in 1966, moved to Greece at the age of 6, where, better known as Coti or Coti K., has been involved in various Athens pioneering electronic bands since the mid eighties (Ricochet, Dada Data, Raw, Spiders’ Web, In Trance 95). He works as a musician, composer, installation artist, record producer and sound engineer, and collaborations include: Tuxedomoon, Blaine Reininger, Dimitris Papaioannou, Stereo Nova, The Raining Pleasure, Nikos Veliotis, Ilios and others. He has released various solo CDs, written music for film, theatre, dance companies and TV. A member of club 2-13, he has played live electronics with many musicians including Evan Parker, Phil Durrant, Nikos Veliotis, Rhodri Davies, Andrea Neumann, Phill Niblock, Mark Wastell, Matt Davis and others.
Sharmeen Syed has a background in Architecture and Urban Design and is currently working as architect and researcher at Sharjah Art Foundation. Syed is also engaged in independent research and artistic projects investigating subject matter in the fields of cultural geography and visual culture – particularly spatial application and theory of satellite technologies, psychogeography, urbanism and architecture.
George Katodrytis is an architect involved in practice, teaching and research. He is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. He studied and taught at the Architectural Association in London and he has been a visiting professor at various schools around the world. He worked in Paris, London, Nicosia and Dubai. He has built a number of projects in Europe and the Middle East as well as published widely on contemporary architecture, urbanism, cultural theory and digital media. His work addresses the ‘city’, especially as it is evolving in the 21st century. He employs digital technology and scripting as tools for establishing new formal and performative models in architecture.
Sponsors
Main Sponsor: Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture
Sponsors: Cyprus University of Technology, Department of Audio and Visual Arts; Embassy of Germany in Cyprus; Embassy of Israel in Cyprus; Australia Council of the Arts; Limassol Municipality; Roberto Cimetta fund; IFA
Support: NDLINE
Hospitality: Kanika Pantheon Hotel
Media Sponsor: parathyro.com, Politis Newspaper
Special Thanks: Koula Sophianou, Frances Lanitou, Theophilos Tramboulis, Angeliki Gazi, Natalie Demetriou, Christiana Solomou, Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Jeremy Sarchet, Christos Christou, Alexis Andreou, Maria Lianou, Ioanna Lyssiotis, Yiannis Demetriou, Marios Theophilides, Evis Michaelides, Demetra Ignatiou and the students of the Media and Communications department of the Cyprus University of Technology for their online promotion