Sync Cu­ra­to­r­ial Fel­low­ship and the NKF - Nordic Art Association - Sweden’s Cu­ra­to­r­ial Res­i­dency in Stock­holm (CRIS) invited me for a fellowship in Athens in 2019. At the end of the stay, I organized a seminar with cu­ra­tors Marita Muukkonen, Jonatan Habib Engqvist and artist Georges Salameh, at the Swedish Institute at Athens. The re­fresh­ments served were de­signed by the col­lec­tive Greece is for Lovers.

How does an out­sider per­ceive the art scene in Athens? The ques­tion has been raised many times to me dur­ing my stay. Nat­u­rally its im­pos­si­ble to make any as­sess­ments af­ter only just a few weeks, but when I ask the ques­tions in re­turn, the fol­low­ing points reap­pear:

First and fore­most there is an enor­mous thirst for in­ter­na­tional cul­tural ex­change. A few dom­i­nat­ing pri­vate foun­da­tions has shoul­dered some of the tasks that in other Eu­ro­pean coun­tries are ad­min­is­trated through the min­istry of cul­ture such as res­i­dency ex­change pro­grams, grants for artists and cen­tral­iz­ing the dif­fer­ent art and cul­ture cen­ters. Mean­while the Mu­seum for Con­tem­po­rary Art, EMST, is closed. Lastly, the many bril­liant artist-run spaces, non-for-profit spaces/events and hap­pen­ings, which cre­ate ex­tremely in­ter­est­ing pro­grams, can­not be sus­tain­able in the long run. This trig­gers many more ques­tions about how to cre­ate a sus­tain­able and equal art world which is not only rel­e­vant lo­cally in Athens, but on a much more global scale. Some coun­tries have re­cently im­ple­mented for in­stance that art has to be “pa­tri­otic” in or­der to re­ceive state grants. Other coun­tries send out­spo­ken and crit­i­cal artists in jail. Mean­while the in­crease of pri­vate mu­se­ums (266 world­wide in 2018) is boom­ing, and has a tremen­dous im­pact in both the mar­ket and how art is pro­tected or un­pro­tected for re­searchers or “eter­nity.” The na­tion state and its phys­i­cal bor­ders with visa reg­u­la­tions – or lack of the same – and the pri­vate in­ter­ests shape the cul­tural work­er’s world in an in­creas­ing man­ner, on top of other au­thor­i­tar­ian struc­tures such as pa­tri­archy or racism.

What role would a na­tion state have ide­ally when it comes to cul­tural and artis­tic pro­duc­tion? What role has art in the po­lit­i­cal frame­work (democ­racy)? Cul­tural her­itage/iden­tity may not share the same na­tional bor­ders of a coun­try, but is im­ple­mented as such – would it make sense to re­de­fine the ter­mi­nol­ogy of cul­tural iden­tity?

Is it of in­ter­est to shift the power re­la­tions be­tween the sec­tors of cul­tural pro­duc­tion lo­cally and glob­ally, like pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions, pri­vate ac­tors and grass-root spaces, and if so, how?

And fi­nally, re­lated to this are of course ques­tions of im­ma­te­r­ial and cog­ni­tive la­bor – what role can it have when pop­ulist pol­i­tics are con­stantly work­ing to­wards the dis­man­tling of cul­tural bud­gets?

https://www.sia.gr/imgpdf/events/sync_BIOS.pdf