This project strand offers short residency opportunities in partner cities for 30 emerging artists. Each UEO city partner will send two artists on a residency to another partner’s city of a different art form, thereby seeking to enrich their professional practice through inter-disciplinary residencies. Artists are chosen on the basis of having demonstrated an interest in the hosting city’s Arts & Society contemporary European theme. They must also practice a different art form from that of the hosting city’s public event. The project offers the emerging artists the opportunity to travel without the pressure to produce work and ideally to experience UEO’s public events.
Kosmos Nikolaou travelled to Vilnius
Athens’ second artist, Michalis Pitidis, travelled to Berlin
Artists’ Statement
My work is based on the operation of architecture, memory, narrative and non-verbal communication. I often works with archives, personal stories, verbal archeology and the immaterial dimensions of sound and voice. I am triggered by the public space and the public sphere, examining the history of cities and how personal experiences and narrations are existing and interact within the city space. I am interested in manipulating display techniques inside the white cube and turning them into institutional critique discourse. I tend to consider law as a contemporary form of magic, as a way in which empowered spoken words are able to influence the real world and everyday life, so I am interested in how the use of speech can create institutions that allow societies and people to improve the way they coexist, collaborate and communicate. I would like to set a discussion about what is going on inside the exhibition space, who has the right to speak, for whom is that space created and how it is connected with the society. With my practice I am pursuing a new and peculiar way of witnessing, a way of recording and documentation that gives prominence to my personal fiction and representations of the everyday world.
Artists’ Biography
Kosmas Nikolaou (1984, Athens) lives and works in Athens. He has been the recipient of Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)- ARTWORKS Artists Fellowship in 2018. He has carried solo shows in exhibition spaces such as Rebecca Camchi Gallery in Athens, Brauchbarkeit in Cologne, Villa Bologna in Malta, D.O.C. in Paris. He has taken part in several residency programmes in Greece, Germany, Italy, Poland, Malta and United Arab Emirates and in the Ideas City του New Museum programme in New York. Recently he was commissioned to present a lecture performance in Athens by Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative and Columbia University New York. He has taken part in group shows in museums, institutions and artist-led organisations in Europe, in the Balkans and in the Middle East. Since 2012 he has established the independent art space 3 137 in Athens along with Paki Vlassopoulou and Chryssanthi Koumianaki.