With Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner, the curators Lydia Antoniou and George Bekirakis playfully use the performativity of social gathering and the pleasure one derives from it as a starting point, with the ultimate aim of creating unexpected connections between artworks and aesthetics, methods and and artistic practices. They identify similarities and differences between a group of artists whose work has shaped critical debates in contemporary art in Athens over the last twenty years and attempt our own approach to collective practices of care.

In this moment in time, it was important for them to ask themselves how they find themselves back in the exhibition spaces, collectively. The gesture of gathering invited artists around a table, is intertwined with both the contemporary socio-political condition of isolation and introversion, and the fragmentation that has historically pervaded contemporary art. Oscillating between digital presence and physical absence, they choose to refer first to the already existing networks of collaboration in the field of Athenian art, their friends, in order to collectively produce common space. Through the processes of exchange and inversion of the hierarchical model of exhibition production carries, the possibility of performing social relations arises, allowing them to imagine a new institutional framework through communities and exchanges.

You are cordially invited, the reception will be brilliant.

Performative Transcending Somatic Dinner is supported by NEON.