Opening: Friday 11 April 2025, 20:00
The longing, the violent expatriation and the demand for return, while they should have been placed as issues in the past, they are paradoxically becoming increasingly topical. This year’s Inspire Project 2025 which is hosted in MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art (TIF-Helexpo premises), from 11 April until 1 June 2025, revolves around the theme of the Return, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus in 1974. It extends, however, to the intergenerational trauma of 'longing', of lost homeland and home, of forced displacement and migration, but also to the futuristic imagination around what has been lost but is constantly sought.
Works of art made during this year’s workshop by 20 young artists, who worked with the guest artist-in chief Nikos Chalarambidis, are based on the notion of the “Return”. The new works are exhibited alongside Charalambidis’ own retrospective works, which stand as the main chapter of the Inspire Project 2025 under the title “If you graze sheep, why don’t you play the flute?”. Through unexpected combinations of different themes and experiences of the globalised world, such as the alteration of cultural identity and the questioning of nationality, the post-colonial legacy, the modernist past, the transformations of refugeeism, the conceptual axis of home and homeland is illuminated.
Through the prism of the Cyprus issue, in the space of half a century, the demand for 'return' to ancestral homes has not only not been vindicated, but has become the demand of thousands of other people in areas that continue even today to be subjected to the suffering of bloody warfare. Love for one's homeland and nostalgia for it seem to be defining emotions from antiquity to the present day.
The relevant considerations constitute the trigger for a broader public discussion, while also functioning as the basis for the joint artwork that will emerge in the venue by the participating artists in collaboration with Nikos Charalambidis.
The Inspire Project is co-funded by the European Union (NSRF - Central Macedonia Programme).
Artistic director: Thouli Misirloglou
Curated by: Theodore Markoglou, Katerina Syroglou
Production assistant: Silia Fasianou
Committee for the selection of the workshop participants: Areti Leopoulou, Theodore Markoglou, Katerina Syroglou, MOMus curators
Guest artist: Nikos Charalambidis
Participating artists: Anna Botou, Vasso Chatzimanoli, Christina Chatzimichailidou, Stavros Christofi (Yeti), Despoina Douzi, Sarkis Hambaryan, Christos Hatzichristofi, Rena Kaklamani, Konstantinos Kalathakis, Zoe Kalogianni, Xenia Kasapoglou, Konstantinos Konstantinou, Nikos Larios, Georgios Othonas, Eleni Pasiata, Sophia Pechlivanidou, Olga Souvermezoglou, Daphne Vlasidou, Konstantinos Xanthis, Stefanos Zafeiriou
Guest artist’s bio
Nikos Charalambidis is a visual artist and Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He ranks among the most important visual artists of the 90's generation, with extensive international activity and acclaim. According to the rationale of his award in 2007, by the Association of Art critics AICA HELLAS, he is considered the main exponent of Political Art in Greece, while the influence of his work has been decisive in establishing a new generation of artists more sensitive to socio-political issues.
His multifaceted research work is distinguished from very early on, with the 1st Prize of the Yannis & Zoe Spyropoulou Foundation being awarded to him in 1992, even before he had completed his studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, thus setting the starting signal for an upward course that is today the subject of academic study and doctoral dissertations, as well as a key reference point for art theorists and historians.
Already since the late 1980s, the artist's daring interventions on the Green Line in Cyprus, his homeland, but also in war zones of other countries, even endangering his life, go beyond the dominant artistic trends of the time. Charalambidis establishes a primary, radical artistic activity that deals with a wide range of socio-political themes, adopting unprecedented artistic practices. At the same time, he enlists innovative digital tools of robotics and other cutting-edge technology, developing interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations with researchers of various disciplines. The examination of archives relating to the troubled space of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East is at the core of his research, focusing on the political problem of Cyprus. Forced expatriation and refugeeism, the legacy of colonialism and its effects, migration and nomadism, national identity and its contestation, localness and "non-place", even the colonization of space and its exploitation strategies, are issues that first appear in the artist's early work, which would, decades later, become common themes for many artists.
The "iconic renegade of the Green Line", as Henry Meyric Hughes, President of the International Association of Art critics, calls Charalambidis in his extensive theoretical essay on his solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2003, has been curated by other internationally distinguished curators and art historians, more than 65 solo exhibitions in international art centres and exhibition spaces, institutional events and biennales, as well as in leading museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, France, Centre Pompidou, Turner Contemporary in London, Palazzo Querrini Stampalia and Palazzo Giustinian Lolin Querini in Venice, Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo in São Paulo, Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia, Musée des Archives Nationales in Paris, etc.
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