Garp Sessions 2024
16-24 August 2024
Ruins, rubbles, residues
Navigating the enigmatic territories of the southeast Mediterranean, like weavers tracing threads through time, this year’s focus will be informed by the fluidity of the terms residues, rubbles, and ruins, allowing their whispers to guide our meandering paths.
Through a collective exploration, the sessions will pose questions such as: When do rubbles unfurl into ruins, revealing secrets buried beneath layers of history? Can words themselves become archaeologists, excavating buried truths with each uttered syllable?
Embracing a playful and intuitive approach, participants will be invited to engage in performative tasks that blur the boundaries between art and archaeology, past and present, stasis and movement. Together, the group will work around structures, collectivising amidst the fragments of the past. Is togetherness possible in the ever-shifting sands of the Mediterranean shores, when dominated by rubbles-in-the-making?
As the group wanders through landscapes both physical and metaphorical, they will wonder about the classification of ruins, residues, and rubbles through the lens of embodied experience. What stories do these liminal spaces tell, and how do they shape our collective memory from where we stand now?
Facilitators
Eirini Fountedaki
Eirini Fountedaki is a curator and writer. Her work revolves around notions of collectivity and resilience through ephemeral formats and media such as readings, moving images, and the sonic. She has curated programmes and exhibitions for Sinema Transtopia, SAVVY Contemporary, and the London Short Film Festival, among others. Eirini is the co-editor of the publication “How does the world breathe now?” (Archive Books), where film is explored as a witness, archive, and political tool to address the current state of the world. As a co-founding member of the collective Cruising Curators, she has collectively developed texts, programmes, and workshops for the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, The Arts University of Cologne, Hopscotch Reading Room, and FLORIDA Magazine. She has been the recipient of the SNF ARTWORKS curatorial fellowship award (Greece, 2020). She participated in the School for Dissident Friendship (Berliner Festspiele, June 2023) and the curatorial workshop “How now to gather” for the 11th Berlin Biennale. Currently, Eirini is working for the independent art space TAVROS in Athens, curating a series of slow readings and listening sessions titled “Around the Shelf.” She spent time in Istanbul for a curatorial residency at SAHA Studio (2022), initiating her research on feminist archives and contemporary artistic practices. Istanbul holds a special place in her heart, alongside Crete and Berlin, where she also feels at home.
Onur Karaoğlu
Onur Hamilton Karaoglu works in theater, performance and video art. Since 2010, his original writing, adaptations and direction work have been commissioned and presented at festivals and for institutions such as Wiener Festwochen, Dancing On The Edge, Media Art Xploration and Volksbühne. His installations and video art have been presented at Bahar (Sharjah Biennial 2017), SPOT, Operation Room and Protocinema. He is one of the founding members of Studio 4 Istanbul that produces theater and film projects, and since 2014 of the performance space KÖŞE in Yeldeğirmeni, which later has become the venue for an international performance festival. Karaoğlu was the director of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul (2014-2019), and he teaches performing arts at Boğaziçi and Koç University. He received a BA degree in Sociology at Boğaziçi University and MFA in Theater Directing at Columbia University in The City Of New York.
Participants
Valinia Svoronou
Valinia Svoronou (b.1991) is an artist based in Athens. Her practice aims to explore with care cultural and technological movements within human history from the subjective, perspective of storytelling. Through making text, moving image, apps, prints and sculptures, versions of stories are narrated and digested/ to come to terms with. As someone who has grown up in Athens but is part of an immigrant family from Istanbul she is interested in the history of the exchanges between the East and what we have come to call the West. In the past she has shown her work in various formats and spaces such as the Tavros space Athens, Athens Biennale, the Ocean Archive, the Showroom London among others.
Eva Vaslamatzi
Eva Vaslamatzi is an art historian, curator, editor, and writer based in Athens. As an independent curator, her research centers on how past folk practices and rituals are embedded in and revived through contemporary art practices. Bringing aspects of the vernacular, as well as the metaphysical, to the foreground as alternative knowledge systems, she investigates how these forms and behaviors function independently from grander national narratives. This research, aiming at multiple exchanges between the Greek and the Turkish art scene, has taken the form of a group show I Heard It from the Valleys, 2021, the a collective performance I Heard Them Singing in the Mountains, 2023 and the group show Constellations Exploding Anew, 2024. She has worked as a curator and assistant curator at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and its esidency laboratory Pavillon (2017–2019) and at the non-profit space DOC! in Paris (2017–2019). She has collaborated with the Orange Rouge association Paris (2018–2021), an educational organization which brings together contemporary artists and adolescents with mental disabilities for the co-creation of artworks and she is currently
responsible for the program “Cultural Prescription”, an art psychotherapy program at the MoMuS Alex Mylona in Athens. As a guest curator Vaslamatzi has realized group exhibitions with a focus on new productions resulting from collective processes and exchanges in public and private institutions such as the American College of Greece, the Haus-N Athen, the annex-M of the Athens Concert Hall, the Athens School of Fine Arts amongst others. Since 2020, she contributes as an art critic in various forums, including the Art Newspaper Greece, Art Unlimited (Turkey) and 02 (France). She has served as editor for art catalogs, such as the Yerassimos Yannopoulos private collection, the ten-year anniversary publication of the Syros International Film Festival and the annual publication on the 2nd year of the Fellowship Program of SNF – ARTWORKS. As a writer, she has participated in publications and exhibitions with text-based artworks. She has been awarded various fellowships, including the NEON Curatorial Exchange (2018), an ARTWORKS Fellowship in Curating (2019), and SAHA curatorial residency (2021). She has served as a teaching assistant at the Department of Culture, Creative Media, and Industries of the University of Thessaly in Volos.
Yusuf Huysal
Yusuf Huysal (b. 1994) lives between Istanbul and London. He holds a BA in Liberal Arts from King’s College London. He works with sound and has produced work for installations, performances, theatre and film. He is currently working on a commission for an upcoming group exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Deniz Buga
Istanbul, 1982. Currently lives in Amsterdam. His film, video, and photography works primarily focus on urbanism, minority politics, and queer stances. His work was presented at various film festivals and museums including the San Sebastian Film Festival, Oxford Modern Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, and C/O Berlin. He was a resident artist at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.