Program

Esperia Palace > Ground floor

Dressed in black, with red armbands and banners emblazoned with an apple, the Front Deutscher Äpfel propagates the need to maintain the purity of the German fruits, worshiping the apple as the most emblematic German crop. The Front fights against the infiltration of the German agriculture by alien species and calls for the deportation of tropical fruits such as bananas. At AB6, the Front Deutscher Äpfel performs based on a manual explaining how to produce a local division of the group and a nationalist popstar.

TTT building > 3rd floor > room 302

With their new piece YGRG 159: SULK, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė create a fictive, mediated sci-fi like environment that builds on the historical space of the boudoir that is re-formatted for the purpose of creating queer intimacy. Readers are placed in casual lounging positions, bringing to mind bodies hanging out in bedrooms. What's produced is a sense of girl-on-the-Internet catharsis as feminist theory rubs against "girlish" reading practices, signaling a move towards de-institutionalizing the texts YGRG works with. Here, meaning is growing out of reading and extending to the non-organic world through smell, vision, and touch.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Shana Moulton’s dreamy world is inhabited by Cynthia, her alter ego. Cynthia is a psychedelic lady, a playful impersonation of escapism, the pursuit of personal fulfillment and happiness, the promise of self-healing and spiritual improvement. Alternative remedies, sacred sculptures and crystals, and secret pathways through bedroom furniture comprise the hallucinatory space of Cynthia. In This organ wants this, that organ wants that, Shana Moulton interacts–as Cynthia–with a video projection that she has created herself trying to harmonize her organs.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

Chessboxing is a hybrid fighting sport that combines chess and boxing. It was initiated in 2003 by Iepe Rubingh, inspired by Enki Bilal’s 1992 comic Froid Équateur. Rubingh understands Chessboxing as a massive social sculpture, questioning traditional masculinity. The mixed-gender sport is now represented by eleven national chessboxing organizations with a total of 3,500 fighters. At AB6, Rubingh teaches Athenians the rules introducing the game in Greece.

Esperia Palace > Ground floor

Jakub Jansa builds functional environments designed to dissect contemporary industries of the self and their ideological influence on volatile social strata. In Club of Opportunities, close-of-a-day feelings, depressive moods, bitter hopes, and the semi-dimmed lights of a bar create the atmosphere for a lecture on the ontology of celery and its impact on game theory, delivered by philosopher Kamil Nábělek.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Panel talk with the participation of Delaine Le Bas, Stefanie Hessler, Joey Holder, Poka-Yio, Iliana Fokianaki, Augustine Zenakos

Reactionary politics thrive on disinformation and its dissemination through reductionist slogans and hateful memes. The aggravating annihilationist tendencies in alt-right movements seek to ring in a new era steered by placing separationism and emotion, faith and presumption above knowledge. Today, bursts of antagonisms affect wide arenas of social life including cultural expressions, identity politics, art labor, and media.

This raises urgent questions, such as how can we deal with the flood of fake news and visual regimes geared at triggering our emotions? How can we simultaneously buttress freedom of expression and a variety of tactics to deal with increasing populism and the avoidance of actual debate? And how—if at all—can artistic practices, writing, and exhibitions grapple with and deviate antagonistic, mutually aggravating feedback loops and neoreactionary politics?

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

In Cargo, a neo-tribal community inhabits an undefined dystopian future. In the aftermath of some unprecedented catastrophe, Greece is inhabited by a Mad Max-type social clan decorated with varied symbols of modern Greek nationalism. This neo-tribal community—a mutated relic of a once vast middle class—is partially modeled after a "cargo cult" worship of "technologically advanced civilizations" albeit the community appears to worship relics of recent Greek social history, such as leftovers of the 1990s euphoric era of “economic modernization” and the 2004 Olympic Games. The community’s choreography draws and comments on the opening ceremony of the Games, where mythological cupids and byzantine emperors marched together, providing an ideological condensation of "Hellenism." 

TTT building > 4th floor > room 403

Shadow theater has a long tradition in Greece and the East. Karagioz, the folk hero, personifies the Ordinary Guy Archetype, a bit naive, a bit of a rascal, poor and beaten-up, trying to survive against the odds by utilizing folk wisdom and tons of luck. In Aggelopoulos's shadow theater, a mash-up of politicians, media figures, superheroes, cinema characters and villains-from Donald Trump and Slavoj Zizek to Rocky and Marina Abramovic-competes in an imaginary arena. Place your bets on the winner. 

TTT building > 3rd floor

Gender and Romani descent define Delaine Le Bas's distinctive practice. Her Romani Embassy and her Gypsy Couture mock the cultural, political, social, and economic establishments that Romani historically disassociate from. She is the personification of the wandering Roma, the trickster of the settled and the petite bourgeoisie, the nemesis of our comfort and trivial aesthetics. Delaine Le Bas in her Gypsy Couture acts like a contemporary Fury, an anti-Vivienne Westwood, a true counterculture icon, unclassified and elusive, haunting the European conscience.

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

Dressed in black, with red armbands and banners emblazoned with an apple, the Front propagates the need to maintain the purity of the German fruits, worshiping the apple as the most emblematic German crop. The Front fights against the infiltration of the German agriculture by alien species and calls for the deportation of tropical fruits such as bananas. At AB6, the Front Deutscher Äpfel will present GNTM, a performance whose name is inspired by the self-titled popular reality show in Greece. 

TTT building

The spectacle of dehumanized mummies serves as a screenshot of a frozen society where beings are deprived of their recognizable features. By developing elaborate methods of mummification, the collective experiments with the subversion of gender-specificity. While a shared sexual energy permeates the collective’s dress code and social interventions, the public mummies highlight the perpetual de-sexualization and normalization of fetishes in the post-Internet world. 

Benakeios Library

Is Pigpen a queer performance of operatic proportions or an allegory created to initiate kids in veganism? Are those cute piglets to be hugged and petted or are they bloated sexual fantasies to be acted out in role-playing? In Saeborg’s performance, the humans step aside while the pork-chops trot in the spotlight.

TSMEDE

The shows of YBDG question originality and claims for authorship, often quoting, citing, and appropriating from Instagram, YouTube, and from already existing work by other artists. YBDG strives to create events in which the audience and the group give in to two hours of immersion and freedom. The outfits worn during the shows are made out of clothes found on the streets, collected and modified. YBDG seeks alternatives to the model of professional dance companies by experimenting with one day rehearsals, no fixed cast, and improvisation-based choreography.

TSMEDE 

Zhala is a futuristic cosmic pop singer from Stockholm. On her debut self-titled album, she creates a burst of danceable electronic pop blended with disco, trance, industrial, and Bollywood. In the night club device of AB6, Zhala performs a new song called Play and presents a live performance adapted for the context as a cosmic LARP, inviting the audience to participate as their cosmic selves.

TSMEDE

Patriarchy, as per her band’s name, is her post-feminist target, which she attacks with her videos and performances that take unexpected turns and reverse the plot. Glam-goth, S/M, vampiric, medieval, fashion icon, rock star––Actually’s constantly shape-shifting art persona is deliberately hard to pin down, refusing to settle or be projected into a single identity.

TSMEDE

Are you an ANTI-party type of person? Or a party animal? It doesn’t matter.

Join us to celebrate the Opening of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI. 

After all, ANTI is about maximizing our senses. Do not resist. 

FREE entry. All welcome!

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

Kosta Rapadopoulos is an uncanny overidentification with a typical semi-folk identity representing unresolved intercultural objectifications and fantasies. How is the "Greek identity" reproduced internationally? What is the imprint of the recent crisis in bilateral representations of the other? Rapadopoulos performs in the space GiGi: a Product of German-Greek Love, presents interviews, and analyzes his own work.

Syntagma Square / Ermou Street

The spectacle of dehumanized mummies serves as a screenshot of a frozen society where beings are deprived of their recognizable features. By developing elaborate methods of mummification, the collective experiments with the subversion of gender-specificity. While a shared sexual energy permeates the collective’s dress code and social interventions, the public mummies highlight the perpetual de-sexualization and normalization of fetishes in the post-Internet world. 

Esperia Palace > Ground floor > GiGi

After an increase of neo-Nazi rallies, the Front Deutscher Äpfel (the Front of German Apples) was founded in 2004 as an organization intended to satirize and combat fascism by mimicking the public image, aesthetics, and discourse of right-wing extremist parties in ways causing an unsettling, puzzling effect. In the early years, the Front targeted the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). In Achtung Athen! (Attention Athens!), the Front–invoking the memories of the Nazi invasion of Athens in '41–brings back the issue of the anti-fascist struggle and satires today's right-wing extremist parties.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Shana Moulton’s dreamy world is inhabited by Cynthia, her alter ego. Cynthia is a psychedelic lady, a playful impersonation of escapism, the pursuit of personal fulfillment and happiness, the promise of self-healing and spiritual improvement. Alternative remedies, sacred sculptures and crystals, and secret pathways through bedroom furniture comprise the hallucinatory space of Cynthia. In This organ wants this, that organ wants that, Shana Moulton interacts–as Cynthia–with a video projection that she has created herself trying to harmonize her organs.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

Chessboxing is a hybrid fighting sport that combines chess and boxing. It was initiated in 2003 by Iepe Rubingh, inspired by Enki Bilal’s 1992 comic Froid Équateur. Rubingh understands Chessboxing as a massive social sculpture, questioning traditional masculinity. The mixed-gender sport is now represented by eleven national chessboxing organizations with a total of 3,500 fighters. At AB6, Rubingh teaches Athenians the rules introducing the game in Greece.

Esperia Palace > Ground floor

Jakub Jansa builds functional environments designed to dissect contemporary industries of the self and their ideological influence on volatile social strata. In Club of Opportunities, close-of-a-day feelings, depressive moods, bitter hopes, and the semi-dimmed lights of a bar create the atmosphere for a lecture on the ontology of celery and its impact on game theory, delivered by philosopher Kamil Nábělek.

TTT building > 3rd floor > room 304

A woman is caressing a large trunk of polymer, the torso of a mannequin. The body of the performer, with its flexibility, temperature, and moisture, clashes with the dry surface of the object. Is this performance a ritual of technosexuality or a simple display of the versatile uses of the products? Geumhyung Jeong’s carefully choreographed performance makes use of elements drawn from spa and body treatment rituals which create a ghostly spa-museum that is more of a cabinet of erotic prosthetics. We are left to explore this display of humanoid paraphernalia and project our preferred uses onto them.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Panel talk with the participation of Franco Mattes, Yuri Pattison, Caroline Busta and Vladan Joler

Esperia Palace > Ground floor

The Domestic Godless have been a thorn in the foot of Irish gastronomy for over fifteen years, disregarding for culinary trends. Since 2003, it has been our mission to explore the potential of food as a vehicle for irreverent artistic endeavour and experimentation. At AB6, like true descendants of local foragers, they mix their acquired mastery of chemistry and arts in a blended sacrilegious practice that defaces both culinary and performative arts alike. Signature dishes like stuffed ferret, an open skull serving black risotto in place of the brain, a cat food tin with amuse bouche floating in a DIY sushi tray made of sewer pipes, granny’s make-up powder flavored dessert, and a Frankensteinish hot-dog-ice-cream hybrid that commemorates a battle between ice-cream and hot dog vendors’ territorial war, the palette of The Domestic Godless is endless.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a West German filmmaker, actor, cinematographer and editor. He is widely regarded as a prominent figure and catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. But above all, he was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. At Fassbinder's second feature Katzelmacher, when Jorgos (Raine Werner Fassbinder), a Greek immigrant laborer, moves to Munich, Germany, the lives of a financially and sexually frustrated group of friends are disrupted. Katzelmacher both depicts the personal alienation of the director himself and comments on the xenophobia in German society.

Film, 85' 
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Produced by Peer Raben
Written by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Lilith Ungerer, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Elga Sorbas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Music by Peer Raben
Cinematography Dietrich Lohmann
*The film has english subtitles

In collaboration with Goethe-Institut Athen

TTT building > 4th floor > room 403

Shadow theater has a long tradition in Greece and the East. Karagioz, the folk hero, personifies the Ordinary Guy Archetype, a bit naive, a bit of a rascal, poor and beaten-up, trying to survive against the odds by utilizing folk wisdom and tons of luck. In Aggelopoulos's shadow theater, a mash-up of politicians, media figures, superheroes, cinema characters and villains-from Donald Trump and Slavoj Zizek to Rocky and Marina Abramovic-competes in an imaginary arena. Place your bets on the winner. 

TTT building > 3rd floor

Gender and Romani descent define Delaine Le Bas's distinctive practice. Her Romani Embassy and her Gypsy Couture mock the cultural, political, social, and economic establishments that Romani historically disassociate from. She is the personification of the wandering Roma, the trickster of the settled and the petite bourgeoisie, the nemesis of our comfort and trivial aesthetics. Delaine Le Bas in her Gypsy Couture acts like a contemporary Fury, an anti-Vivienne Westwood, a true counterculture icon, unclassified and elusive, haunting the European conscience.

Benakeios Library

Is Pigpen a queer performance of operatic proportions or an allegory created to initiate kids in veganism? Are those cute piglets to be hugged and petted or are they bloated sexual fantasies to be acted out in role-playing? In Saeborg’s performance, the humans step aside while the pork-chops trot in the spotlight.

TSMEDE

Signe Pierce explores how social media expand the field of the performative through showcasing everyday life in ways kindred to scripted reality shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Pierce’s Instagram reality is saturated by explosions of pink, violet, blue, green, and yellow, crafting an idealized / televised version of romance, personal relations, and metropolitan life: a marshmallow world turning toxic. In her performance at AB6, she posits questions regarding gender, identity, sexuality and reality within an increasingly digital world.

TSMEDE

Anna Goula is a pop idol created and impersonated by the artist Joy Kolaitis. The acoustic image of her alias translates to nausea. By deepening trash aesthetics to render them indulging, Anna Goula’s music videos, interviews, and public performances pursue a feminist reworking of social normality. By overflowing the local/patriarchal vision with an unbearable pastiche of its own idols, Anna Goula glitches Greek societal structures such as the family, the community, and the ethos of newly rich strata, jeopardized by the financial crisis.

TSMEDE

Patriarchy, as per her band’s name, is her post-feminist target, which she attacks with her videos and performances that take unexpected turns and reverse the plot. Glam-goth, S/M, vampiric, medieval, fashion icon, rock star––Actually’s constantly shape-shifting art persona is deliberately hard to pin down, refusing to settle or be projected into a single identity.

Are you an ANTI-party type of person? Or a party animal? It doesn’t matter.

Join us to celebrate the Opening of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI. 

After all, ANTI is about maximizing our senses. Do not resist. 

FREE entry. All welcome!

Performance at a prominent tourist site

Book your seat now for Johannes Paul Raether’s only performance as part of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI. Raether creates fictional characters that he refers to as his tools and with which he generates and navigates situations in public space. Speculating on and animating future identities, these figures insert themselves in situations that involve both participants and uninvolved onlookers, raising questions of self-determination, gender, and posthuman futures. Schwarmwesen invites AB6 visitors to a guided tour performance at a prominent tourist site in Athens that plays a central role in the construction of Greek identity.

Limited capacity, book your seat now!

More details on the meeting point will be distributed directly to participants before the performance. 

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

After an increase of neo-Nazi rallies, the Front Deutscher Äpfel (the Front of German Apples) was founded in 2004 as an organization intended to satirize and combat fascism by mimicking the public image, aesthetics, and discourse of right-wing extremist parties in ways causing an unsettling, puzzling effect. Dressed in black, with red armbands and banners emblazoned with an apple, the Front, worshiping the apple as the most emblematic German crop, propagates the need to maintain the purity of the German fruits moking right extremist parties.

Kolokotroni Square

The spectacle of dehumanized mummies serves as a screenshot of a frozen society where beings are deprived of their recognizable features. By developing elaborate methods of mummification, the collective experiments with the subversion of gender-specificity. While a shared sexual energy permeates the collective’s dress code and social interventions, the public mummies highlight the perpetual de-sexualization and normalization of fetishes in the post-Internet world. 

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

Chessboxing is a hybrid fighting sport that combines chess and boxing. It was initiated in 2003 by Iepe Rubingh, inspired by Enki Bilal’s 1992 comic Froid Équateur. Rubingh understands Chessboxing as a massive social sculpture, questioning traditional masculinity. The mixed-gender sport is now represented by eleven national chessboxing organizations with a total of 3,500 fighters. At AB6, Rubingh teaches Athenians the rules introducing the game in Greece.

Esperia Palace > Ground floor

Jakub Jansa builds functional environments designed to dissect contemporary industries of the self and their ideological influence on volatile social strata. In Club of Opportunities, close-of-a-day feelings, depressive moods, bitter hopes, and the semi-dimmed lights of a bar create the atmosphere for a lecture on the ontology of celery and its impact on game theory, delivered by philosopher Kamil Nábělek.

TTT building > 3rd floor > room 304

A woman is caressing a large trunk of polymer, the torso of a mannequin. The body of the performer, with its flexibility, temperature, and moisture, clashes with the dry surface of the object. Is this performance a ritual of technosexuality or a simple display of the versatile uses of the products? Geumhyung Jeong’s carefully choreographed performance makes use of elements drawn from spa and body treatment rituals which create a ghostly spa-museum that is more of a cabinet of erotic prosthetics. We are left to explore this display of humanoid paraphernalia and project our preferred uses onto them.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Panel talk with the participation of Electra Diakolambrianou, Ed Fornieles, Maria Saridaki, Henry Mahla, Kostis Stafylakis

This panel discusses mimetic practices, including live action role playing (larp), which started in the Nordic gaming community. Players convene in closed group encounters in which they collectively develop scripts, design games, and immerse themselves in role plays, sometimes returning to the same game for several months and even years. LARP relies both on cognitive mediation through the design of the characters and game structures, and on direct and experiential immediacy. Some games are designed specifically to evoke “bleeding” of experiences and emotions as they flow from the context of the game into the players’ real lives. In recent years, several artists who grew up with the internet and computer games have created larp performances and drawn on its gaming techniques. The participants in this panel discuss different methodologies of role play, and their resonances with artistic strategies including mimicry, re-enactment, and subversive affirmation.

Esperia Palace > 1st floor > KINO

Under delicate diplomacy by artist and filmmaker Morten Traavik, the government’s negative reception of Laibach is appeased, and the Slovenian group has a green light to perform in North Korea. But this is not the end of Traavik’s and Laibach’s trouble. The plan for the concert undergoes various levels of censorship. What remains is a small number of songs accompanied by edited visual material approved by the Censorship Bureau. Laibach present amplified cover versions of songs from the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music. Western culture industry’s rebuke of National Socialism, reprocessed after Laibach’s playful appropriation of totalitarian aesthetics, reaches a quasi-unruffled audience during North Korea’s Liberation Day celebrations. Who absorbed whom? Laibach’s sincerity crosses North Korean politics and puzzles our perception of liberty and oppression. The film is premiered for the Athenian audience at AB6’s Kino on October 28, 2018—the day of the Greek national celebration of the Όχι (No) to the 1940 Italian Ultimatum.

Film, 100'
Directed by: Uģis Olte and Morten Traavik
Original languages: English, Korean
Subtitles: English
Produced by: Traavik.Info (Norway), VFS Films (Latvia)
In coproduction with: Mute Records (UK), Norsk Fjernsyn (Norway), Staragara (Slovenia)
Supported by: National Film Centre of Latvia, Culture Capital Foundation, Arts Council Norway, Slovenian Film Center

Esperia Palace > 1st floor

In Cargo, a neo-tribal community inhabits an undefined dystopian future. In the aftermath of some unprecedented catastrophe, Greece is inhabited by a Mad Max-type social clan decorated with varied symbols of modern Greek nationalism. This neo-tribal community—a mutated relic of a once vast middle class—is partially modeled after a "cargo cult" worship of "technologically advanced civilizations" albeit the community appears to worship relics of recent Greek social history, such as leftovers of the 1990s euphoric era of “economic modernization” and the 2004 Olympic Games. The community’s choreography draws and comments on the opening ceremony of the Games, where mythological cupids and byzantine emperors marched together, providing an ideological condensation of "Hellenism." 

TTT building > 4th floor > room 403

Shadow theater has a long tradition in Greece and the East. Karagioz, the folk hero, personifies the Ordinary Guy Archetype, a bit naive, a bit of a rascal, poor and beaten-up, trying to survive against the odds by utilizing folk wisdom and tons of luck. In Aggelopoulos's shadow theater, a mash-up of politicians, media figures, superheroes, cinema characters and villains-from Donald Trump and Slavoj Zizek to Rocky and Marina Abramovic-competes in an imaginary arena. Place your bets on the winner.