10 July—14 September 2024
Group show
Care Ecologies
in collaboration with the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, WHW, Idensitat, and CNMFPP
State of Concept is proud to announce the opening of the group exhibition Care Ecologies, on Wednesday the 10th of July at 19:00, part of the ongoing project CARE ECOLOGIES, a collaboration among the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, What, How & for Whom / WHW, Idensitat, and the Center for New Media and Feminist Public Practices / CNMFPP.
The opening will be flagged by an open discussion and presentation led by the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, starting at 21:00. Aiming to further explore and expand on the themes of the exhibition, offering deeper insights into the ongoing dialogue surrounding care in contemporary society, the eight fellows of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation 2023 Residency will be presenting a new edited volume comprising new texts following the second Residency Programme which took place in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, in October 2023.
Exhibition Duration: 10.07.2024 – 14.09.2024
OPEN BY APPOINTMENT please contact [email protected] 24h in advance of your visit.
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Care Ecologies explores how care manifests in contemporary society, prompting a collective re-examination of cultural practices as acts of care. Featuring works by Adelita Husni-Bey, Fokus grupa, Hana Miletić, Theo Prodromidis, and Idensitat, it examines the notion of reclaiming care as a crucial strategy which could potentially be applicable in wider social contexts – care as solidarity and sustainability, care and the environment, care as a building capacity for wellbeing, care in education, the sharing of resources and knowledge, care as a mending mechanism for fragile social structures.
Hana Miletić’s series Materials highlights the subtle yet significant acts of care within urban environments. Her textile installations reflect the city’s physical and social spaces. Miletić’s hand-woven textile works capture the transient repairs and modifications in public spaces, advocating for a slower, more mindful approach to the relentless pace of modern life.
Fokus grupa’s ongoing project, Vedutas from the Palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Rijeka, delves into historical care, examining the hidden labour of slaves in Rijeka’s industrial past. Through their critical exploration of these “idealised” landscapes, Fokus grupa brings attention to the often-overlooked contributions and exploitation that underpin historical and contemporary economic systems.
Adelita Husni-Bey’s On Necessary Work addresses the concept of care in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed in collaboration with unionised nurses, this project documents workshops where participants reflect on the designation of ‘necessary work’ and its implications. The resulting video installations capture personal narratives and critical reflections on the healthcare systems’ response to the crisis, highlighting the essential yet undervalued labour of healthcare workers.
Work 30yrs1d by Theo Prodromidis explores performativity, participation and citizenship in collaboration with young cultural workers from Zagreb, Croatia. 30yrs1d started as an exploration of the processes for the production of citizenship in the last 30 years and the methods, successes and failures on how we collectively decide who acquires it and how we can support someone to claim it.
IDENSITAT’s (Un)Open Archive is a curatorial and artistic project that collects and presents diverse perspectives on care. Featuring contributions from various cultural and political activists, this project expands the notion of care to include themes such as social justice, accessibility, and collective work. By creating a platform for dialogue and reflection, (Un)Open Archive challenges traditional archival practices and fosters a deeper understanding of care in contemporary society.
The exhibition is curated by State of Concept in collaboration with Idensitat and Ana Dević & Ana Kovačić. In dialogue with the exhibition On necessary work curated by Ana Dević and Ana Kovačić, May 2024, Zagreb.
Organised by State of Concept Athens as part of the two-year project Care Ecologies in collaboration with the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation (Greece), What, How & for Whom / WHW (Croatia), Idensitat (Spain), and the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices /CNMFPP, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
CARE ECOLOGIES is a network based, multifaceted project between partners from Greece, Croatia, and Spain active in the fields of production of art works, promotion of contemporary art among domestic and international art audiences, fostering a robust relationship between contemporary artistic practices and social space, through research and education.
For more information about the project please visit https://carecologies.eu/en/
Hana Miletić
With a background in documentary photography, and inspired by her family’s long tradition of handwork, Hana Miletić has developed an artistic practice based primarily on the creation of hand-woven textile works. She uses the weaving process to reflect on the social and cultural realities in which she lives and works. Weaving, which requires practice, time, care and attention, allows her to formulate new relationships between work, thought and the emotional sphere, as well as to counteract certain economic and social conditions at play, such as acceleration, standardisation and transparency. Through her use of weaving, Hana reproduces the public gestures of maintenance and repair, showing buildings, infrastructures and objects in mutation, or in various states of transition.
Hana Miletić was born in Zagreb in 1982, today she lives and works in Brussels. Her most recent solo exhibitions were held at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2024); Kunsthalle Mainz (2022-23); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU), Rijeka (2022); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2022); Bergen Kunsthall (2021); La Loge, Brussels (2021); and WIELS, Brussels (2018). She has participated amongst others in the Dhaka Art Summit (2023), Manifesta 14 Prishtina (2022), and Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017). She was a resident at Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (2014-15), and at the Albers Foundation’s cultural centre Thread in Senegal (2019). In 2021, she was awarded the Bâloise Art Prize.
https://hanamiletic.com/
Fokus grupa
The artistic collective Fokus grupa has been active since 2012. In their work, they try to establish a critical framework for reading the artistic, economic and political environment in which they operate. They borrow and learn from design, architecture, curatorial practice and writing, and often expand their team with collaborators from other fields. In 2015, the collective participated in the postgraduate program at Bauhaus Dessau, and in 2016, together with the postgraduate center Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, they developed a seminar at the Innsbruck Institute for Architectural Theory. This seminar, realized as an Existenzoptimum project, was exhibited at the Art Pavilion in Innsbruck in 2016, and an expanded version was presented at the exhibition Some Shapes of Things to Come at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg in 2018. In 2016, they also presented the Stories About Frames project at MSU in Zagreb, Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, and at MSUB in Belgrade. The Invisible Matter project was exhibited in 2017 at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Krakow, the Onomatopee Gallery in Eindhoven in 2018, and the Tobačna 001 Cultural Center in Ljubljana. In 2019, Invisible Matter was published in the academic journal Život umjetnosti. The artistic research project Vedutas from the Palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Rijeka was exhibited in 2018 at the Industrial Art Biennial at MMSU Rijeka, and at La Box, ENSA Bourges in France in 2020. In 2022, the work was exhibited at Sugar – Industrial Heritage and Colonialism at < rotor > in Graz, at Whiteness as Property at the Kunstlerhaus Wien, and at the Sugar from the East exhibition at Drugo More in Rijeka. The collective additionally thematized the topic of sugar and colonialism in an article published in the ArtMargins magazine, and through the Sugar Everywhere conference organized by Drugo More.
https://fokusgrupa.net/
Adelita Husni Bey is an Italian-Libyan artist and pedagogue interested in anarcho-collectivism, political theater and legal anthropology. Since 2012 she has organized workshops and produced video installations through non-competitive pedagogical models, within and outside the field of contemporary art. By involving activists, architects, jurists, students, poets, actors, urban planners, physiotherapists and teachers, she creates spaces in which to practice forms of collectivity and authorship aimed at social analysis. As a Vera List Center fellow (2020-22), she began experimenting with hybrid pedagogical spaces and film sets, exploring historical protocols related to pandemics. She was awarded the 2021 Italian Council grant, and she is a 2016 and 2022 grantee of the Graham Foundation, among other awards. She has exhibited in various international museums such as the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the MoMA (2018) and Whitney Museum (2016) in New York, with solo exhibitions at the Kunstahaus in Bergen (2020) and Gasworks in London (2011). In 2017 she was part of the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion.
Theo Prodromidis (b. 1979, Thessaloniki, Greece) is a visual artist based in Αthens, Greece. He studied Contemporary Media Practice at the University of Westminster and was awarded an MFA in Fine Art by Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007. Theo’s artistic research and practice on performativity, participation and citizenship has been activated in both institutional and non-formal spaces of learning, action and exhibition.His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries, museums and festivals such as the Victoria Square Project, GMK Zagreb, 3rd Industrial Art Biennial, Furtherfield, Galerija Nova, State of Concept Αthens, the 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the 4th Αthens Biennale, i.a. Since 2021, he was the co-leader of “An album from our square”, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University and a fellow of AFIELD. His artistic research has been supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture and has participated, through the production of new work, in the program “Cοmmunities of Learning, Bridging the Gap of Isolation” initiated by WHW and supported by the Culture of Solidarity Fund of the European Cultural Foundation. In 2023, he was a resident artist at the Public Activities Department of Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. https://www.theoprodromidis.com/
Idensitat is a collective art project which experiments with means of creating social space. Idensitat acts as a system incorporating other projects, activities, and processes, expanding through different local contexts, a system based on dynamic strategies in social space, through research, production, and educational and collaborative activities.
Idensitat has established a long-term strategy to reinforce mechanisms of social interaction, collaboration, content production, and knowledge exchange. Idensitat has, throughout the years, connected with and collaborated with other initiatives, with the intention of discovering mutually reinforcing elements. Their proposals are designed as a continuity, integrating educational actions, raising visibility in public space using itinerant cooperative devices for the development of multidisciplinary projects in specific locations. By pursuing this strategy, they have established themselves in a transversal territory, understanding artistic practice as the creative mechanism of a permeable system in which culture actively influences social context. Idensitat’s team: Ramon Parramon, Irati Irulegi, Albert Gironès, Anna Recasens and Roser Colomar. www.idensitat.net
