Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni

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Greece, United Kingdom (citizenship) °1974
research interests: art, artistic research, politics, Art history
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"My use of media has been contingent and expansive. Working across artistic disciplines, I examine political themes, such as the body, historical changes, cultural and artistic identity, in relation to economies of culture and the built environment. I have continuous engagement with art and design from the age of sixteen, when I picked up a pencil to draw my first still life. When I was nineteen, I read my first book on art history, "A concise histor of modern painting" by Herbert Read, and at twenty-one, I went to my first contemporary art exhibition by Rita Ackernann at Rebecca Camhi gallery in Athens. After my five-year training and subsequent work in architecture, I worked independently as an artist since 2004. I expanded my artistic training, attending research seminars and workshops, most notably with Janine Antoni, Rosemary Butcher and Julian Wild. The artistic ethos of the Schools where I have taught: UEL's Architecture and the Visual Arts (Signy Svalastoga) and Winchester School of Art (Bashir Makhoul); were also formative later experiences. Complementary to my scholarly work, with its early influences by the Greek literary and artistic avant-garde, published in The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Architecture and Culture, and e-flux, amongst other, my artistic work explores the relevance of philosophical methods, concepts, and contexts of analysis, for design and the arts. Videos, where I translated my own artistic approach into moving image, as well as other works, have been exhibited and archived internationally.

 

I view art's labouring task as making philosophical statements in a tool other than language."

 

Zoe Panagiota Nigianni was born in Athens, Greece, eldest of three, her parents being originally from the Peloponnese, a mountainous area surrounded by the Mediterranean sea. She received academic training in the fine arts at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), with artists Vlassis Caniaris and Sotiris Sorogkas; while she studied architectural and visual art theory, when Peter Salter was Head of the Architecture School at UEL. She has also studied visual art theory, as well as philosophy, at the University of East London (UEL), University of Athens (UA), and University of Amsterdam (UvA).

research

Schema

  • Evolution (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    "New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world.
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  • Glossary (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    The exposition outlines artistic terms and categories in relation to my artistic practice. I include below a specific quote about the artistic notion of the postmodern. "The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the character of an event; hence also they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realisation (mise en oeuvre) always begin too soon. 'Post modern' would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)." Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge', trans. by G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 81. Terms have been taken loosely from 'Art Now, Vol. 3', Hans Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Cologne: Taschen, 2012.
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About Artistic Research

  • Can Philosophy Exist? (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive. "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued.
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  • Q&A (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time. I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions.
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research expositions

  • The game (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Happening, 2016. Participant's research, including improvised full recorded interview with first generation Albanian immigrants to Greece, images, and thematic text. The research was conducted for the workshop, "Logics of Worlds", organised by architect Filippos Oraiopoulos, at Athens School of Fine Art (ASFA), Master of Visual Arts (Marios Spiliopoulos, Giorgios Xiropaides), December 2016. I used play as a method to facilitate improvised discussions. People share and respond more freely when participating in structured, but playful interactions, such as those a game involves. Albanians speak three languages, Albanian, Greek and Italian, so I wasn't able to translate parts of the conversation. Avlona is an English now obsolete name for Vlore, an Albanian seaport and former ancient Greek colony Aulon. Notably, the workshop was slightly interrupted by a performance art student, who brought a live hen to slaughter in the studio. This can be taken as a metaphor for scapegoating refugees. For this exposition, I include an essay by Pantelis Boukalas, in Kyriakos Katzourakis, O "Dromos Pros Ti Dysi" (The Way to the West), 2001, as well as Kyriakos Katzourakis' introduction in English. The exposition also aims to juxtapose the experimental and the conceptual in the fine arts; and to make the 'invisible' visible.
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  • Debris (Enlightenment Panel no 2) (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Sculpted and painted wood, combined with treated rusty objects. Duct tape with boat paint models for metal sheet sculptures, 2020. Digital drawings, 2021, 2023. Dutch steel sailing boat part-restoration and renovation, Amsterdam (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2019-20. Relief and improvised sculptures made with industrial paints, as well as found objects, were exposed to weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind, over a few months on a floating timber raft. Working with the changes the weather was causing to the ad hoc studio, I made changes until the painting was finished, photographed, then dumped. The relief was collected. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks. The pieces would comprise of the scenography for a theatre performance, informed by my conversations with a theatre lighting technician. The event would also include a donation event of the art objects. See external link for the theatre play, based on the tradition of the philosophical dialogue and employing the idea of performing philosophy to make it accessible to a wider audience. Political asylum is offered to people who flee from their countries of origin, because of violations of their dignity, which is a human right, for the political beliefs and personal lifestyle. Drawing on the philosophical notion of impossible objects, the works also attempt an indirect postcolonial critique.
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  • Aftermath (E for Installation) (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Design for interactive art installation with urban regeneration proposal, as well as video about environmentalism and our technologically mediated private and public lives; installation catalogue design with photography and textual collage, 2021-2023. "There is a massive abundance of goods that end up in landfills. With such abundance of goods, no one should be deprived." Visitors will have to leave an unwanted item of theirs and take another to collect the installation catalogue. The installation will be monitored for this purpose. Designed with Wi-Fi light technology for agility training, the interactive floor in the entrance will be controlled by the visitors through a tablet computer that will allow them to select the difficulty level. The exposition offers a critical viewpoint to the contemporary gallery-mediated commercial environment by making reference to the non-monetary economies of artistic production. Art "is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy". The enemy is whoever exploits their fellows out of egoism or personal interest (Pablo Picasso). With summary and questions about David Murakami Wood's article "The Global Turn to Authoritarianism", 'Surveillance and Society', (15), 3/4, 2017: 357-370.
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Writing for Fine Art - Philosophy (MA); open to Artistic Research (MA), UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM (2019)

  • Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts (2020) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Play in the format of the philosophical dialogue, 2019 Drama is pretense. But, unlike fiction, a theatrical play is not a pretended representation of a state of affairs; rather it is the pretended state itself, in which the actors pretend to be the characters doing the pretending in the actual performance of the theatrical play. The actor is in this way irrealised in the character. Aside from writing the play, which consists largely in pseudo assertions, the playwright gives the actors directions on how to pretend to make assertions and to perform actions. Therefore, the playwright is writing a recipe for pretense. Instead of pretending to write assertions, the playwright gives directions to the actors on how to enact a pretense. The philosophical dialogue has been an established, although uncommon, method of philosophical writing, which usually deploys fictional characters to present a discussion between several divergent viewpoints on a topic of ordinary or philosophical interest. The juxtaposition and debating of opinions in ordinary uses of language, without prioritizing any opinion, endows the dialogue with open-endedness instead of conclusiveness. As McKeon (in Prince, 1996: 3) argues: "Dialogue is statement and counterstatement, based on ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through opinions about reality. Truth is perceived in perspective, and perspectives can be compared, but there is no overarching inclusive perspective." In this exposition, I exploit the dialogic format to expose the views of Jean-Paul Sartre, a well known philosopher and father of the existentialist philosophical and literary movement, and Maurice Blanchot, a rather obscure philosopher of literature and literary critic. Notably, both Sartre and Blanchot were active in the post second world war period, which significantly shaped their philosophical insights; specifically on modes of writing, including fictional prose, about a variety of topics, from politics, to ethics and aesthetics. Because referencing is rarely used in philosophical dialogues, here I employ full bibliographical referencing in the end. The dialogue presents an advantage for reaching a wider readership, beyond the confines of those with strictly philosophical and academic interests. Prince, Michael, "Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Design and Multidisciplinary

  • All that glitters and black holes (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022. The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining. Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary. With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015. About how to navigate this exposition: Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right.
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  • Morton Road House (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Unrealised design for garden house in North London, 2002. An unrealised house commission prompted my preoccupation with the question of creative value, which for architecture largely relates to the local economy. Similar to, but not quite the same as authorial or intellectual property rights, the question of creative value for writers is not connected to local economies, although it is determined to a certain degree by cultural values.
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  • Parallax (House for an artist) (last edited: 2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Design for a new house, scrapped 2002, reworked 2021 with bird observatories on mud landscape. Flipping the initial scaled sketches for the house, I selected the naturally lit staircase as the main sculptural and building element for bird observatories, spread on the mud landscape of a natural bird habitat. The sculptural structures are proposed to be installed on site following the parallactic model, which re-frames the site as the medium through the pieces.
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Artworks

  • Shadows of Intimacy, collaboration with Jia Yu Corti (2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Interactive digital art installation for dance performance in collaboration with choreographer Jia Yu Corti, London Contemporary Dance School (The Place), 2011. Dance improvisation by Robert Anderson and Kathy Crick.
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  • 1 Day Artwork (2020) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Net art for unrealized site-specific performing arts installation, 2020 The exposition shows fragments of work prepared for an unrealized interactive site-specific public installation at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, South London. The installation would include dance performance, video/photography and structures with objects. The work was produced at different times between the winter and summer of 2011. The installation was to be a collaboration with dance artist Susanna Recchia and photographer Rachel Cherry. Audiences would traverse or remain on site as long as they wished. The Critical Pathways workshop by choreographer and artist Rosemary Butcher served as the starting point. Walking journeys allowed for emerging themes, such as pilgrimage, walking-the-lifeline and potentiality. The concepts of the moving body and the plane tree, a variety imported into the city, became intertwined. The performers would enact processes related to journeying and nomadism. The installation would create a virtual landscape of remoteness: a place for reflection. Revisiting these works, I draw from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming animal to suggest that we rethink the notion of animal via the concept of the plan(e)/plateau. Deleuze and Guattari's advancement of the notion of the plan(e), from a metaphoric articulation of processes of translation into a conceptual apparatus of intersection across forms, enables the co-existence of multi-dimensional multiplicities against their reduction to two dimensions. The plane is one of consistency that is sustained across multiplicities. If it is the plane of Nature in the Deleuzian sense of natural history, it allows for the infinite multiplicity of individuals. Entering the plan(e)/plateau, one becomes part of an individuated assemblage depending on their relations of movement. In memory of Rosemary.
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  • 1 DAY ARTWORK: APPENDIX (2020) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Site-specific single channel video and photography, with drawing, 2010-11 Deductive logic.
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  • You and Me and Everything Around Us (2020) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Single channel video, 3’, 2008 The probe for the work was the philosophical question what it is to exist in the world: in environments, with others, people, objects, surfaces; and whether the answer can be intuited. The work evokes the temporality of such experiences, which is contingent upon the ever-changing nature of things. Objects have often had multiple owners, and so they carry traces of previous worlds. When encountering objects new to us, we may find ourselves appropriating them through affective attachment to assimilate them into our world. Inspired by the everyday lives of the house's occupants, the work is also about the affective bonds developed during and because of their temporary co-existence. Experimentation with overlaying resonates with the artistic expression of overlapping materials, textures, spatial qualities, and reflected images. Photographs, film footage and sounds were recorded in an improvised way over a one year period in an old house in Walthamstow, East London. The artistic treatment of the subject matter as a time-based media assemblage, which exploits the home style video format, critiques popular staged presentations of everyday life, while exploring the house as an evolving over time system.
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  • Novel (2023) author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni published in: Research Catalogue
    Single channel digital video, with photography and text, 5' 41'', 2007 'Novel' is a half-photography, half-fiction digital video, which was inspired by my temporary dwelling in different cities during the period of a year. For my contribution to this catalogue, I briefly discuss the artistic process and thinking behind the project. In parallel, I reflect upon the possible theoretical links between visuality, narratives, architecture, and urbanism. I suggest that personal associations are definitive and significant in the ways we tend to occupy and subjectively interpret contemporary urban spaces. After a lengthy process of collecting photographs and digital film footage, as well as selecting written material, some of it in the form of quotes, from my journal, I completed the video in 2007. My method was: - I made preparatory sketches that I included in the video (film still 1). - I used a montage technique I saw in one of Peter Greenaway's films: the separate 'window' on the top or bottom sides of the video (film stills 2, 4, 5) that denotes parallel action. - I overlaid photographs (film still 3), a technique that allowed me to create the animating effect of the moving image, without using film footage. In painting, the artist can make layers out of collaged material that might be unconnected or purposefully juxtaposed to the painting's subject. Using the above method, I asked the viewer to watch the video more like a moving series of paintings, rather than as a film. The video, like my other video art work, was exhibited and archived under my artist's pseudonym, Betty Nigianni. Written in 2012, the essay is a separate piece to accompany this exposition. Note: Please disregard comment I posted about a notification that doesn't appear anymore.
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Video Art (https://repository.uel.ac.uk/repository/search?q=Betty+Nigianni)

Select Artistic Training: Freelance Courses & Workshops

  • Visual Communication (2011-2012)
    Degree: Associate, Malmo University, School of Arts and Communication (Sweden), recipient: Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
    Visual communication (distinction), graphic design (distinction), photography & history of photography (pass). Participation in interaction design Medea Research Lab workshop.
  • Fine Art (2008-2011)
    Degree: Associate, Royal School of Drawing (United Kingdom), Morley College (United Kingdom), Slade School of Fine Art (United Kingdom), recipient: Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
    Drawing the human anatomy, Drawing the unexpected in the studio, Portrait drawing. Painting, Casting and molding. Drawing I, Painting I, Painting II, Drawing as a way of thinking, Drawing into painting.
  • Contemporary dance and performance (2007-2011)
    Degree: Associate, Shiobhan Davies Dance (United Kingdom), London Contemporary Dance School (United Kingdom), recipient: Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
    Contemporary dance, dance improvisation, contact improvisation.
  • Performance Matters: Performing Idea (2010-2010)
    Degree: Associate, Whitechapel Gallery (United Kingdom), Toynbee Studios (United Kingdom), recipient: Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
    Conceptual art and performance workshop with visual artist Janine Antoni.

About art and philosophy

comments

Exposition: 1 Day Artwork (04/02/2020) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 12/09/2023 at 18:54

I asked the dancer to improvise freely around a tree of her choice in Kennington Park. I recorded her using a hand held digital camera without editing.


Exposition: Novel (25/02/2012) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 24/04/2023 at 17:08

Please note that a notification about a technical error appears on this exposition as:

"Some fonts could not be loaded: andale mono. Not all elements on the page may look as intended".


Exposition: Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts (01/02/2020) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 19/04/2023 at 10:13

The exposition includes a found photograph, digitalised to resemble a drawing or a video art still.


Exposition: You and Me and Everything Around Us (01/10/2016) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 23/03/2023 at 16:37

The indexical "you" refers to the viewer of the artwork.


Exposition: Can Philosophy Exist? (03/02/2020) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 17/03/2023 at 19:38

"The fact is that most people are not interested in art as an interdisciplinary field. Art has repeatedly opened itself to other disciplines, but most of these other disciplines have not responded by being open to art. Art's task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities, to destroy cliches and prejudices. Most people don't see it that way." Pipilotti Rist in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.


Exposition: Debris (Enlightenment Panel no 2) (31/01/2021) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 07/03/2023 at 16:09

"The British nation proved to be adept not at the Roman art of empire building but at following the Greek model of colonization. Instead of conquering and imposing their own law upon foreign peoples, the English colonists settled on newly won territory in the four corners of the world and remained members of the same British nation." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.165.


Exposition: Glass Cities (01/01/2007) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 26/02/2023 at 18:22

https://www.concertarchives.org/bands/elica


Exposition: Novel (01/01/2007) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 07/12/2022 at 22:00

https://nolafront.org/plugged-art-collective


Exposition: Novel (25/02/2012) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 08/07/2022 at 20:39

Romeo = wanderer

Mercutio > eloquence, wind, sleep and dreams

Angel = messenger


Exposition: Aftermath (E for Installation) (08/08/2021) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 09/12/2021 at 21:23

A PARTIAL HISTORY (excerpt)

by Ariana Reines

 

 

Complaint against us we devolved

 

With such ease and swiftness it seemed

 

To alarm even our enemies. By then

 

Many of us had succumbed to quivering

 

Idiocy while others drew vitality from new

 

Careers as public scolds. Behind these

 

Middle-management professors were at pains

 

To display their faultless views lest they too

 

Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death

 

At the hands of an enraged public

 

Individuals in such pain and torment

 

And such confusion hardly anyone dared

 

Ask more of them than they not shoot

 

And in fact many of us willed them to shoot

 

And some of us were the shooters

 

And shoot we did, and got us square

 

 

 


Exposition: Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts (01/02/2020) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni 12/05/2020 at 11:54

Quote unquote:

 

"First some anthropologists adapted textual methods from literary criticism in order to reformulate culture as text; then some literary critics adapted ethnographic methods in order to reformulate texts as cultures writ small. And these exchanges have accounted for much interdisciplinary work in the recent past. But there are two problems with this theatre of projections and reflections, the first methodological, the second ethical. If both textual and ethnographic turns depended on a single discourse, how truly interdisciplinary can the results be? If cultural studies and new historicism often smuggle in an ethnographic model (when not a sociological one), might it be "the common theoretical ideology that silently inhabits the 'consciousness' of all these sepcialists... oscillating between a vague spiritualism and a technocratic positivism"?"

 

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 183.