"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 have 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 and other works have been exhibited and archived internationally.
In my art, I dare to look at the bleak side of things, initially through a phenomenal approach, later with a more clinical and analytic method. In my art, I intend to affect and mobilise."
Zoe Panagiota Nigianni was born in Athens, Greece (1974), the eldest of three daughters. Her parents were originally from the Peloponnese, a Greek mountainous area surrounded by the Mediterranean sea; her grandparents from her father's side fought in the Greek resistance to the German occupation and the civil war afterwards. She received academic training in the fine arts at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), with artists Vlassis Caniaris and Sotiris Sorogkas; and studied architectural and visual art theory with Peter Salter as Head of Architecture at UEL. More recently, she studied philosophy at the University of Athens and the University of Amsterdam, graduating in 2019.
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".
The exposition includes a found photograph, digitalised to resemble a drawing or a video art still.
The indexical "you" refers to the viewer of the artwork.
"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.
"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.
https://www.concertarchives.org/bands/elica
https://nolafront.org/plugged-art-collective
Romeo = wanderer
Mercutio > eloquence, wind, sleep and dreams
Angel = messenger
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
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.
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.