As part of the CCC Master in Visual Arts seminar series, we are pleased to invite you to ILiana Fokianaki's lecture ‘Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us? Instituting in turbulent times’, to be held on Tuesday 10 December 2024 on the HEAD campus.

iLiana Fokianaki will discuss the trajectory of State of Concept Athens the institution she founded and was running for a decade in Athens *2013-2024. She will use it as an example to address and question concepts such as artistic autonomy and by extension institutional autonomy, and enquire the impact (or lack thereof) of arts and cultural institutions in fostering understanding, healing, and social change during tumultuous times. She will also give an insight on her current workings as the new director of Kunsthalle Bern.

iLiana Fokianaki
iLiana Fokianaki is a curator, researcher and theorist based in Bern. Since April 2024 she is the director of Kunsthalle Bern, where she is developing her forthcoming research on permaculture, ecological thought and theory as tools for instituting and exhibition-making. Since 2020, through the research platform "The Bureau of Care" she examines the concept of care and how its politics and ethics relate to environmental and social justice. Founder and Director of State of Concept Athens *2013-2024, she changed the landscape of the Athenian art scene, bringing to the Greek capital exhibitions by artists such as Laure Prouvost, Sanja Iveković, Forensic Architecture, Kader Attia, Kapwani Kiwanga and others. She has curated exhibitions for international institutions such as Reina Sofia Museo in Madrid, e-flux New York, KADIST Foundation, Kunstinstituut Melly Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana and has curated public projects for institutions such as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York. Fokianaki regularly lectures at academies, independent spaces, museums and institutions around the world while organising discussions and talks with thinkers such as Silvia Federici, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Jodi Dean, Yanis Varoufakis and others. In 2022-2023, she was the artistic director of Survival Kit 13, a large-scale contemporary art festival organized by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. She regularly publishes at e-flux journal and has contributed to various books and publications. A series of books of hers will be published by Archive
Books in 2024.

The CCC Public Seminar 2024-25
Each year, the CCC Public Seminar offers a cross-disciplinary platform to expand on a particular theme. In 2024/25, the CCC Public Seminar series Public Matters is addressing the emancipatory dimension of public disclosure. The program focuses on research by the means of art while taking a closer look at the methods, discourses and modes of dissemination of research in the context of contemporary art and curatorial practices.