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Massimiliano Mollona appointed Programme Director of the Athens Biennale 2015–2017.

Athens Biennale 2015–2017

OMONOIA (Concord)

Massimiliano Mollona has been appointed Programme Director of the next edition of the Athens Biennale which is symbolically titled OMONOIA(Concord) that will launch in October 2015 and –contrary to the usual biennial model– run through 2017.

The Athens Biennale 2015–2017, reimagining the institution of biennales, revises its identity and extends its duration. Bridging the past with the present and the future, the fifth edition of the Biennale (2015) merges with the sixth (2017). Massimiliano Mollona will lead the Athens Biennale for the next two years, running a daring and experimental programme which highlights the current views on contemporary art and unfolds in three strands of debate and research intervention: the emergence of alternative economies, the performative in the political and the establishment of institutions that redefine existing structures.

Programme Director’s statement

Greece is at a historical juncture. In spite of wide popular opposition against debt, welfare cuts and privatisations, the country was forced into a new regime of austerity by the European Union. But popular mobilisation for a just and human economy remains strong. At issue is not only Greece’s future but the very future of democracy in Europe.

The Athens Biennale aspires to be a stage for the experiments of grassroots democracy and economic solidarity that are spreading throughout Greece and in Europe’s South. More than art in the service of society, it is art as an experimental space for new modes of thinking and performing life.

How can art and cultural institutions contribute to this moment of radical change? How can they rethink their traditional institutional structures and build grassroots, discursive, dispersed and processual forms of cultural production?”

Programme Director’s short bio

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. He is senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, at Goldsmiths College, London. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics and anthropology and his work focuses on the relationship between art and political economy. He conducted extensive fieldwork in Italy, the UK, Brazil and Norway, looking at the relationship between economic development and political activism through participatory and experimental film practices in favelas and poor neighborhoods. His practice is situated at the intersection of pedagogy, art and activism. He is a member of the collective freethought and editor of Focaal Anthropology and Visual Anthropology (AVA) Blog.

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