© Panos Sklavenitis. All Rights Reserved.

How to be seen (and heard) 2

In the context of The Symptom Projects 08 curated by Elpida Karaba and Glykeria Stathopoulou.

1. Action, In situ installation, Delphi, Greece, Sept. 2017
2. Action, Performed by Thodoris kakitsos and Evriviades Goro, Amfissa, Greece, Okt. 2017
3. Installation, Amfissa, Greece, Okt. 2017


'Our exhibition never meant to represent the athenian art scene. This is the responsibility of others. If people feel they are not being adequately represented here, then they should think about why they are not being heard.'
Excerpt from an interview with the artistic director of documenta 14
(Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 14th of May 2017).

Panos Sklavenitis is interested in the issue of the artist’s self-promotion, the terms, the means and the institutions that establish cultural status and value, and the various mechanisms and strategies for the gaining of fame. In the work How to be seen (and heard) #2 the artist initiates a unilateral dialogue/answer to the artistic director of documenta 14, the international contemporary art exhibition which was split between Athens and Kassel in the spring of 2017. Circumventing the established routes and parameters of the institutional consolidation of value, Sklavenitis arbitrarily attempts to construct his own posthumous fame and memorialisation. Manipulating the truth but failing to subsequently cover his tracks he simultaneously undermines his efforts. His pompous but overall weak self-advertising which consists of a series of events of an a priori relatively pointless self-promotion, comment among other things, on the greek cultural policy and the state's inability to promote contemporary artistic production as well as on his own ambivalence to enter into dialogue with the complicated relational criteria of evaluation and endorsement set forth by the globalised field of art.

Special thanks to Kostas Christopoulos, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou and Stelios Apostolou.

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