Kappatos Athens Art Residency | Santiago Sierra 2015

Kappatos Athens Art Residency
Exhibition: Santiago Sierra | Athens Stray Dogs Project

Opening: 28 May 2015
Duration: 28 May – 27 June 205
Location: Kappatos Gallery, Athens
Project Coordination: Foteini Vergidou

Kappatos Athens Art Residency is pleased to invite you to the spring cycle of the first official residency programme in Athens under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, supported by a European fund (NSRF: National Strategic Reference Framework 2007 – 2013) and the first solo exhibition of the Spanish Artist-in-Residence Santiago Sierra curated by the programme’s artistic director art theorist Dr. Sozita Goudouna.

Santiago Sierra is one of the most prominent artists internationally often addressing structures of power that operate in our everyday existence. Sierra’s work intervenes into these structures exposing situations of exploitation and marginalisation, famously hiring underprivileged individuals who, in exchange for money, are willing to undertake pointless or unpleasant tasks. Sierra’s work never repeats reality, but challenges it exposing its intrinsic mechanisms.

The essence of the work is often in the tension generated and sustained between the event or its documentation and the spectator, who is exposed to what can be described as the formal and poetic articulation of the voice of all those who are normally marginalised or disenfranchised.

The artist was born in 1966 in Madrid and he is one of the best-known artists of the international artistic scene. He has shown his work in important museums and institutions as MoMA PS1, New York; Reykjavik Art Museum; ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Museo MADRE, Naples; 50° Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London. Recently he has conducted the traveling project “No, Global Tour” which has run around the world, from Italy to Japan, through Europe and America. Last year he has participated in I Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India.

The exhibition will feature older and new works such as part of the series “Pigs Devouring the Hellenic, Italic and Iberian Peninsulas.” These images are the result of a series of performances which begun in 2012 in Hamburg, where the pigs had “devoured” the Hellenic Peninsula; then in Luca, the Italic Peninsula; and finally in Milan, the Iberian Peninsula. Sierra is using a clear metaphor to denounce that the European financial entities are literally eating real territories. Sierra will also create a new piece during his residency in Athens that will take place in the public sphere of the city centre.