Jillian McDonald + Kate Teale /HOLE

07.29–08.21/22

Opening reception: July 29, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

In 2020, Jillian McDonald and Kate Teale, friends since graduate school and sometimes collaborators, discovered that they were both drawing holes - intensely. The coincidence seemed related to the combined pressures of Covid isolation, climate crises, and desperate politics, yet the holes are also personal and psychological, and oddly compatible, despite being so entirely different. The concept of the hole seems timely on multiple fronts, and perfectly suited to Undercurrent’s gallery space, into which we descend underground. 

This two-person exhibition features site-specific and grouped wall drawings, with a video projected on the wall. 

Teale started meditating during lockdown in 2020, and visualized a series of hard-edged apertures that she thought of as “escape hatches”. Made initially as small sketches of minimalistic dark openings, she scaled them up as large wall drawings that interact with the architecture and lure the viewer into seductive but sinister places. McDonald’s dark and crumbly root-filled holes in earth and ice are sometimes harmless fissures found in nature, but at other times they are portents of ecological disaster. Removed from their context, they float on white paper like otherworldly passages or traps, burrows or tunnels, portals or entryways.

Teale’s drawing process is highly physical, with the works made in graphite or charcoal dust either directly onto the wall, or on Tyvek which is later pasted flush with the wall or floor. They create illusions of interruptions in the architecture, revealing a hole stretching from the floor through the wall, and uneasy watery spaces into which we might fall or jump. McDonald’s realistically rendered hole drawings are hung in groups. Her root drawings, depicted flatly to emphasize the soil around them as a hole and negative space, hang loosely near the ceiling. A video combines hole drawings with Google’s AR-3D animated animals (described online as the perfect pandemic activity); the animals appear tentative at the edge of, swimming in, or trapped in digital versions of the drawn holes. 

GALLERY MAP —> click on the image to navigate

Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn and Troy, NY. Most recent exhibitions were held at The Art Gallery of Regina in Canada - in collaboration with Linda Duvall, FiveMyles in Brooklyn, and Philip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art in Denver, Colorado. She participated in The Arctic Circle Residency in Norway, the LMCC Workspace in New York, and Glenfiddich International Residency in Scotland. She has received a NYFA fellowship, media arts grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, and research support from Pace University, where she teaches.

Kate Teale is a dual UK/US artist, also living in Brooklyn. She has received a NYFA Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist’s Grant, and is currently a recipient of a Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy studio around the corner from Undercurrent. Most recent exhibitions include two-person shows at John Molloy Gallery, and Studio10, Bushwick. She teaches at Parsons School of Design. 

Image I: Jillian McDonald, an excerpt from Animals On The Verge video, 2021

Image II: Jillian McDonald, Deep Breath, 2020. 30 x 22 inches. Coloured pencil on paper

Image III: Kate Teale, Plunge, 2020. 30 x 46 inches. Graphite on wall

Image IV: Gallery Map designed by Laura Zaveckaite

SIMONE KEARNEY /Criers

06.24–07.17/22

Opening reception: June 24, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

During the opening, the musician Jacob Bills and the

artist will give a brief performance of text and sound ♫♪♪

First it is pressed down, it is pressed into being. Then something emanates like a substance from this pressure. It is more like a substance than a pressure—a sap that oozes out of a collision—a sap that is a line, a very thin, but also still, line. And the line is a stillness. A stillness that abuts what can’t be harnessed, what turns into a secret closed in on itself, like water inside of something, sloshing around. The water sloshes inside the inside of the line, giving the line a center, a middle, so the line becomes a ball, an orb, a vessel. One can hear it inside the thinness of the line, barely perceptible, like water folded into itself, pressing and pressing inwards.

Criers is a sequence of mostly unglazed ceramic sculptures depicting crying heads. Sometimes the clay of the sculptures is unfired, ready to dissolve back into unshaped materiality; sometimes it is fired, where expression has become petrified; sometimes a face or tear is tangible with stone; sometimes transformed into a glazed shard. Clay, as the primary material for these sculptures, emphasizes crying as radically elemental and acutely physical. In crying, the body is laying claim to the event. Sometimes, the clay serves as a means to express and represent an emotion, where a discernible face emerges from the material. At other times, the expression is subsumed by the very material used to convey it. And so here we see a wrestle between material and language, between sense and raw fact, between what we can decipher as something namable (a tear, a face, etc.), and what is otherwise simply churned, thumbed stuff. Crying itself also often marks a moment of such points of confluence and rupture, where the interior, and all the intangible, invisible, immaterial “stuff” of emotion, breaks through onto the surface of the body. Crying can be the manifestation of surplus: just as an emotion seems at times to surpasses the confines of the subjectivity that houses it, the body too exceeds itself with tears.

Criers tracks the ways in which emotions that give way to crying might renew themselves repeatedly (many heads for many moments), while also showing how certain emotions blow the individual open. Emotion surges beyond the perimeters of self. One crier is always many criers. And so here, there is not one individual crier evoking an individual crier. This is a chorus, perhaps even one might call them an army, of criers. Not limited in their expression of a singular emotion – they can contain multitudes. Moreover, they transcend any one individual experience, including that of the artist. Particularly in this time of global pandemic, war, and ecological catastrophe, they gather to mourn or howl or sing as company. In a world so often characterized by capitalist demands of efficiency and good performance, emotions such as grief, surprise, or even wonder can be disruptive. These criers thus stall that which is otherwise run of the mill. They are as rocks that block the cogs in the wheel. They repel the smooth. They are lumps in the throat. They are coughed out. They are not well made. They rise up, under us, like an undercurrent of raw substance. Muddying. Roiling. Disturbing, even. They are an upset of ground we thought was there, unmaking and remaking that ground. The “o” of their mouths is the o of the navel, of the mouth, the heart, the eye, the lung, the void, the hole, the aperture, the rupture, the sphere, the whole, the nothing, the full, the empty, the stone, the sun, the moon, the wound, the world, the breath, the whoosh.

To further examine the relationship between language, emotion, and materiality, a wall of painted language serves as counterpoint to and for the crying sculptures. Words can be kinds of tears. While these ink-composed writings insist on language’s own materiality, they also gesture at how words might proliferate around a wound, around the gape of this or that sensation or feeling. The text is entitled The Loquela, in reference to a passage in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: “This word…designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound…” Any wound that the sculptures make manifest here, however, is not reducible to the lover’s wound, though it absorbs it. The words flock around the ontological wound of being, around the excess of experience.

-Simone Kearney

/Criers navigation map HERE

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Simone Kearney is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions include Annex Gallery at Lighthouse Works (NY) and Artshack Gallery (NYC). Select group exhibitions include Olympia Gallery (NYC), Olga Korper Gallery (Toronto, CA), Klaus Von Nichtssagend (NYC), Boston College (MA), La MaMa (NYC), NURTUREart (NYC), and Anytime Dept (OH). Her debut collection of poetry, DAYS (Belladonna*), was published in 2021. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons School for Design.

Image I: Crier-XXV, 2022. 18 x 12 x 11 inches. Unglazed and glazed ceramic.

Image II: Crier XXII, 2022. 11 x 10 x 12 inches. Unglazed ceramics and stone

Image III: The Loquela, 2022. 117 texts, framed ink on paper, 9 x 12 inches

DOMINIK HALMER /Shields

05.27–06.19/22

Opening reception: May 27, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

Undercurrent is pleased to present Dominik Halmer's solo exhibition Shields. The Berlin based artist is known for his image-objects, expanding painting into physical space.

At Undercurrent he is showing nine new shaped-canvas works. The recurring question at the center of Dominik Halmer‘s practice is: what makes us see the world, or respectively the pictorial space, as a unity rather than an assemblage of individual, scattered elements? What does the mind need to construct an impression of coherent reality?

Combining all sorts of painting techniques – gestural painting, spraying, creating hand marks, using stencils – sometimes enhanced by everyday objects (like fringes in the case of KULP-shield or MUN-shield), Halmer creates closed entities. Those entities consist of loose gestures, defined geometric shapes and visual analogies that suggest a coherence and kinship between the individual works through repetition: the recurring hand marks which remind us of the first painterly gestures of cavemen, the glitter circles, the thin streaks connecting the different image parts – adding up to a wide range of formal diversity. Despite their diversity, the pictorial elements on the respective Shield works develop their own pictorial logic and ultimately define the form the canvases are shaped.

The exhibition title Shields pays reference to the Dutch word for painting “schilderen“. In German the word “Schild“ means both a shield (to protect oneself) as well as a sign as in traffic sign. Halmer plays with this etymology and creates his own pictorial signs by inventing very specific shapes and references. Some of the works (like ZUM-shield or EX-shield) evoke associations of open books spilling out their narratives, while the fringe works make us think of domestic functional objects like carpets or the head-profile work (KULP-shield) becomes its own character once we connect the respective elements to its facial expression.

Following the different traces, Halmer‘s paintings show us how pictures are being built – in fact: how our notion of reality and continuum is always constructed by our perceptive filters.

/ / / /

Dominik Halmer (*1978 in Munich, Germany) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf Germany with Albert Oehlen. Halmer's work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among them are major institutional venues such as the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (Exhibition Space of the Federal Republic of Germany), the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum of Arts Wiesbaden, Marta Herford, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art Newark. Next to numerous private collections, his work is part of permanent public collections, such as the Collection for Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundeskunstsammlung), the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Museum Wiesbaden and CCA Andratx. Since 2022 he holds a professorship for abstract painting at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Bonn, Germany.

/Shields navigation map HERE

/Image I: KULP-shield, 2022. 78 x 50 cm / 30.7 x 19.7 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter on canvas on wood, fringes

/Image II: MUN-shield, 2022. 88 x 54,5 cm / 34.6 x 21. 4 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter, iron powder on canvas on wood, fringes

/Image III: EX-shield, 2022. 70,5 x 59 cm / 27.75 x 23.2 inches. Acrylic, oil, glitter, iron powder on canvas on wood

/Image IV: Shields navigation map

/Images V–VI: Installation shots at Undercurrent, 2022

MATT KENYON /Cloud Machine Performance +

Artist Talk + Tour

May 21, 2.30–5.00 pm + May 22, 1.30–2.30 pm

Saturday, May 21, 2.30-5.00 pm Kenyon will be performing Cloud as part of DUMBO Drop. 

Following the performance of Cloud, Kenyon will give a short tour of the exhibition Wolf at the Door and answer questions from gallery visitors. 

Cloud: In Cloud, house-shaped forms are produced out of helium foam. They shrink and grow in response to real time housing and climate data, then rise to form a “neighborhood” floating for miles in the sky. Cloud demonstrates the cyclic nature of real estate speculation that prospers even in the wake of the most recent housing bubble. The houses, and the home ownership aspirations that are inflated with them, rise only to eventually fall.  

In the continual reconstitution of the house-cloud’s form, Cloud also acknowledges the connection between the home and its neighborhood, one that persists, and is always in flux.

/ / / / /

Sunday, May 22, 1.30-2.30 pm Kenyon will be joined by FICTILIS (​​Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau) curators of the Museum of Capitalism for a discussion of the exhibition and its themes. Their book Museum of Capitalism: Expanded Second Edition will also be available for sale.

Following the discussion, Kenyon will lead a community letter writing activity using one of the artworks from the exhibition Alternate Rule in order to demand Action to End Gun Violence. 

Alternative Rule: Though it might look like the paper you use to learn penmanship, in Alternative Rule, the lines on the paper are made up of micro-printed names and dates of children who have been victims of gun violence in America. People of all ages are invited to take a sheet of paper and write a letter to members of government to advocate for gun control in America. Alternative Rule is a memorial and a protest tool, created for the activists of the next generation, many of whom are already organizing in their own schools and on the national level.

/IMAGES: Animated GIF from Matt’s Cloud performance at Undercurrent, DUMBO. Captured by Jolie O’Brien.

MATT KENYON /Wolf at the Door

04.22–05.22/22

Gallery hours: Thursday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

WARNING: Strobe lighting and any other intense lighting will be used during this exhibition. It will not be safe for those with epilepsy and other conditions with sensitivity to light.

Undercurrent is pleased to present Matt Kenyon's solo exhibition Wolf at the Door. This show is the artist's continuation of SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) art practice. SWAMP focuses on critical themes addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military-media-industrial complexes, and general meditations on the liminal area between life and artificial life. Since 1999, SWAMP has been making work in this vein using a wide range of media, including custom software, electronics, mechanical devices, and sometimes working with living organisms.

His style is elegant and subtle with the twists of wonder, surprise, and unexpected paradox. Each of Kenyon's work has built in individual content and visual metaphor / narrative similar to poetry, short story, or film. The idea and content are where the work begins and determines formal solutions for these machines of thoughts. These are exquisite objects, not only created for contemplative meditation, they are commemorative monuments holding the quality required to inspire action to change social structure.

Wolf at the Door consists of six kinetic, or mentally shifting objects / structures / constructs addressing specific global issues of climate change, housing crisis, mass shootings, health and mental health. They complement each other, by creating cohesion of vastly different subjects with an overarching sense of tension, trauma, and premonition of things to come. Wolf at the Door asks what euphemisms like a debt waterfall, an untapped resource, or a key investment would look like if they reflected the human stories they have unleashed.

/Printable press release PDF HERE

For gallery navigation MAP CLICK HERE or click the image below ↓

CLOUD /2020

Cart, helium, foam, custom electronics

Cloud demonstrates the cyclic nature of real estate speculation that prospers even in the water of the 2008 housing crash. The cloud houses, and the aspirations they represent, rise to form a subdivision on the ceiling of the gallery. Over time the foam breaks down and the houses eventually collapse. House clouds are released based on housing value trends from the area to return these complex systems back to a human scale. Cloud can also be wheeled into a neighborhood as a form of community protest or an SOS signal.

/Video: Cloud performance at Undercurrent, Dumbo, 2022.

TIDE /2022

Champagne glass pyramid, casts of houses,

custom electronics

By contrasting the opulent image of a champagne glass pyramid with the crisis of climate change and rising flood risk, Tide creates a visual metaphor for the fragility hidden within the current housing market. This crisis is already part of the lexicon—when someone owes more than the house is worth, people say the mortgage is "underwater". Over the course of the show, the slow drip will gradually fill the pyramid flooding the interconnected glasses and making the houses invisible. Through the fluctuating visibility of these houses, Tide calls attention to the way climate change continues to create uncertainty in neighborhoods, long after the news cycle has moved on from each individual extreme weather event.

/Image: Tide installation shot, 2022. Courtesy of the artist

ALTERNATIVE RULE /2020

Micro-printed alternate-rule paper

Though it might look like the paper you use to learn penmanship, in Alternative Rule, the lines on the paper are made up of micro-printed names and dates of children who have been victims of gun violence since the Columbine High School shooting. People of all ages are invited to take a sheet of paper and write a letter to members of the government to advocate for gun control in America. Alternative Rule is a memorial and a protest tool created for the activists of the next generation, many of whom are already organizing in their own schools on the national level.

/Image: A video still from Alternative Rule, 2020. Video length: 2:17

LOCKSET /2020

Custom cut keys

When houses change hands, so do keys. In Lockset, the keys are also portraits of housing activists, people who have been evicted and have gone public to protest, and homeowners in neighborhoods with high rates of foreclosure. These keys allow a portrait of the previous owner to covertly remain inside the lock of their home, even if the property has changed hands. These portraits also allow locks to be rekeyed to match the key portrait, acknowledging the ownership history of a house.

/Image: Lockset, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

SUPERMAJOR /2013

Vintage oil cans,  custom electronics

A rock of vintage oil cans sits innocuously on the gallery floor. A punctured can, located somewhere mid-stack, has Sprung a leak. The oil flows out in a steady trickle, cascading onto the pedestal below; a golden-brown pool forms at its base. Upon closer inspection, however, the oil is not originating from the can. Instead, its stream is reversed. Drop-by-drop the oil flows upwards, defying gravity. At times, droplets even appear to hover in mid-air. Returning to its source, the upward ascent of oil continues uninterrupted as if neither the can's reserves nor the puddle can ether be depleted.

/Image: Supermajor installation shot, 2013. Courtesy of the artist

TAP /2020

Reclaimed kitchen sink, audio interviews,

custom electronics

The water is on fire. The image of a contemporary kitchen sink spouting forth has become synonymous with fracking. Across America, residents have experienced a slew of chronic health problems that can be traced back to contamination of their air, water wells, or surface water resulting from nearby oil and gas fracking. In Tap, the flame itself functions as a plasma speaker–voicing a shifting collection of media coverage and individual stories from people whose lives have been affected by fracking. The flow of the frame and personal narratives seeks to fuse the complexities of iconic imagery, exploitation, and domestic space.

/Image: Video still from Tap, 2020. Video length: 05:07

/Top Promo: Matt Kenyon installingTide at Undercurrent, 2022

MEGAN STROECH /Fully Furnished

03.25–04.17/22

Opening: March 25, Friday, 6–9 pm

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 1–7 pm

Undercurrent is pleased to present Fully Furnished, a solo show of large wall pieces and works on paper by Megan Stroech. Stroech’s skillful integration of printmaking on found fabrics and felts contrasted against hand-painted passages on canvas explore the crosshairs of craft and luxury, realness and artificiality, and our relationship to domestic space. 

The meaning of “home” has evolved with the pandemic, taking on both a versatility and irony; abject of privacy, new negotiations of space and safety, the public and private compounded. This physical verisimilitude impacts our daily movements, altering our experiences and therefore our future memories of home. In Stroech’s work, mundane elements that unconsciously influence our perception of our space collide: the direction of fiber in a carpet, the reflection in a polished surface, or the coffee ring stain lassoing the grain of wood on a table. From an illogical convergence of profile and aerial views, these fragments are sandwiched to implode larger systems of patriarchy, consumerism, and class.

Stroech injects feminine stereotypes into her work, empowering their function. Petals, scallops, and curves dominate Well Traveled and Woven, both works on paper, offsetting the plaid and checkered structures below. In Hat Trick, the decorative element of a bow is magnified to frame the work and transmute adornment to structure and utility through use of scale. Literally and metaphorically tying everything together, Hat Trick teeters on a purple, plastic mylar pedestal/column/cake-plate, incorporating the gallery floor in order to question space, representation, and craft clichés. 

Uniquely straddling mixed media, Stroech defies the hierarchy of high-brow fine art materials versus low-brow art-and-craft supplies. Throughout much of the 20th century and up through today, modern art history has turned “craft” into a pejorative term associated with femininity, polarizing gender and practice, and creating a misogynistic dichotomy which Stroech consciously engages and amplifies. Split Decision, for instance, integrates hand-silkscreened elements on felt, store bought gingham, discarded fabrics from fashion students, and painting. It’s soft and malleable fringe and pleat shapes coalesce to bandage broken railings and fragmented ladders, while works on paper such as Accordion and Fat Column weave lattices and checkers to disrupt grid systems and form alternate pathways. 

Stroech works with a knowledge of hierarchal and patriarchal paradigms, pushing the boundaries of her materials and methods to resist them. Her intentional integration of mis-registration is an ironic nod to deskilling printmaking— especially alongside her use of controlled brush strokes— while combining hand-printed and mass-produced patterns push authenticity, luxury, and accessibility into dialogue. The results are charmingly performative, a presentation that reconstitutes a fully-furnished experience where we have everything we could ever need within the home to precarious excess.

Daina Mattis

/Downloadable press release PDF

/Gallery navigation MAP HERE

/Promo Image I: Flower Mouth, 2018, 5 x 6 feet, fabric, felt, vinyl, collage, latex paint

/Image II: Split Decision, 2022, 59 x 47 inches, collage, screen print and acrylic on fabric.

/Image III: Hat Trick, 2021 Screen print, acrylic, vinyl, felt and found fabric 48 x 60 inches.

/Image IV: Navigation map designed by Laura Zaveckaite

WASTELAND

01.18–01.23/22

Visiting hours: January 18–23, 1–7 pm

Greek artist’s Michalis Argyrou interactive ice installation and Rafika Chawishe’s long durational performance explores identity themes of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

On the closing date of “Wasteland,” January 23, from 11 am-7 pm, Greek actress and performance artist Rafika Chawishe will present an 8-hour long-durational performance.

PERFORMANCE: Chawishe replaces the figure trapped in the ice with a live, naked human body, searching for meaning through multifold transformations and exploring the ever-changing nature of politics, society, and identity inspired by figures in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. While digging through the soil and icy remains, Chawishe unmasks false stereotypes and patterns humans use as a cloak to conceal fears conform to societal norms. Chawishe enacts the roles people portray in a lifetime through colorful costumes and makeup, only to discover the only one that matters is the true self. Preoccupied with ideas about transformation and ridicule, she tests the audience’s acceptance of the incongruous and unfamiliar to the limit.

Undercurrent and Greece in USA present Wasteland, a performance-based interactive installation by visual artist Michalis Argyrou and performance artist Rafika Chawishe.

The art installation and participatory event begins 2022 with a powerful piece to launch Greece in USA's new program Greece NOW, focusing on Greek artists who experiment with the politics of "nowness" and reflect upon the ubiquity and social ramifications of “nowness” in the digital age.

Wasteland echoes themes from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land on the 100th anniversary of one of the most iconic poems of the 20th century. The poem examines the decline of outdated certainties that held society together and what occurs when they break. There is no turning back, only transformation of those broken cultural fragments into something new.

The audience is invited to explore the latent meanings of Eliot’s writings by experiencing the transitions and transformative life of a human figure encapsulated in a 3.5-ton ice installation created by Michalis Argyrou. The viewers are invited to participate by lighting a candle and placing it inside the holes of the sculpture. Then, as it melts, the ice figure is transformed, and the artistic vision of a collective reawakening is revealed.

As the new identity of the melted figure emerges, actress and performance artist Rafika Chawishe enacts notions of transition for eight hours in an intensive, long-form durational performance that symbolizes the human trapped inside the ice capsule. The piece alludes to Eliot's out-of-court settlement against the Canadian professor John Peter who argued that the “Waste Land” is an elegy dedicated to his beloved deceased Jean Verdenal.

The participatory installation Wasteland challenges notions of what is being wasted, calls attention to the temporal inertia and urges for renewal and regeneration. The figure’s entrapment in the interactive installation by Michalis Argyrou alludes to our collective “wastelands” and the mundane.

My friend, blood shaking in my heart/ The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/ Which an age of prudence can never retreat/ By this and this only we have existed/ A secret which is not to be found in our obituaries/ Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider/ Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor/ In our empty rooms--Excerpt from What the Thunder Said from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Interactive Installation: Michalis Argyrou
Long-durational Performance: Rafika Chawishe
Curation: Dr. Sozita Goudouna for GREECE in USA
Coordination: Vangelis Zacharatos

For all press-related inquiries please contact publicist Cindy Sibilsky
Photo credit: Lingfei Ren
Download Press Release HERE

Wasteland is the inaugural project of the new program Greece NOW by the non-profit organization Greece in USA. Greece NOW showcases Greek artists who explore themes of "nowness" in their oeuvre, how it relates to social ramifications in the digital age, and how “nowness” relates to “newness” of aesthetic forms, modes of production, discourse, performance, technology, ecology, economy, and politics. The selected artists of Greece NOW utilize their artistic practice to envision new social actions, forms of community and imagine new worlds to overcome global concerns.

Michalis Argyrou (born 1968) is a visual artist, creative director and set designer. He received a scholarship to study at the National School of Fine Arts in Athens, graduating with honors. He holds degrees from the Open Photography Studio, Focus and the Royal College of Art in London. Michalis is the founder of the event production company "Sambo Events" and the Architectural office "Create New Ideas Architects." He has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has curated and designed performances, exhibitions and cultural events, and design projects. From 2006-2008 he was the General Director of the international art fair of Athens, "Art Athina." In 2009 Michalis founded the Art and Culture Center, Beton 7, a venue for new ideas and trends in contemporary art and culture. In 2011 he founded Beton7artradio, "We Speak Art," a radio station covering art and culture issues, highlighting recent creation nationally and internationally. Michalis has also been Greece's director of the Art Film Festival, Hellas Filmbox Berlin. The Art Film Festival was created by a collective of activists in 2015, aiming to break the media bashing against Greece and introduce the Greek visual arts and cinema scene to the German audience. He is also the co-director of the Platforms Project International Independent Art Exhibition that presented platforms and artists’ collectives from over 26 countries with more than 2,400 artists from the five continents from 2013-2017 and opened a productive dialogue on culture and art. . He has also been the deputy director of Athens Biennale from 2016 to 2019. And recently, in 2020 he is the co-founder of the Metaphor Athens Creative Hub Art Space in Athens.

Rafika Chawishe is an award-winning actress, performer, and theater maker whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism. She uses various formats to express herself, ranging from theater, multimedia and spoken text to scenic reading and performance (performing knowledge). Rafika combines academic and lyrical narrative, and as a dynamic children’s rights activist, she has worked extensively with unaccompanied refugee minors at the first reception center in Lesvos, Greece. In 2014 she created together with Antonis Volanakis a daydreaming platform for refugee, local and international artists, titled THE BLIND PLATFORM. Her works have been presented in Athens, Oslo, Berlin, New York, Mexico City and Puerto Rico. She has collaborated with prominent theatres and organizations, including the National Theatre of Oslo, the International Ibsen Festival, the Herbtsalon Festival (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin), the National Theatre of Greece, the Greek National Opera, the Greek Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been awarded the Ibsen scholarship by the Ibsen Awards and has received a Grant from Neon Foundation. She is a member of the Lincoln Theatre Director’s Lab 2019 and the Young Curator’s Academy of the Maxim Gorki Theatre.

This project is made possible under the auspices and financial support of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, with support from GREECE in USA, Undercurrent, Metaphor Athens, Lab for Arts and Daydreams.