Talks

Talks

Alkisti Efthymiou

How to Take Care of your Voice: Exhaustion and other Habitual Affects in Working within large-scale Art Institutions

Friday, 16 March 2018, 6pm
OnCurating Project Space

https://vimeo.com/263828641

Focusing on the affective reality of work in art institutions, I will share my experience and thoughts on my long-running involvement with the Athens Biennale and my most recent employment in documenta 14. I will attempt to express the inherent tensions between institutionalized feelings and work methods and feminist working practices, exploring what sort of voice I felt was muted, as a woman, while contributing to the operation of either a precarious (almost) institution or a depersonified (mega) institution. Exhaustion, and how to potentially counteract it, features at the centre of my talk both in terms of institutional frameworks that tend to produce and/or maintain it, and with regard to feminism and the constant struggle to keep on fighting for a change that never seems to come.

Alkisti Efthymiou is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary researcher based in Athens. Informed by critical theory, queer/feminism and performance studies, she is interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, art and affective politics. She has worked with several cultural institutions in Greece and abroad, such as documenta 14, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and the Athens Biennale, in capacities ranging from Education Producer to Curatorial Assistant to Program Coordinator. She is just about to start her PhD candidature at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, with a thesis on love in/as crisis, for which she is clearly not prepared.