ILiana Fokianaki
# ILiana Fokianaki

iLiana Fokianaki is a Greek curator, writer, theorist, educator and former journalist based in Athens and Rotterdam.

## Biography

Fokianaki holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from Oxford Brookes University in Oxford and a M.A. in Arts Criticism and Management from City University London.

She is the founder and artistic director of contemporary art institution State of Concept in Athens,.

In May 2022, Fokianaki was announced as the artistic director of the 13th edition of the annual festival Survival Kit, organised by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, in Riga. The festival entitled ‘The Little Bird Must Be Caught’, "is an exhibition with many questions, embracing them in a cascade of visually, sonically and vocally very strong works, each proposing a different mode of resistance to racially, ecologically and extractively oppressive governances".

## Exhibitions

Since 2013 she has showcased at State of Concept, solo exhibitions of artists such as Laure Prouvost, the research agency Forensic Architecture, Croatian artist Sanja Iveković, Dutch collective Metahaven, the film collective Rojava Film Commune. The exhibition of the Rojava Film Commune Fokianaki curated, titled "Forms of Freedom", was featured in Art Forum magazine in 2020, and has travelled to Galerija Nova, in Zagreb, the exhibition space of e-flux publications in New York and Moderna Galerija / Museum of Modern Art of Slovenia, in Ljubljana.

A retrospective of Fokianaki's curatorial work for State of Concept, titled State (in) Concepts was exhibited at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris in 2017. Fokianaki was invited by artist Kader Attia to curate a group exhibition inspired by the program of State of Concept, at La Colonie (Art Space) in May 2018, titled "The Trials of Justice". She has curated the solo exhibition of artist Kapwani Kiwanga at the Formerly Known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, which coincided with Kiwanga's award for the Marcel Duchamp Prize of the Centre Pompidou.

Fokianaki's work explores the relation between art, formations of power and how they metamorphose under the influence of geopolitics, national identity and cultural and anthropological histories. Her recent project "The Bureau of Care" received the Solidarity Grant of the European Cultural Foundation.

Together with curator Antonia Alampi, she is the co-founder of Future Climates, a platform that aims to propose viable futures for small-scale organizations of contemporary art and culture. Future Climates was part of the "Substance 100", a new, annual list, that outlines a diverse array of artists, activists, collectives, movements and organizations making a substantial change in the world, launched by on-line museum and platform "Collecteurs".

Fokianaki was part of the artistic team (curator and programmer) at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp from 2017–2019, where she curated two large-scale group exhibitions: the exhibitions Extra Citizen (2017) and Extra States: Nations in Liquidation (2018). She has lectured in various institutions on issues that explore how institutional and curatorial practices respond to the current economic and socio-political shifts in the West

## Teaching

Fokianaki is a lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) of the ArtEZ University of Arts in the Netherlands, and was a guest lecturer at HISK in Ghent, Belgium and a resident curator at the NTU Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore. She has guest lectured at the Athens School of Fine Arts, at Columbia University, and The Willem de Kooning Academy, the art school of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences among others.

She writes for various international art journals and publications, discussing issues ranging from art, politics, to ethics such as a joint opinion piece on art, economy and documenta's arrival in Athens, written with former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis and an opinion piece around the discussion of looted artefacts and specifically the Parthenon Marbles for frieze (magazine).

