Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data

Taking place in Pedion tou Areos Park setting once more – a space that started out as an army training ground before becoming a recreation ground for the city’s inhabitants – the exhibition speaks about the body not just as the locus of subjectivity, but also as the field of identitive, political, and social conflict, as the core of both pleasure and pain, and ultimately of our very existence.

How do we understand gender within a digital setting? How do we see our own selves in the reflections we ourselves create? What does disability mean, or the extension of our abilities? How do pharmaceutical and medical technologies help mold our intentions? And what sorts of bodies does a machine imagine, and how can it make them?

This year, the exhibition will follow pathways that ask us to discover parts of the park that are not, in the main, known to the general public. They’re inviting exhibition visitors to explore those Pedion tou Areos areas that run alongside Alexandras Avenue – the side where the statue of the goddess Athena stands – and to wander around the digital pavilions and events sited in the clearings and flowerbeds hidden away inside the park. This is a conscious curatorial approach that allows visitors to engage with the exhibition in Pedion tou Areos’ most popular areas before being invited to lose themselves within the park in order to discover startling exhibits, collective activities, and events.

With 25 international pieces, new commissions, more than 250 square meters of LED works, 40 solar batteries collecting the energy of the Attic sun by day to create an artificial moon 70 meters above the ground using laser beams by night, a humanoid handing out medicine in an abandoned pharmacy at the edge of the park, and a huge red planet that reminds us of our overheating Earth and of our inability to formulate a collective political subjectivity, ‘Plásmata’ promises to entertain us but also to give us pause for thought in the Athenian summertime.

Artist involved: Morehshin Allahyari, Refik Anadol, LaTurbo Avedon, The Alternative Limb Project, Frederik Hayman, Ekene Ijeoma, Keiken & Clifford Sage, Kimchi & Chips, Nick Knight (SHOWstudio), Marshmallow Laser Feast, Eva & Franco Mattes, Christian Mio Loclair, NOWNESS, Tony Oursler, Maria Papadimitriou, Eva Papamargariti, Annie Saunders, Sensorium, SpY, SUPERFLEX, Dries Verhoeven, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Saya Woolfalk, & Liam Young