Diatomic Exhibition: The Severed Finger

BIOGRAPHY OF VASILIS ALEXANDROU

Vassilis Alexandrou was born in 1990 in Thessaloniki. In 2014 he graduated with excellent from the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Athens. In 2019 she completed the Master “Audiovisual Arts in the Digital Age” with a focus on Interactive Installations and New Media in Art at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University. He has a permanent artistic intervention in a public space, “On the occasion of the burnt piano of the University of Macedonia” (2015), six solo exhibitions “, Digital Seduction” Lola Nikolaou Gallery (2020) “, Short Memory” French Institute of Thessaloniki (2020) “Machines of Bliss” old fortress, Corfu (2019), “learning by force” French Institute of Thessaloniki (2017), “object’s origin, rejected” Alimos Cultural Centre, Athens (2017) and “Native Language” Space 18 Gallery, Thessaloniki (2014), as well as over 70 group exhibitions. In 2017 he represented Greece at the Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale “Home”, National Gallery of Tirana, Albania and in 2019 at the 24th Biennial of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. He has given seminars and workshops at University Institutions. Since March 2020, he has been a PhD candidate at Ionian University, in the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, on the subject of political art in the digital age. In 2020 he was awarded by ARTWORKS and became a Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artists Support Programme.

BIOGRAPHY OF DEMETRIS PALANTZAS

Demetris Palantzas was born in Larissa in 1992. In 2011 he entered the School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with Professor G. He graduated from the University of Thessaloniki in 2004 with the title of Professor G. Tsakiris. In 2017 he graduated from the Department of Visual and Applied Arts with Honours. He lives in Larissa and works as a teacher / visual artist in education since 2019. In the artist’s work, we can identify a variety of ideological and symbolic readings. The central core of the work is the reuse of the object, where it always has identity, decay, substance and materiality. The artist has created an intangible alphabet where idea and concept take precedence for the reading of the work, focusing on the identity of the object he chooses, “discarded objects”, where history, dysfunction and time become the primary structure of his art. To his credit, he has a permanent work at the French Institute from the exhibition “Unknown Object, objet in-connu” (2018), a solo exhibition “Object’s origin, rejected”, Alimos Cultural Center, Athens (2018) and has participated in a large number of exhibitions, including 2012- “INSPIRE”, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2013; “INSPIRE”, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2013; “Re Art”, Goethe Institute, Thessaloniki, 2014; ” Art Athina-REM-BRAND name project”, Athens, 2015; “Ode to the Sea”, Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, Athens; “27th International Art Exhibition”, Istanbul, 2016: – “Logos – Noise” University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, 2016- “Ode to the Sea”, Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Odessa, Ukraine, 2016- “Vanishing point”, Alatza Imaret, Thessaloniki, 2017- “ex libris AUTH”, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

BIOGRAPHY OF YANNIS METROS

Yannis Mitrou was born and lives in Thessaloniki. He is a visual-performance artist, director and theorist of contemporary art and psychoanalysis. He has taught for the last four years at the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Visual and Applied Arts. He founded the International Laboratory for Research in the Performing Arts-Alma Kalma, which he still directs and directs his research.

Ioannis Mitrou’s rich theoretical experience and his multiple cross-research collaborations testify to a spirit of interdisciplinarity that constantly seeks every possible interaction between the fields of Sciences, Social Sciences and Art.

The directions of his postgraduate degree were in the philosophies of Art, Language and Politics. His work on aesthetics dealt with the postmodern logic of the artwork in late capitalism and the question of its autonomy (based on the philosophical approaches of Fredric Jameson and Alain Badiou). His final master’s thesis entitled “The end of chiropractic and the imaginary freedom of modern man”, deals with the figurative quality of man according to Leroi-Gourhan as well as the “language of forms” and more specifically the phenomenon of “living art”.

The study of the distancing of bodily experience and direct experience as components of scientific technical mastery produces an imaginary in man that gives a new meaning to the notion of his freedom. Ioannis Mitrou’s research concerns a particularly different approach to the unconscious, the phenomenological one, which is why he studies the phenomenon of art, language and politics and their interrelationship.