#1 Giorgos Gerontides & Rachel Parry

Giorgos Gerontides is a Cypriot artist born in Athens in 1987. His work often combines real and fictional elements, he produces systems of collecting, preserving, and archiving objects in order to outline characters and tell a story. Over the last decade, Gerontides has exhibited widely in Greece and across Europe, including solo exhibitions in Thessaloniki and Madrid, and participation in several European residencies. He currently lives and works in Thessaloniki and Cyprus. https://giorgosgerontides.wixsite.com/work

Rachel Parry, born in Nottingham, UK, is an interdisciplinary artist working in live, performance, and digital arts. As a cultural producer, Parry is the founding director of the performance art platform Little Wolf Parade and a founding member art collective of Guerilla Art Lab which seeks to take over space and create safe(r) spaces for those identifying as neurodivergent and gender/queer. Parry is also a member of Near Now creative technology studios at the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham. Parry has performed widely across the UK and in Europe. Their recent work includes performances for the Venice International Performance Art Week (2020). Currently, they are working on an artist residency at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham and developing new work following receipt of Arts Council England (ACE) funding. https://www.instagram.com/rachelparryartist

#2 Dimitris Ameladiotis & Jon Kipps

Dimitris Ameladiotis’ work, an act of material condensation, encloses an explosion, although it incorporates and transforms the matter persistently and methodically during a long time. His assemblage per-constructions, either as only incidents in their pure presentation or as normally material, organic remnants of the place where they are produced, formulate the confusion of an abstract and yet analytical thought, which is constantly being readjusted to the opposing dipoles of concepts such as affinity and heterogeneity, synthesis and decomposition, construction and degradation, creation and destruction. It is also emotionally being charged from the psychosomatic expense during their process until the final fall of the matter and the exhaustion of various meanings. Eventually, the piece of work manages to exist, ending its natural wear and after it has finished its completion, inside or outside its space.

Dimitris Ameladiotis (b. 1979 Thessaloniki) studied at the School of Fine Arts in Thessaloniki, the Koninkijke Akademy in Gent and the Chelsea College of Art in London. He has exhibited widely in Greece and abroad and is also a member of live art groups including PalAmeA, ΚangarooCourt, and MetaTiLithi. Ameladiotis has participated in events for Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennale, the Benaki Museum, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Goethe Institute among many others; and has works in the collections of the State Museum of Contemporary Art and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. He is currently based in Thessaloniki. www.dimitrisameladiotis.com https://ameladiotis.wordpress.com

Jon Kipps’s practice draws from a wide range of referential starting points which he splices together creating new sculptural hybrid objects. He is interested in the way people choose to model and customise their environments and surrounding commodities, particularly objects associated with asserting or diffusing power, restricting behaviour, and understanding social hierarchies. Examples include hostile architecture design such as homeless spikes and skate stoppers as well as car body modifications and less obviously aggressive forms of urban infrastructure such as neoclassical architecture, bollards and coastal defences.

Kipps attempts to undermine the assertiveness inherent in such design through materiality. For example dyed MDF suggests a far more robust material such as steel, but will actually fade and age quickly over time. Other examples include the use of leftover floor protection plastic as a budget replacement for iridescent car paint, using partially weathered materials such as a sea eroded brick, or repurposing cheap plasterboard into towering, fluted columns. The way an object develops and evolves throughout the making process is hugely important. Kipps pushes this progression by customising the forms using stickers, prints, found objects, bespoke paint jobs and tailor made components intended to imply a level of functionality and also significance.

Jon Kipps (b.1986, Southend) graduated from the MFA Sculpture at Slade School of Art in 2014. Kipps was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2020. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, key exhibitions include Kuroko, Index Festival, Leeds 2019, Fogou (w/ Stuart Bowditch), May Project, London 2018, Arches and Velvet Curtains, Frank Kent and Jonathan Kipps, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2017 and TAWI, Dakar Biennale OFF, Senegal 2016. He is currently based in London. www.jonkipps.co.uk

#3 Alexandros Plomaritis & Simon Raven

Alexandros Plomartis, born in Kastoria and raised on Thassos Island, Greece, spent several years in London, UK where he completed his studies in Contemporary Performance Making. Since his first durational performance at the National Review Of Live Art in Glasgow in 2008, he has been working as a performance artist, festival curator, teacher and professor of live art. Deriving inspiration from the current political situation, Greek history and history of the Empires with a constant emphasis on the personal and the ephemeral; Plomaritis uses performance art as a platform to elaborate on issues such as origins, identity and home. Plomartis has presented a number of his performances in Greece and abroad, and collaborated with important artists including Ulay, Manuel Vason and Bobby Baker. He currently lives and works in Thessaloniki. https://cargocollective.com/alexandrosplomaritis

Simon Raven is a UK based artist, his practice in performance, writing and video-making offers a playful exploration of notions of subjectivity and ‘otherness’, and the importance of non-normative psychological states to creativity. Raven has exhibited and performed widely across the UK, and received the Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary in 2012 undertaking a residency at the Camden Arts Centre, London. Raven is currently based in Newcastle where he is undertaking PhD research (Northumbria University) into radical implications of Disability Art, with a particular interest in the cultural effects of a disease and drug-centred approach to mental health. https://vimeo.com/user4025215

#4 Alicja Dobrucka & Vasilis Alexandrou

Alicja Dobrucka is a photographer based in London. She has exhibited widely and taken part in several residencies across the globe. Her work ‘I like you, I like you a lot’, a personal documentary about family and the experience of death and mourning, was published as a book in 2019 with Kehrer Verlag. Architecture and site are key subjects in Dobruka’s practice, she particularly explores themes of dwelling and inhabiting. Her work includes photographing houses disguised as tents in Palestine, vernacular architecture of Tokyo at night, and a modernist social housing estate, Aranya, in India, where she concentrated on feminine internal spaces where the patriarchal conventions of public life don’t apply. She is interested in taking a subjective look that refuses to be a static composed architectural photography. The gaze is mobile. Feminism and the global politics surrounding women’s issues are key concerns in Dobrucka’s current practice.  www.alicjadobrucka.com

Vasilis Alexandrou is a visual artist, based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He has exhibited widely across Greece and further afield including the public commission “On a burned piano” for the University of Macedonia. In 2017 he represented Greece in Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale “Home”, at the National Gallery of Tirana, Albania. 

Alexandrou’s practice concerns the appropriation of “ready” objects or concepts and their anew meaning-making within new contexts. Industrial objects, often rejected by the modern urban environment, words but also images and sounds function as forms, whose initial meaning is subverted, often in a playful and ironic mood. His comment is articulated in the space created within both the initial and the new meaning that he evokes to the appropriated object, to the appropriated concept.
The conceptual relations that occur within the new framework created are supplied by the presence and the action of the viewer. The work aspires to remain “open” to every interaction, “open” to multiple readings and interpretations. Keeping away from practices that raise the personal experience into an axiom, he searches for the common in the individual, the public in the private, seeking to reconstitute something that could as far as possible approach to collective experience. https://vasilisalexandrou.wixsite.com/vasilis-alexandrou

#5 Benjamin Jones & Ilektra Maipa

Benjamin Jones is a UK based artist, he studied Photography at Bath School of Art and Design. His works are made through various experimental processes and focus on the experience generated by a photographic object. He was a graduate fellow at Spike Island, Bristol, (UK), from 2016-17 and recently Land Stiermark Artist in Residence in Graz, (AT). Recent projects include Nothing, Like Something, Happens Anywhere (Camera Austria, Graz), Shades of Grey (Galerie Artepari, Graz), Glashaus (Schaumbad Freies Atelierhaus Graz), Carousel (Koppel Project Central) and UKYA (Backlit Gallery, Nottingham, UK). www.benjaminjonesstudio.com

Ilektra Maipa is a visual artist based in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Painting in the Department of Visual & Applied Arts at University of Western Macedonia, Florina and she continued her studies in Manchester School of Art, Metropolitan University of Manchester (MA Fine Art, Hons). Maipa works across a range of media including drawings, digital collages, installations, performances for camera and text. In her practice explores the relationship between body and landscape. Through this process she creates a new journey filtered by her stimuli and memory. Her work has been exhibited in Greece and abroad. http://www.ilektramaipa.com/ @ilektra_maipa

View residency in progress: maipa-jones.hotglue.me

#6 Ryan Heath & Stella Ouzounidou

Ryan Heath is an artist and designer based in Nottingham, UK. He is interested in psychogeography and the built environment. Heath works across painting, sculpture, and mixed-reality. He has exhibited in the UK and internationally, receiving commissions and awards from established organisations including BACKLIT Gallery, UK New Artists, and Ignite Futures. Heath is a BACKLIT studio artist and former member of Chaos Magic. https://www.ryan-heath.com

Stella Ouzounidou is a visual artist based in Thessaloniki. She completed her studies in arts at University of Arts London (UAL) and has exhibited widely in the UK and Greece. In her work, she exposes herself to ordinary yet transcendence experiences and adapts to different roles evoking alternative realities. These performative actions are a vehicle for her research and operate at a subtle level highlighting the process of discovery. She investigates personal histories, domesticity, and the private in juxtaposition to collective history, the museum, and publicness. The leftovers of a private heritage in the personal spaces she visits reveal memories, nostalgia, and forgetfulness, themes that interlock in the work delicately. http://stellaouzounidou.blogspot.com/

See residency in progress: https://sorhgu.wixsite.com/sorh