IBA Stage: 8th Thessaloniki Biennale – Being as Communion

Alexandra Paperno, Abolished Constellations (2016), installation view at Yeni Jami, photo Konstantinos Tsakalides

IBA Stage: 8th Thessaloniki Biennale
July 13th, 2023 (Wednesday)
2pm (Thessaloniki/GMT+3)

We are happy to present, as our next IBA Stage invited event, the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale. Founded in 2007 and since organized by MOMUS, the State museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, the biennial was established to strengthen the role played by the northern greek city within the national and international network of contemporary art events. It traditionally takes place within the network of museums and galleries administered by MOMUS as well as other relevant cultural spaces in Thessaloniki.

Its most recent edition, which took place between December 2022 and May 2023 with a wide array of parallel events and public programs centered around the main exhibition titled Being as Communion, curated by Maria-Thalia Carras, which took place between March 5th and May 21st.

The central exhibition of the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale, titled Being as Communion, is a reflection on co-existence. Co-existence with those around us and co-existence with the more-than-human, with the critters, forests, with the gardens of our earth, but also with the shadows of our past, with our dead and with those to come.

The exhibition constitutes an attempt to shine a soft light through the current fog of uncertainty and barrage of dark predictions. It asks whether we can imagine new forms of being, new ways of living, but with the understanding that we can only truly do so in collaboration.

The exhibition traces past artistic practices that envision ways of working with the earth, create radical pedagogical tools, pioneer ecological activism and broaden the horizon of how we can live together. Contemporary works foretell multiple forms of communion: with the fragile past of our host city, with forests, with the soil, with animals, and with one another. Understanding of indeterminacy, the twenty-eight artists and artist collectives taking part in the exhibition probe, question, and offer their responses. These contain ruptures, seek realignment of injustice and offer tentative understanding, and nurturing and care. The artists imagine multiple forms of organizing, of living and of loving.

Being as Communion testifies to the challenges of imagining possible futures for a city so rooted in the past. Thessaloniki, with its 3000-year-old history, Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine, Ottoman, contemporary, with all its highlights and failures, allows for a more expansive understanding of time. How do we talk about living together, of our relationship with futurity, in environments and cities whose past ‘togethers’ have all but vanished?’

Being as Communion finds affinities with the ghosts of the city, seeking to live with them and narrate their stories anew. It calls for a rethinking of the co-existence between living and dead, and with the human-animal-forest-plant world around us. Being as Communion asks us to take stock of how the living world around us makes us feel, and how we in turn make it feel. So that in the time we have, we can cherish and celebrate the joy of mutual living.

Being as Communion unfolds in nine different host sites that function as small exhibition hubs throughout the city of Thessaloniki. Each site links with a particular period of the city’s history.