ILiana Fokianaki
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iLiana Fokianaki | |
|---|---|
 Fokianaki at Dutch Art Institute | |
| Born | Thessaloniki, Greece |
| Alma mater | City University London |
iLiana Fokianaki is the director of Kunsthalle Bern. She is a Greek curator, writer, theorist, educator[1] and former journalist based in Bern, and occasionally Athens and Rotterdam.
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.
Fokianaki's exhibitions explore the relation between art, formations of power and how they metamorphose under the influence of geopolitics, national identity and cultural and anthropological histories.[2][3]
She is the founding director of contemporary art institution State of Concept in Athens.[4][5][6]
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: Extra Citizen (2017)[7] and Extra States: Nations in Liquidation (2018).[8]
In May 2022, Fokianaki was announced as the artistic director of the festival Survival Kit,[9] organised by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, in Riga.
In November 2023, Fokianaki was announced as the new director of Kunsthalle Bern[10]
Exhibitions
Since 2013 she has showcased at State of Concept, solo exhibitions of artists such as Laure Prouvost,[11] the research agency Forensic Architecture,[12] Croatian artist Sanja Iveković,[13][14] Dutch collective Metahaven,[15] the film collective Rojava Film Commune.[16] The exhibition of the Rojava Film Commune Fokianaki curated, titled "Forms of Freedom", was featured in Art Forum magazine in 2020,[17] and has travelled to Galerija Nova, in Zagreb,[18] the exhibition space of e-flux publications in New York [19] and Moderna Galerija / Museum of Modern Art of Slovenia, in Ljubljana.[20]
She has curated State (in) Concepts at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris in 2017.[21] and the group exhibition at La Colonie (Art Space) "The Trials of Justice".[22][23] She has curated the solo exhibition of artist Kapwani Kiwanga at the Formerly Known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam,[24][25] which coincided with Kiwanga's award for the Marcel Duchamp Prize of the Centre Pompidou.[26][27][28]
In 2023, she was the co-curator of Machinations,[29] a large-scale research and exhibition project at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Her project "The Bureau of Care" received the Solidarity Grant of the European Cultural Foundation.[30]