State of Concept

State of Concept Athens is a non-profit contemporary art institution founded in 2013 in Athens by art critic and curator iLiana Fokianaki. It is an independent platform that fosters the appreciation for local and international contemporary art and the growth of artistic and curatorial practice. It hosts exhibitions, public programs, events and workshops.

The institution, since its inception, has been looking into formations of power in relation to geopolitics, national identity and cultural and anthropological histories, so as to comprehend, reformulate and eventually deconstruct the ideologies that maintain profound power imbalances and injustices in our world today. Our interest is to bring to the fore artistic and curatorial practices that address and question the current social, economic and political phenomena of Europe and beyond. We do so by looking into these thematics from the location of Greece, existing literally and metaphorically on the borders of West and East. Facing still a financial crisis that has altered its societal fibre, the country remains an urgent location from where cultural practitioners can rethink the Western canon and its constructs.

By looking at the institution as a form of power, we examine institutional critique from within the structures of the institution. Building on the idea of the “state” and its power structures -often inherited by art institutions- in State of Concept we develop our thematic chapters in the form of “ministries”, “departments” and “bureaus”. In an effort to address and redefine the functionality and grammar of institutional building and its white Western, Eurocentric legacies, we run a program that responds to both the precarious conditions of peripheral localities and the global sociopolitical realities of contemporaneity, from a feminist and intersectional perspective.

We have been collaborating with institutions abroad, with exhibitions and other parts of our program traveling to Amsterdam, Ljubljana, New York, Paris, Rotterdam, among other places.