https://kosmasnikolaou.com Kosmas Nikolaou Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:58:00 +0000 https://kosmasnikolaou.com en https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Home-desktop Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:58:00 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Home-desktop selected works Jour Fixe Choir and Manoeuvre Sinesiu Kirinis 24Notes for a Lost Film Mental Radio 19.735 days Family Tales Dream Bar Dream Bar is about to open soon. Stay Tuned. Work Index Bio https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Dream-Bar Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:45:10 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Dream-Bar Dream Bar is about to open soon, Stay tuned.︎ back https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Jour-fixe Wed, 07 Jun 2023 11:21:41 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Jour-fixe Jour fixe 07.09 - 14.10. 2018 Instagram Takeover “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.“ She is buying the flowers herself as an act of self observation during the preparations of a social event. The woman in a leading role is taking some time to observe her inner self, some time to daydream and admire. She is conscious about her role in society and she knows that her party is going to be a slow succes. Buying flowers is a performative act. Flowers are temporary. People admire their dying beauty. Flowers are still life. In Latin and in my mother tongue (Greek), the term for still life is Dead Nature (Natura Morta in Latin, Νεκρή Φύση in Greek). The way we celebrate manifests our mentality, it represents our approach to life, class and ideology. Social events are an act of self affirmation, creating and following protocols. Protocols create habits. Habits create rituals. For Open Space’s Kitchen Takeover, I looked at the memorabilia of my great grandmother, her household, her books and the spoken stories around her. I tried to understand what they represent, which stories they are bringing with them, and where I stand. I follow the style of another era and recreate it today. I do that by constructing a setting, creating a scenography in the living room of my apartment. I try to allow myself to experiment with objects, representation of class, hysteria for perfection and social image, and the useless rituals of self-affirmation and family roles. The main inspiration for the project is the most prominent Greek cookbook Tselementes. Nikos Tselementes published this influential cookbook, a guide to cooking and patisserie in 1920, and it is the first complete cookbook in Greek. Influenced by European and specially French cuisine, he was the moderniser of Greek cuisine, as thanks to him, people in the country learned Bechamel and Bouillabaisse. His name Tselementes is a synonym today for ‘cookbook’ in Greek. The book is full of recipes, instructions and ideas for a modern lifestyle, not just a recipe book, but a bible of modernisation and the middle class way of living. Behind the recipes and food styling photos, the writer proposes a pioneering way of setting our tables. How to eat, celebrate, and maintain a contemporary lifestyle.    ︎ link   ︎ back https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Choir-and-Manoeuvre Tue, 09 May 2023 18:28:58 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Choir-and-Manoeuvre Choir and Manoeuvre a guided tour to imaginary gardens 07.09 - 14.10. 2018 Villa Bologna, The Sunken Pond Choir and Manoeuvre is a site-specific intervention in the gardens of Villa Bologna, inspired by the archaeology and the history of Malta. Choir and Manoeuvre is a meeting with the genius loci. The starting point for the intervention is the question of the Maltese Temples. The artist is looking at the mega structures and their relation with the landscape; their orientation and their enigmatic alignments with the celestial bodies. Other references are the Mediterranean flora and fauna, and the colonial past of the island. The spectacular gardens of Villa Bologna are the setting for a storytelling encounter. Sounds, voices and histories amplify our relationship with the location and they offer visitors the opportunity to be part of an imaginary scenario and discover the secret life of the garden. The story will be told on-site through a guided tour to temporary, imaginary structures.    ︎ back https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Mental-Radio Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:43:48 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/Mental-Radio Mental Radio 15.02-03.03 DOC! Paris Kosmas Nikolaou with the body of work, that is presented in the exhibiton Mental Radio studies and Interprets  a trace of the long and absurd history of parapsychology in Greece. In doing so, he has to tackle the history of various institutes, associations and clubs, where researchers sharing an interest for paranormal and psychic phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis...) tried, for the first time, to explain them using formal scientific approaches. Neither spiritualists nor psychotherapists, these scientists tried to prove the existence of invisible phenomena while distancing themselves from religion, magic, and other such beliefs and interpretations. Inspired in part by personal motives (his great-grandfather, a founding member of the Greek Society for Psychical Research (SPR) took part in the movement). Kosmas Nikolaou attempts to investigate the non-fulfilment of these experiments and the collapse of the Greek SPR in the 1960s. The exhibition explores the inability of the movement to realize its avant-garde potential, and exposes its failure to reconcile the primitive and intangible concepts it addresses with its practical aspirations to social and institutional recognition and, in fact, its inclination towards status quo. Through archive materials and the echo of the exhibition space at the DOC, Kosmas Nikolaou is rewriting the story of these interactions. Text by Eva Vaslamatzi ︎ back https://kosmasnikolaou.com/index Fri, 11 Mar 2022 16:05:08 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/index Work IndexA detailed list of works will be available soon. ︎ back https://kosmasnikolaou.com/profile Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:42:55 +0000 Kosmas Nikolaou https://kosmasnikolaou.com/profile Kosmas NikolaouKosmas Nikolaou (1984, Athens) lives and works in Athens He studied Fine Arts and Architecture at Ioannina (Northwestern Greece), Volos (Central Greece) and Milan(North Italy). His work revolves around the functions of architecture, spatial qualities, memory, narration and non-verbal communication. He is often concerned with modernity, scattered documentation, records, personal narratives, oral archaeology, gossip politics, and the moral dimensions of sound and voice. The compound of these different elements leads to new correlations and a new positioning in the space between reality and stage design.  By blending personal nvestigation with broader cultural phenomena, the practice aims to create works that resonate both locally and internationally. Being based in Athens, he draws inspiration from the city as a historical and contemporary crossroad. He has been the recipient of Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) ARTWORKS Artists Fellowship in 2018 and  has taken part in several artist residencies in Greece, Germany, Italy, Poland, Malta, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and in the program Ideas City of New Museum, NY. He has participated in group exhibitions in Greece, the Balkans, Europe and the Middle East, in museums and institutions. In 2023, he was commissioned to present a lecture performance in Athens by Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative of Columbia University, New York. Past solo presentations include Rebecca Camhi Art Gallery in Athens, the Brauchbarkeit in Cologne, Villa Bologna in Malta and SNPHI, Columbia University. Since 2012 he has been a founding member and co-director of the independent artist-run space 3 137 in Athens together with Paky Vlassopoulou and Chrysanthi Koumianaki. email: kosmas.nikolaou@hotmail.com    instagram: @onthemezzanine   ︎ back