With the ambiguous title “everything must change. RIS9,” the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is organized by MOMUS-Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki and curated by independent curator Nadja Argyropoulou. It engages with a common(place), yet (re)current, urgent, and plural demand that, with its punchiness, may feel like a revolutionary cry and echo like an empty slogan, ring like rage bait and work like a charm; there is something in it for everyone, and it does not belong to anyone.
Biennale 9 engages with the incommensurability between our available vocabularies and that which we are asked to describe. It enters by flipping questions, experimenting with an anarchy of answers, refusing the proper and the proposed in outright censorship but also beyond its obvious mandates. Biennale 9 employs a mode of close narration and is marked by what it proposes. This 9th edition is cast as a para-biennale that acknowledges paradoxes of enclosure and escape, takes pleasure in errant paths and improvisation, and sides with tactics of joyful militancy and the intimate labor of attending to the unrecognized.
Key Dates
Full duration: October 31,2025 — July 5, 2026
Main exhibition: May 23 — July 5, 2026
Press & professionals preview: May 22, 2026
Public opening events: May 23 & 24, 2026
The 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, “everything must change. Radical Intelligence. Saloniki 9,” unfolds across key venues in Thessaloniki, including Pavilions 2 and 3 at the Thessaloniki International Fair – HELEXPO, the MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art on Egnatia Avenue, and Kalochori Lagoon within the Axios Delta National Park.
Curator: Nadja Argyropoulou
Visual Identity: studio precarity
Architectural Design: Y2K Architects
Curator’s Assistant: Evelyn Zempou
Lighting Design: Edeko Lighting Studio
Audiovisual Consultant: Makis Faros
MOMUS Production Team: Angeliki Charistou, Silia Fasianou, Eftychia Petridou
Organization and Implementation: MOMUS-Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki
Co-organizer: GROWTH FUND – TIF HELEXPO
Partners: Municipality of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki Film Festival
Creative Partners: Heinrich Böll Foundation – Thessaloniki Office, Another Football, Mamagea
The Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Arts is co-funded by the European Union (NSRF – “Central Macedonia” Operational Programme).
9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art “everything must change. RIS9”
Press, Public Relations & Communications Department, MOMUS
Chrysa Zarkali
press@momus.gr
+30 2310 566716 (ext. 118)
+30 6945 114343
“everything must change” is a phrase that is now, more than ever, wielded by social revolutionaries and technofeudalists alike, by persecuted activists and fascist-adjacent demagogues, by rival social classes and diametrically opposed collective forms of expression, by countercultures and institutional propaganda. It is being used to erase the gap between the home and the streets, the click and the walk, to highjack ambivalence and twist solidarity.
As noted by Biennale 9 curator Nadja Argyropoulou: “Through its shared utterances, visual frequencies, think pieces, terrible mixtures and abundance of f(r)ictions and glitches; through its peripheral place and minor scale in the artworld; through its precarious position in the structural container and its economies, Biennale 9 employs a mode of close narration and is marked by what it proposes. It engages with the incommensurability between our available vocabularies and that which we are asked to describe; with forms of play, with fugitive tactics of dismantling, with collective magic, the feedback loop of call and response, or what Arthur Jafa has described as the ‘quantum dimension of emancipation.’
This ninth edition is cast as a para-biennale that acknowledges paradoxes of enclosure and escape, takes pleasure in errant paths and improvisation, and sides with tactics of joyful militancy and the intimate labor of attending to the unrecognized. If indeed, ‘in the face of new tyrannies encroaching, we should use art not to “ask questions” but to give audacious answers that nobody asked for’ (as per Luce deLire), Βiennale 9 enters by flipping questions, experimenting with an anarchy of answers, refusing the proper and the proposed in outright censorship but also beyond its obvious mandates. It takes a bold stance on the power of imagination, suggests a kind of intelligence that is radical (the shorthand ‘RI’), and sides with a non-fascist AI (as per Dan McQuillan) that does not reproduce forms of dominance but supports autonomy and freedom based on collective activity and suppressed knowledges.
If new solidarities and vocabularies, a ‘social otherwise,’ need to be crafted in order to change life shaped by genocidal capitalism, and the tools cannot be those of the master’s own, then Biennale 9 wishes to experiment with the unfolding, metamorphic possibility of shared refusal. It chooses to be inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’ and take recourse to her research on waywardness as ‘the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. . . the social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. . . a short entry on the possible.’
It is made by sensorial manifestations of aesthetic sociality, works that imagine into existence ways to refuse, riot and explore un-settling paths and divergent stories, ways to speak truth to power and spell difference that does not devolve into separability; works that suggest when to rant and how to whisper, when to laugh and how to love. If ‘the revolution is like housework — you have to do it every day’ (G. C. Spivak) — then ‘everything must change. RIS9’ wishes to be part of this every day and, while exploring it, to attempt a bewildering, vibrant proposition.”
The shorthand “S9” evokes a popular, older, eastern in origin, name of Thessaloniki (Saloniki), thereby inserting in the Biennale’s utterance a double movement, towards and away from the city, an attempt to foster a sense of togetherness — however temporarily — with Thessaloniki’s obscured, neglected spaces, agents, ghosts, and symbols.
After a prelude realized during October–November 2025 around the revolutionary potential of science fiction (“Plot twist: science fiction as change”), and through a host of interim cooperations (with the Thessaloniki Film & Documentary Festivals, as well as with the Greek Film Archives) and off-site manifestations, the Biennale is realizing its main exhibition between 23 May and 5 July 2026.
The venues that will host it co-create a crucial space of (d)rift:
- Buildings within the Thessaloniki International Fair – HELEXPO complex that highlight the site’s ties to modern Greece’s foundational socio-economic narratives and political ceremonies since the 1960s, as well as its current significance as the battleground of competing plans around the function and future of public space. Situated there and hosting part of the Biennale is also the MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art, home to the Alexander Iolas collection.
- The unique Kalochori Lagoon on Thessaloniki’s western outskirts, a landscape shaped by immigrant communities, industrial growth, and the gradual emergence of a wetland as a result of land subsidence, groundwater depletion, and the mixing of river and sea waters. Now part of the Axios Delta National Park, the lagoon is rich in rare biodiversity, hosts more-than-human activity, and participates in contradictory narratives of “symbiotic living” as the city inexorably expands to this side too.
* υποσημείωση η [iposimíosi] Ο33 : επεξηγηματική ή
συμπληρωματική σημείωση, συνήθ. στο κάτω μέρος της
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σε ~.
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What Remains
Τ.J. Demos
“Impunity won’t last forever.” As Francesca Albanese utters these words, liberal democracy implodes under its unbearable contradictions. Rogue superpower states, war criminals are bombing sovereign countries. The rules-based order sheds its mask, the reactionary international takes command. Human and civil rights flicker like unstable signals against the burning horizon of Gaza, now Iran, now Lebanon. “Greater Israel”—Eretz Israel—scorches its expanding borders, as the US cannibalizes its own social wealth to sustain military supremacy and domestic repression, consolidating hemispheric dominance and securing its strategic interests across the Middle East.
Add to this the rise of AI and technofascist reason—automation without accountability, tools beyond justice serving gangster power. The present hardens into a cruel global conjuncture. For critical aesthetic practice, the stakes are (still) no longer theoretical, but existential. What remains for the left when institutions hollow from within? What tactics endure when legality is weaponized, when language is conscripted, when institutions collaborate with genocide? How can historical memory—of antifascist struggle, of decolonial insurgency, of revolutionary futures—inform interventions in a field where the political and the aesthetic are inseparable and yet under siege from newly aligned oppressive forces?
Each phase of late fascism—this evolving form of modernity’s colonial racial capitalism—both represses and inadvertently summons its antagonists. Domination generates and responds to refusal. Crackdown produces counter-forms of life. From the traces of past liberation movements, from anti-colonial uprisings, from radical avant-gardes and militant image cultures, from earlier fronts of political aesthetics and technological resistance, newly configured practices gather force. Speculative fabulations of emancipatory futurity take shape in the ruins.
This is no survey, but a cartography of tensions: between genocidal politics and the stubborn insistence on life; between institutional repression and organized refusal; between defutured worlds and hope as disciplined practice; between cruel illiberalism and antiracist ecosocialism, all fighting to shift the tide. These are sites of contradiction where the aesthetic becomes situational, tactical—a terrain for struggle. In the convergence of art and politics, the question is not whether resistance is possible, but how it will now be composed, at what cost, to whom.
Genocide-Ecocide Nexus
For more than two years now, the sky has not stopped falling. What many call the first live-streamed genocide flashes across our screens—catastrophe as feed, commodified spectacle. The “Palestine laboratory” refines itself in real time, and expands outwards to Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran. Prototype weapons rehearse their futures on bodies, racialized and made killable: AI assassination factory, drone swarms whining like mechanized locusts, quadcopters hovering and firing into hospital windows, bombs fold entire neighborhoods into dust. Women, children, elders, disabled people—dissolved into data, evaporated in thermal heat signatures, deleted targets. A classroom of children massacred every day for two years. Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft make a killing. But struggle continues, even love in a genocide.
This is not rupture but recursion, diffusion. The latest in a settler-colonial score written over centuries: eliminate Palestinian presence, establish regional hegemony. Not only bodies but the grammar of living is targeted. Israel targets greenhouses. Irrigation lines bleed into sand. Olive trees—older than nations—uprooted. Universities flattened. Mosques gutted. Libraries, archives turned to ash. Livestock blown up. A war against livability, a methodical unmaking of habitat, until existence and its environmental envelope collapse together into a poisoned sacrifice zone spread across a mass grave: ecocide in/as genocide.
And still, the war of visibility intensifies. Screens split the world, but on massively unequal terms. Official narratives arrive pre-packaged, self-exonerating, farcical. Journalists in Gaza film through smoke with trembling hands, documenting atrocity knowing that the camera may be their last witness. The occupier speaks first, blames first, absolves in advance. The dead are reclassified as statistics; dehumanized as “terrorists” by terrorist states. Words become weapons, automated murder becomes policy.
Justice tears, crumbles into tragic theater. International law collapses, with Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, the DRC, Yemen, Venezuela, now Iran. What governs is not morality but throughput: port access and maritime lanes, energy grids, data flows, AI security networks, supply chain coordination. Cold efficiency devoid of ethics. The entity known as Israel is less nation-state than node in the global infrastructure, extended in ICE and Frontex. Late fascism operates in transnational logistics, in the smooth circulation of goods, data, profits, absent human rights or judicial recourse. Venture capital portfolios dazzle speculative renderings of the Gaza Riviera built atop ruins, on bodies pulverized into rubble: disaster capitalism at amoral skyscraping heights.
The expansion of this fascist-authoritarian project—propelling mass deportations, globalizing carceral and surveillance infrastructure, militarizing domestic policing—is terrifying not only for its brutality, but for the material alliances it forges. AI technologies diffuse through these systems, binding the world’s most powerful capitalists to an architecture of repression that is profitable, scalable, and increasingly difficult to undo.
The art world has not been “broken” by this (though certainly it continues to be drained of funding); the genocide may have revealed deep complicity, but it also sharpens the ongoing urgency for critical anti-systemic practice by many others. Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat, Al Haq: criminological analysis of visual, spatial, sonic evidence is essential to grasping the architecture of genocide, its logics, economies, technologies. To reveal how domination materializes through cartography, infrastructure, predictive futures—investigative and aesthetic methodologies render destruction and circuits of capital critically visible.
Aestheticide
The killing is not only of bodies. Memory, its fragile architecture of meaning, lies in ruins. Israel’s war machine silences journalists mid-sentence. Artists buried with their unfinished canvases. Professors, teachers, students erased, their universities reduced to rubble. Libraries collapse into ash. Museums implode. Archaeological strata—past civilizations layered in earth—shattered. Mosques and churches torn open to the sky.
This is more than scholasticide. More than politicide. More than epistemicide. Lexicon fractures, relationality falters, vision fails. Even as vocabulary necessarily expands: aestheticide—the systematic destruction of collective sense-ability, of a people’s capacity to see, to narrate, to imagine. In this profound severance, when genocide collapses the symbolic order, when language fails before the unprocessable, words are nonetheless forged.
Still, confronting genocide, there are no adequate images or forms. Violence ravages representation. Those who survive speak of losing speech itself. In the void, disfigured silence screams. Bodies tremble. Perception dulls, numbed into sheer instinct, reduced to the labor of staying alive. Sociability lies in ruins. Israel’s engineered famine in Gaza produces a brutal calculus of survival, isolating the individual from communal solidarity. Transgenerational knowledge—once braided through story, gesture, ritual, meals—frays. Collective resistance starves.
Aestheticide radiates outward too. Speech is policed far beyond Gaza. Militarized forces descend on dissent. Protesters everywhere are beaten, fired, canceled. Anti-genocide refusal is criminalized. Antisemitism is weaponized as bludgeon, flattening thought, foreclosing debate. The destruction of sense-ability extends wherever solidarity might form. There is no genocide without the denial of genocide. International law hollows into theater. Justice becomes an empty sign. Even as rubble smolders, financial speculation begins—the destruction of destruction, disaster capital paving over mass graves.
Yet within and against the ruins, language mutates, refuses its refusal. Against all odds, there is a relentless reinvention of expression—to testify, to remember against erasure, to survive extinction. Members of the Gaza-based Eltiqa collective, such as Raed Issa, turn to debris itself—coffee grounds, charcoal, scraps—to sketch the outlines of life reduced to lines, as Sohail Salem attests. “Houseless” compositions—paradoxical constructs of spaciocide—by Mohammed Joha become mobile places to live amid total devastation. Films like The Voice of Hind Rajab hold us before the unbearable: a five-year-old girl’s terrified voice trapped in a car under tank fire, the echo of her last calls refusing silence, before her murderous silencing. The Palinale Film Festival convenes screens and conversations in defiance of German Berlinale censorship, answering state erasure with collective gathering, struggle, speech.
The forces of destruction (IDF, ICE, CIA, etc.) do not have the final word. Even in extremis, life strains toward form. Memory smolders. Images reassemble. Speech, though broken, returns. And in that return—in the stubborn insistence on relation, naming, sharing (think of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, the seed sharing of Vivien Sansour, the collective sociability of Dar Jacir)—there is a promise that the attempt to annihilate sense will fail. Life struggles on, Palestine will be free.
Preemptive Futurity
Anticipatory obedience spreads like a quiet contagion. Institutional autonomy buckles before it; cultural freedom thins; universities and museums fold inward, as international liberalism aligns with power, opting for fascism to forestall socialism. MAGA-aligned billionaires, donor dynasties, financial and political elites need not always command—institutions learn to anticipate the blow. Administrations summon riot police against their own students. Graduate workers are dragged from picket lines. Exhibitions vanish overnight. Critical programs are suspended, their leadership dismissed; curators, editors fired for speaking what should not be spoken. Artforum, the Whitney “Independent” Study Program, zombified documenta. Aestheticide seeps into the walls: repression becomes policy; fear becomes governance. A genocidal state is platformed at the Venice Biennale, even as a critical South African artist—Gabrielle Goliath—is cut out.
And yet repression hardens resolve. Institutional critique sharpens into a practice of refusal. Decolonize This Place. Strike MoMA. FeesMustFall. MIT Coalition for Palestine. BDS. we refuse_d at M HKA. Movements name the economy of genocide, follow its money trails through endowments, boardrooms, trustees, debt markets. They scrutinize privatized education as a factory for the production of mass debt, private museums as laundering devices for extractive capital, cultural philanthropy as reputational armor for plunder. They trace hypocrisy in high definition: institutions proclaiming democracy and human rights while underwriting devastation; vulture hedge funds circling sovereign debt from Puerto Rico to Greece. Life in late fascism is a profound contradiction.
Across this darkened terrain, other futures are limned—fragile, insurgent, speculative. Practices emerge that refuse to inhabit the script of colonial racial capitalism, its seeming inevitability. Let us create our own emergency, as Benjamin wrote long ago. They reject the prewritten futurity of disaster capitalism—the Gaza land grab dressed as redevelopment, the Halkidiki mine carved into forested mountain, the Moria and CECOT camps generalized as investment carcerality, the Venezuelan resources stolen from beneath a sovereign nation, the Greenland minerals earmarked for tech industry extraction. Strike MoMA pries institutions loose from their financial entanglements; Angela Melitopoulos, Angela Anderson, Maurizio Lazzarato, generate a cinematic exposure of extractive biopolitics. Experiments in people’s tribunals and counter-assemblies—Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal’s, and Zuleikha Chaudhari’s—stage accountability, rehearse postliberal justice, where present courts will not. Artists and political collectives—from the Otolith Group, Chimurenga, Black Quantum Futurism, The Red Nation—imagine Black and Indigenous decolonial horizons, emancipatory speculations that exceed the grid of empire.
The struggle is uneven. Power is immense. But within the tightening fist of anticipatory obedience, something refuses to close. In the liberated spaces, in the defunded ruins of classrooms, in the surveilled streets, critical energies persist—naming complicity, mapping plunder, rehearsing liberation. Under late fascism’s shadow, the imagination does not entirely submit.
Empire of AI
Meanwhile, these movements are shadowbanned by platform capitalism. In the empire of AI, dissent is down-graded, de-monetized, rendered spectral. Algorithmic automation reduces resistance to noise, commercializes outrage. Techno-economic systems hum along, extracting value, demolishing human labor, scorching environments for server farms, coding dark epistemologies: a managed confusion reigns, as conspiracy flourishes, verification falters, political life destabilizes into static. Erasure becomes infrastructural.
The conjuncture makes the study of emergent technologies urgent, material, planetary. Critical investigators probe the political economies embedded in networks and computation, tracing their political and material implications. Echoing calls for non-fascist AI, they search for counter-forensics—systems that do not predict and police, but expose and verify; that strengthen calls for as a renewed aesthetic commons shaped by open-source verification capable of puncturing conspiracy, corruption, and state-sanctioned lies.
Critique appears insufficient when digital production remains concentrated on imperial platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok—whose infrastructures quietly monetize speech, labor, affect. To confront authoritarian power requires more than reform; it demands collectivization. Worker control. Jonas Staal and Jan Fermon’s Collectivize Facebook as template for the people’s fight for the means of info-sharing. Anti-imperial logics inscribed into code and infrastructure. The fight is over the architecture of visibility itself: whether digital systems will continue to metabolize life into profit, silence, and death, or whether collective survival will prevail in these shifting sites of class war.
Contradictum
Still, contradiction reigns, as Fred Moten insists: the conflicted terrain for critical thinking, at a time when world-defining lexicon—justice, law, ethics, rights—meets its unworking upon utterance. There is no purity: our spaces, platforms, devices are riven with capital. This means mapping the differential positionalities of institutions and actors: not to drown in guilt or nihilism, the defeating affects of complicity, but to expose the challenges and clarify the path forward.
Contradiction is neither merely tension, nor total cancellation—it is the engine of transformation (as Strike MoMA argues). The friction between emerging technologies and existing social relations catalyzes material struggles: democratic control within compromised social media, open verification of corrupt information, affordability within cycles of extraction and debt, survival ecologies amidst capitalist ruins.
Collective study, including art practice, scrutinizes real material conditions—economic structures, resources, institutions, in which it is immersed—rather than subscribing to abstract ideals. The breakdown of Western liberal democratic modernity is a stark case: its lofty principles of freedom, democracy, equality, and legality collide with entrenched corruption, struggles to be free, built from histories of state violence met with continual resistance. These contradictions persist within cultural institutions, demanding analysis, refusal, imaginative reinvention.
Resolve may not occur through endless debate, but through concrete, practical struggle. Theory informs, but organizing acts, and praxis, transforms. Contradiction becomes both the lens and the lever, driving the creation of new practices of justice, power, and relationality in situated conditions—within and beyond the terms of colonial racial capitalism.
All of which raises the pressing question: How do we move from conceptual, speculative, and affective engagements in cultural forms—independent aesthetic practices, pedagogies of the oppressed, unlearnings of oppression, critical speculation—toward the transformation of tangible, material conditions? How do we avoid the trap of cruel optimism, while also recognizing the incommensurability between the vast scale of the planetary polycrisis and the relatively small reach of artistic interventions, which alone cannot reshape structural realities, even if they can make a sizeable difference in small steps?
How can we rehearse new methodologies of practice, creative ecologies, and sense-abilities that will give legitimacy and readability to a counter-violence violence, a world-making collective force—in the enactment of liberation, decolonization, anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, ecosocialism? Small steps matter, even when everything must change. Art serves as signal, a form of worldbuilding born of the contradictions of worlding in the grips of disaster. May its growing energies make radical speculation that less utopian and that much more legible for a coming just future, planting the seeds of real transformation in what remains.
1 Samah Salaime, “‘Impunity won’t last forever’: What gives Francesca Albanese hope,” +972 Magazine, January 21, 2026, https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-impunity-francesca-albanese/.
2 https://reactionary.international/investigations/mapping-fascism/, 2026.
3 Susan Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); and Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023).
4 Sarah Ihmoud, “Love in a Time of Genocide: A Palestinian Litany for Survival,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 52 no. 4 (2023).
5 David Velasco, “How Gaza Broke the Art World,” Equator, Dec. 22, 2025, https://www.equator.org/articles/how-gaza-broke-the-art-world.
6 Eyal Weizman, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide (New York: Penguin Random House, 2026).
7 Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, “In Gaza, We Are Literally Losing Our Ability to Speak,” The Nation, October 1, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-speech-loss-silence-trauma/.
8 “Thinking Gaza: Critical Interventions,” Third Text, https://www.thirdtext.org/thinkinggaza.
9 Sari Hanafi, “From ‘Spacio-cide’ to Genocide: The War on Gaza and Western Indifference,” Institute for Palestine Studies, December 30 2023.|
10 See Strike MoMA’s recent posts, including: https://www.instagram.com/p/DVCzDMKjmdW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
11 Karen Hao, Empire of AI (New York: Penguin Random House, 2025); and Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI System (2018), https://anatomyof.ai/.
12 Don McQuillan, “Non-Fascist AI,” in Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019); and Eyal Weizman, “Open Verification,” eflux, June 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248062/open-verification/.
13 Fred Moten, “Theory and Practice of Contradiction,” UC Santa Cruz, April 9, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqsdkNyLys. Moten defines contradictum as a figure of speech where utterance immediately meets its own negation.
* υποσημείωση η [iposimíosi] Ο33 : επεξηγηματική ή
συμπληρωματική σημείωση, συνήθ. στο κάτω μέρος της
σελίδας ενός κειμένου: Tις πηγές του τις αναφέρει σε
~. Ο αστερίσκος σε μία λέξη του κειμένου παραπέμπει
σε ~.
[λόγ. < ελνστ. ὑποσημείω(σις) -ση]
Curator
Nadja Argyropoulou
Nadja Argyropoulou is an independent curator and art historian based in Athens.
She studied history and archaeology (BA, Kapodistrian University, Athens) and art history and theory (MA, Essex University, UK).
She has worked as Director of Cultural Programming at the Hellenic American Union in Athens, as Head of Cultural Affairs for the Office of the Greek Presidency of the Council of the EU – Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2003, and as associate curator for the Greek Pavilion in the 2005 and 2007 Venice Biennale. She has collaborated with a wide range of institutions across the fields of contemporary art, culture, and social action, both in Greece and internationally. These include Columbia University, the University of Ioannina, the University of Thessaly, the Serpentine Galleries, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, the Greek Film Archive, the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, the Deste Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and ΝΕΟΝ. She has also worked with public bodies including the Ministry of Culture, the Athens School of Fine Arts, and the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, alongside regional and municipal authorities and independent grass-roots initiatives active in art and eco-social activism.
Among many other exhibitions and interdisciplinary events (dance, theatre, ecology, music, science et.al), she has curated exhibitions such as: “What Remains Is the Future,” Patras, European Capital of Culture, 2006; “Hotel Paradies,” 2nd Athens Biennale, 2009; “The Marathon Marathon Pproject,” co-curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Acropolis Museum, Athens, 2010; “Investigations of a Dog,” Deste Foundation, 2011; “Velvet Gardens,” Thermisia, Argolis, 2012–ongoing; “Family Business” (project initiated by Massimiliano Gioni and Maurizio Cattelan) in New York and Paris (Chalet Society and Palais de Tokyo) for 2013–2014; “Collecting Architecture Territories” research project, DESTE and GSAPP – Columbia University, 2012–2013; “HELL AS Pavilion,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; “Deste Fashion Collection: 1 to 8,” Benaki Museum, 2014; “Wor(th)ship: Tassos Vrettos,” Benaki Museum, 2015–2016 / Arles, 2016 / Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, 2017; “Paratoxic Paradoxes,” an international, commission-based, three-year curatorial on political ecology, exhibited at the Benaki Museum, Athens, 2017; “Making Oddkin – for joy, for trouble, for volcano love,” Nisyros and Gyali islands, Dodecanese, 2018; “mêtis. the wave in the mind and fugitive planning,” Tilos island, Dodecanese, 2019; “TRYPA: Stories of Love, Anarchy, Care and Disruption as Told by Teos Romvos and Chara Pelekanou,” Plato – Ostrava, Czech Republic, 2020–2021; “Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin,” online exhibition and publication project, Deree – The American College of Greece, 2021–2024; “The Feel. Backstage. Tassos Vrettos,” Athens Epidaurus Festival, 2021; “The Forest’s Riddle,” Nov. 2022 – Jan. 2023, Nobel building, Athens; “outraged by pleasure,” 2023, Nobel building, Athens; “the collective purr,” 2024, Nobel building, Athens.
She is a founding member of the collective Saprofyta.
Her research explores eco-critical practices and networks, de-growth strategies, and the entanglements of art with science, technology, and alternative fields of knowledge and action.
She has written reviews and texts for books, solo and group exhibitions and art related publications. She speaks English, Italian and French and she is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art).
Visual Identity
studio precarity
Studio Precarity was founded in 2019 by Vasiliki-Maria Plavou and Marios Stamatis, and has since been joined by Stefanos Koutroulis. Rooted in architecture and fine arts, the studio works in graphic design and art direction, focusing on the visual translation of identities and narratives through contemporary research. Central to their practice is the notion of precarity — both as a condition of modern labor relations and as a design methodology. In 2022, they were awarded the Young Book Designers Award by the Goethe Institut for the special publication OTE Study Archive: From Documentation to the Unexpected, produced for the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization. In 2024, they participated in the Greek presentation at the 60th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art – Xiromero/Dryland. They have collaborated with organizations such as the DESTE Foundation, the Onassis Foundation (Onassis AiR program), and the Syros International Film Festival (SIFF), among others.
Architectural Design
Y2K Architects
Υ2Κ architects is an ATH/SKG based creative studio founded by Olympia Kokkorou and Konstantinos Stefanidis, two specialized architects who joined their forces towards a shared vision in 2K24.
Both members have been awarded or nominated for prizes, among others, at the DOMa-Greek Awards, the EUmies YTAAwards, the UIA-Hyp Cup, the Blue Awards-Austria, the Biennale of Young Greek Architects, and the TDW awards.
They aim to design environments, buildings, spaces, and objects with a sense of “notorious love” for any approach that hacks or highlights everyday-life banalities, through functional glitches. Each project is a conscious act of redefining form, atmosphere, and narrative, where architecture moves beyond structure to become a statement, driven by context and charged with political and cultural meaning. They create spaces that are unapologetic, yet memorable. Their design is never neutral; it translates their references, experiences and observations into space, not as an aesthetic choice, but as substance.
“We don’t just design, we like to disrupt.”
(kisses)
Curator’s Assistant
Evelyn Zempou
Lighting Design
Edeko Lighting Studio
The Edeko Lighting Studio has been illuminating the most important architectural landmarks and cultural events in Greece for more than three decades. Guided by the artistic vision of its founder, the internationally acclaimed lighting designer Eleftheria Deko, the studio consists of a team of architectural and theatre lighting specialists, who implement a bespoke, attentive approach to each project. With technical ingenuity and artistic sensitivity, Edeko Lighting Studio seeks the poetry in lighting design.
Audiovisual Consultant
Makis Faros
MOMUS Production Team
Angeliki Charistou, Silia Fasianou, Eftychia Petridou
A Plot Twist and A Prelude
The opening festivities of the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, “everything must change. Radical Intelligence. Saloniki 9,” in October–November 2025, consisted of encounters, works and other creative manifestations that acted as hints and predictions, joyful signs of questioning, factual invocations, and thoughts about the Biennale. These constituted a chord of tonalities with “enduring” structure and a “fugitive” core, leading up to the broader staging of Biennale 9 in May–July 2026.
The exhibition “Plot Twist (the science fiction change)” was complemented by a ritualistic tangle of film screenings (“moving in riot”), workshops, performances and live music, a non-hierarchical mix that runs throughout this Biennale, in its attempt to probe, among others, into the possibility of critical fabulation, as this is defined in the work of Sadiya Hartman, or the doing of the study and the revolutionary prospect of playing in its various different forms
Plot Twist (the science fiction change)
Exhibition featuring works by Ben Rivers, Errands group, Kostas Sfikas
MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts, Oct. 31 to Nov. 16, 2025
The exhibition was an expression of the essential cooperation between Biennale 9 and the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Biennale 9 curator Nadja Argyropoulou notes about the exhibition:
“The concept of the plot twist, as it lurks in science fiction as premonition, openness and possibility, and as it is presented in this exhibition-preamble to the 9th Biennale, is perceived as revolutionary insight and a trigger of change. It is not a getaway but a necessity; it is resonance with a world of many worlds, hands-on imagination, radical futurism, as it reknits time (the entanglements of already with not yet) with the yarn of a structural understanding of unfreedom and the militantly joyful overturn of its deadlocks. The choice of this evocative exhibition for the soft opening of the 9th Biennale alluded to the importance of critical fabulation — as defined in Saidiya Hartman’s work, which serves as inspiration for the Biennale as a whole — while also presenting artistic practices of the ‘radical intelligence’ that challenges what is established as proper and proposed, attuning to the possibility of a social otherwise, to what we elude and eludes us.
The exhibition began with the installation of the triptych Urthworks (Slow Action [2010], Urth [2016], Look Then Below [2019]) by British artist Ben Rivers.
In this trilogy, the artist engages both real and fabricated times and places (the real places comprising Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, Mendip Hills, Somerset) as well as an alternating use of 16mm film and digital imaging technology, to present the stages of an environmental collapse that is not merely a possible plot twist but a lived reality that we do not recognize as such.
From the ethnographic allegory and archipelagic Utopia of Slow Action, to the contemplative introspection stirred by the sealed environment experiment in Arizona’s Biosphere in Urth (which antedated the Covid global lockdown) and to his film, Look Then Below, which recalls the chthonic side of life as it inhabits the un-exotic caves of Somerset, in an almost eerily poetic manner, Rivers reveals something crucial in the apocalyptic: the reality that is constantly occurring within imagination and vice versa, the familiar dimension of the epic narrative, the loose boundary between documentary and invention. The exhibition also presents the artist’s book Urthworks, which has been created with the contribution of sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegell and draws from the mythology of the Vikings and Urth, the goddess of fate, as well as from Brian Aldiss’s dystopian novel Earthworks (1965).
In parallel, the official program of the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival featured, in collaboration with the Avant-Garde Film Festival (a Greek Film Archive institution), Rivers’s new film, Mare’s Nest, which draws from Don DeLillo’s work and challenges, as does all of the artist’s work, the classic form of plot-based narratives which is often nothing more than disguised predictability. The film unfolds in an unknown and ambiguous world where the only trace of adults can be seen in the surrounding catastrophe, while the presence of children is central as they gather in community, in a hopeful for the future move.
Ben Rivers was present at the opening of the exhibition and the screening of Mare’s Nest.
The exhibition ‘Plot Twist (the science fiction change)’ further unfolded through a new work by the Errands, commissioned by Biennale 9 and titled U.F.O. Lost in HEAVEN (2025) – The Journey of a Forgotten Future. The work deals with the visionary work of Nikolaos Xasteros, the peculiar idea of retrospective futurism and the coming together of the two coeval Greek Biennales (Thessaloniki – Athens) in the dynamic field of science fiction, as a memory of the future.
Here, the Errands returned to their work TRANSPORTING UTOPIA, which was presented at the 2nd Athens Biennale (2009), ‘AB2: ΗEAVEN.’ In 2009, the Errands had come upon a ‘UFO-house,’ abandoned among trees in a coastal area of Loutraki; they bought it for 1 euro and transported it, piece by piece, to Flisvos beach. The UFO-house is one of the few surviving exemplars of the futuristic prefabricated dwellings made of fiberglass that were designed by Nikolaos Xasteros in the 1970s.
The Errands group re-displayed this peculiar residence that was left to abandonment and obscurity for decades – along with the name of Xasteros. Yet, one day, the UFO-house mysteriously disappeared from Flisvos, this time for good. No one knew or saw anything. Its whereabouts are still unknown, adding a new level of mystery and meaning to the work itself, but also to the wider history of prefabs, mobility, and the shuttering of the dream of mass portable habitation.
At Biennale 9, the Errands returned to their work, shedding light on its multi-layered trajectory: from Xasteros’s utopian vision to the collapse, artistic rescue, disappearance and, ultimately, the current fetishization of the architectural relic — how the unwanted became ‘exotic,’ a collector’s item, selling the future as memory.
Historic works by the great artist Kostas Sfikas (1927–2009) complemented this brief exhibition tour of the concept of the plot twist through a different path. The cinematography precociously and prophetically introduced by Sfikas is an unconventional viewing experience, as the director grapples persistently and aggressively with ‘the snare of the eye’ that holds the order of the world together, raising ‘a nightmarish mirror’ in front of it, in the words of Christos Vakalopoulos. Sfikas grapples with the pitfalls of representation as an orchestrated cultural constant and authoritative imperative.
More relevant than ever, Sfikas’s films dissect the iconoclastic vampirism of dominant culture, the scenographic perception of the world, the shackles of narrative ritual, the time of the gaze, and all sorts of constructions including that of the ‘moving image’ itself, the representation of time.
The critical reflection on eternal fiction and the ever-coming end of worlds, the leap into the depth of history and the dive into the New Times, are the connecting thread in Sfikas’s three famous allegories (Allegory I [1986]; The Enigmatic Mr. Jules Verne – Allegory II [1993]; The Woman of… and the Collector – Allegory III [2002]) that were featured in the exhibition. As Savvas Michail notes about Sfikas’s work, ‘the creation of such a space presupposes a simultaneous critique of the illusory representation of the epiphenomena and an Opening to the World / Opening of the World: a Denial of the Denial of Denial.’ The works Prometheus Retrogressing (1998) and Paul Klee’s Prophetic Bird of Sorrows (1995) completed this installation in the building of the MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts. In the universe of Sfikas, the beginning and the end of the world are the groundbreaking adventure, the vortices of images, and the search for truth in the spiral of the perpetual dialectic of power and rebellion.”
moving in riot
film screenings
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
The body of moving-image works under the general title “moving in riot” featured 9+1 exemplars in order to probe into the dangerous field of e-motion. By spreading the screenings throughout the empty space of the TIF-HELEXPO buildings, it created the non- or pan-dimensional quantum field where things were refracted and interacted without diminishing in energy or semantics. Forming a kind of hauntology that included the future and inhabited the spaces of Greece’s most famous trade fair institution, these works flickered in the dark in defiance and anticipation.
The works of the tribute (curated by Biennale 9 curator Nadja Argyropoulou) included:
- Ben Rivers & Ben Russell’s The Rare Event (2017), a study on the illusory condition of a philosophical roundtable, whose members reflect on the possibilities of Resistance.
- The historical film Social Decay by Stelios Tatasopoulos (1932, screening in collaboration with the Greek Film Archive, in the labs of which the film’s restoration took place). It is the first fiction film that dealt with the plight of the unemployed and poor working-class populations of urban centers and depicted the struggles for the unionization of industrial workers.
- The initially forbidden film 100 Hours in May by Dimos Theos & Fotos Lambrinos (1964, courtesy of the Hellenic Film Academy, with the cooperation of F. Lambrinos and K. Theou). It narrates through authentic images and unknown documents the grim background of the political assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki, and outlines the social setting and the cultural/political context of that time.
- The groundbreaking film Model (1974) by Kostas Sfikas, which dissects, in a one-shot take, the homogenizing, vitiating paradigm of the capitalist apparatus. Part of the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the film is its creator’s attempt to initially express the model of capitalism as it appears in Greece of the time, with building activity being its most pronounced manifestation. Along the way, the film turned to the “direct plastic transcription of the fundamental laws of the Capital” (K. Sfikas), in abstractly rendering the coordinates and automations of the production process. Machines, graves, dummy-workers, the flow of fetish products, the legendary work of Sfikas on the shoot, the use of color and perspective derived from both De Chirico’s painting and the experience of industrialization, compose a unique handmade filmic creation that embodies Sfikas’s great research and thought on work, life and emancipation.
- The work A-Anti-Anticapitalista (2021) by Oliver Ressler, which conveys the consensus in the climate justice movement that only systemic change can prevent climate disruption. Personal acts of renunciation are no longer enough. The future success of the climate movement will depend on intersectional approaches, on the possibility of alliances with (for example) anti-racist and decolonizing movements, with movements against gender oppression and others fighting intolerable forms of labor exploitation. The slogan “A-Anti-Anticapitalista” is already heard in a wide variety of left political contexts. It points toward unity, pushing aside contradictions and participants’ political differences in the moment of collective expression. The materials assembled for this film were recorded in actions by Ende Gelände and Occupy, and in the context of anti-G7, G8 and G20 and other political mobilizations. The editing of images and sound weaves these materials into a whole whose end is always already a new beginning. If indeed “everyone who ever protested knows the importance of meaningful slogans,” as per Oliver Ressler, then this work directly engages with the questions raised by Biennale 9 through its title and the way it engages with language and protest.
- The films Antistrip (1976) and Le Sibylle (1978) by the pioneering feminist group Le Nemesiache, which constitute the revolutionary dynamic of the collective practice that radically uses play, ritual, memory, and art.
- The films Ouroboros (2017) and Deep Sleep (2014) by Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif. The films deal with the violence of the taxonomic representation that Palestinian life has endured over time, and the struggle of the people there for independence and autonomy. Al-Sharif’s work is composed of the symbiosis of scenes of beauty and destruction; it challenges politics, the didacticism of stereotypical and constructed/directed representations, and studies the cycle of the terrible litany of trauma involving both protagonists and spectators. Largely thanks to its defiant articulation, the film opposes the stasis produced by every fixed expectation.
- The film Dédé (Ancestor) (2025) by Yasmine Djédjé-Fisher-Azoumé, which delves into diasporic female identity. Featuring animated copper relief engraving, the film is a journey into the feminine cosmology and folkloric traditions of the Ivory Coast and the Bété tribe, guided by feminine icons such as fertility carvings, masks, sculptures, mythological fables and deities.
- Return to Bog Walk (2025-2026) by Cecilia Bengolea. It is a work in progress that assembles dance, performance, and a series of interviews made since 2017 in the artist’s attempt to restore context and content in reference to Jamaican dancehall (genre of music derived from reggae, in which an artist improvises vocals over a recorded or live beat). In it dance emerges as a form of refugia, a space of survival, transformation, and collective memory. The film features Jamaican dancehall performance artists, all of whom are now economic refugees, living far from their homeland due to financial hardship and limited opportunities. The teams featured in this film are Black Eagle and Overload Skankaz. Their movements carry the memory of their land, community, and culture. Dancehall becomes a cultural refuge, a living space where identity is not lost in exile but sustained and reshaped through rhythm and movement. The work is a tribute to the dancers’ ability to carry home within them, and to dance as an act of resistance, care, and regeneration. Bengolea works internationally across performance, video, and sculpture, using dance as a medium for radical empathy and emotional exchange. Movement for her is a language of resilience and transformation, shaped through collaboration and exchange with no use of hierarchy or violence.
A special place in the tribute was dedicated to a video that heralded one of the most experimental and creative collaborations-initiatives of Biennale 9, titled Playing Otherwise. The video was screened as a work in progress, constructed gradually using materials that were gathered through collective research, directed and coordinated by Iria Vrettou. In the context of investigating the “social otherwise” — which is the main axis of this curatorial work, along with assertions for public space, issues of collectivity and solidarity, concerns for the revision of power relations and competition — the project-series of activities titled “Playing Otherwise” will be unfold with Another Football platform and the Heinrich Böll Foundation – Thessaloniki Office as creative partners, and will include, with football at the forefront, a multitude of collaborative initiatives, self-organized groups and independent platforms, as well as a range of artistic, theoretical references around games, sports, and modern gaming, including the positions of the Situationist International on anti-war games (Guy Debord’s Kriegspiel) and applied “triolectics” (Asger Jorn, 1962). Even if a new “three-sided football league” is not launched on the occasion of the 9th Biennale in Thessaloniki, it will be interesting to experience the adventure/effort of its formation in the tradition of similar initiatives of the 1990s, as well as the emergence of a game that combines football, chess and poker techniques while breaking the binary nature of competing.
Seed bombing laboratory
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
in collaboration with the Mamagea Environmental Organisation
This first event of the creative collaboration of Biennale 9 with Mamagea Environmental Organisation traced the points where art, activism and pedagogical care meet in order to change the relationship between children and adults with collective assertions, experiential knowledge and aesthetic pleasure: from the great call for the creation and throwing of thousands of seed bombs, which then bloom and dominate the urban landscape, to the Wonder City exhibition that brings the expression of the children’s experience to the museum space and in the context of the Biennale, to the “Network of School Vegetable Gardens of Thessaloniki” and, finally, to the reflective activity “Tablemates” that brought to the table those who plan and decide the discussion for more equitable and sustainable nutritional futures. The communities of Mamagea met those of the Biennale of Contemporary Art, and this was a beginning that could only lead to where everything can change.
MOMUS sacculos in MOMo non imprimet
screen-printing workshop
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
True to the spirit of degrowth, and utilizing the practice of playful reuse in order to change the usual approach to “merch,” the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art invited the public to a participatory and provocatory screen-printing workshop. Using the logo of this year’s event, “everything must change. RNS9,” we tagged our canvas bags of previous exhibitions and events, merging together and teasingly confusing different cultural experiences, memories and identities. The process took place under the guidance of Mephisto Me Studio, which exacerbated the confusion and subversively enlisted the humor of the other, the incomprehensible language, to note:
Momus sacculos suos in MOMo non fingit.
Si Momus sacculos suos in MOMo imprimeret, animos commoveret.
Sacculi Momī in MOMo velut vestigia artis exprimerentur.
Momus sacculos suos in MOMo signis suis non notat.
Momus per sacculos suos in MOMo fulgere posset.
Momus sacculos suos in MOMo tanquam artem vivam non insculpit.
Pro MOMo arte Momī mortua est.
Sed etiam Momō MOMUS mausoleum est.
DETH arthó: dance otherwise
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
The Aerites dance company studied the condition of change, its bases and its upbeats, and intervenes by luring and observing:
DETH
DETH arthó
DE ΤΗa katargithó
DE ΤΗélo
* The largely untranslatable, polysemous and assonant play on words of the title consists roughly of the following words and pun elements: DETH: transliteration of ΔΕΘ, the Greek acronym for Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF); Arthó: passive voice form of the verb αἴρω = to carry, lift, and, metaphorically, to cancel, annul. De: transliteration of the negative function word δε, Greek equivalent of “not”. The combination DETH arthó may read De th’ arthó, synonymous with De tha katargithó (I shall not be cancelled/annulled), or De tha ’rthó (I will not come). De thélo means I don’t want to.
In the prelude of “everything must change. RIS9,” DETH arthó proclaimed the public demonstration of TIF-HELEXPO premises (pavilions 2 & 3) free from content, celebrations and productive ideas that promise to make our future certain.
Via a series of immaterial interventions and outrageous confessions of kinetic destabilization, DETH arthó took us on a guided tour of the basis of the upcoming 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, of its foundations, its bricks and mortar. It timidly foretold the first steps towards the non-annulment of existence; it trusted and announced the glitch, proposing new tropes of unquelled dance poetics.
Choreographer: Patricia Apergi
Performers: Eleanna Zoi, Caterina Politi, Ilias Hatzigeorgiou
Production: Aerites Dance Company
In a biennial of unspeakable ingenuity, the Aerites enjoyed the solitude of the decision do trance into change.
VELVET BUS goes Salonica Biennale: live
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
- DJ performance of the duet Toumpa-Charilaou (Marina Velisioti, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou). Where playlists collided like broadcasts from a planet in free fall, revealing the cost of being a girl (visuals: Marina Velisioti).
- Vassilina live performance
- Bipolia live performance
VELVET BUS is a moving, multi-faceted, participatory festival, created in 2008. It was conceived by The Callas / Aris and Lakis Ionas, members of the Velvet Room team, a large collective consisting of associates and friends, which has been presenting for 20 years, throughout Greece, the contemporary independent artistic creation through exhibitions, publications, films, concerts, festivals, and events.
VELVET BUS goes Salonica Biennale: The Callas with the Callasettes live
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
Direction, costumes, artworks: The Callas | Choreography: Angeliki Hatzi | Dancers: Angeliki Hatzi, Elpiniki Saripanidou | Performers: Eirini Zografou, Melia Papadopoulou
In the context of the “VELVET BUS goes Salonica Biennale: The Callas with the Callasettes live,” The Callas / Lakis & Aris Ionas debuted their new song, “Everything Must Change,” which they created specifically for the 9th Biennale of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki. Lyrics, music, orchestration: Lakis & Aris Ionas / The Callas | Production, mixing: Marilena Orfanou | Lead singer: Aris Ionas | Vocals: Filippa Dimitriadi, Eirini Zografou, Ioanna Iona, Dafni Kyriakidou, Kyveli Marsellou.
DJ set: Yavash
Pavilions 2 & 3 of TIF-HELEXPO premises, Oct. 31, 2025
The welcoming party of Biennale 9 was concluded with a set by the well-known Thessaloniki DJ.
