Meteora Residency Lectures
Ainalaiyn Space welcomes you to the Meteora Residency Research Seminars.
This research seminars will work in conjunction with our artists’ residency which will be taking place in Meteora, Greece from 10th August until 7th September. Our residency will introduce three artists to the site’s fascinating histories, including its transformation from a sea bed to towering rock spires; its turbulent monastic histories; the seasonal metamorphosis of its flora, fauna and fungi; and the histories of the local names and traditions surrounding each rock spire. Yet, situated in Greece, we have designed a residency that will connect our artists to the wider national histories, research and creative community. Therefore, we are excited to celebrate the narratives of Meteora, from its most micro to macro.
As Ainalaiyn Space embraces a multidisciplinary approach to art, we have invited speakers that can add unexpected and new perspectives to the research topics of Narratives/Histories, Place/Landscape, Ecologies/Anthropologies. While we have specifically crafted this research seminar with an open theme, we are particularly excited to welcome speakers that research within the context of Greece.
These lectures are free to attend and are open to everybody.
Belinda Martín is a London-based artist consultant, curator, entrepreneur and visual arts producer. A graduate from King’s College London, she is about to complete her PhD in Classics, and holds an MA in Classical Art & Archaeology and a BA in Art History. Martín is the co-founder of Lava Art Project, a visual arts company offering production, curatorial and advisory support for emerging and mid-career artists. From 2020 she co-runs the arts programme of Habitación Número 34, a project space based in Madrid focussed on site-specific installations by young emerging artists. Prior to this, she has worked in several contemporary art spaces and institutions internationally, including MTArt, King’s College London, Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins and Max Estrella Gallery. Martín now combines her experience as a curator, gallery director and visual arts producer to help artists build their careers and navigate the art world as professionals. She is also a member of The Association of Women in the Arts.
15th August, 14:30PM (UK)
Embracing the Monstrous:
Monsters and Contexts of Alterity
in Early Greece
Most classical archaeological accounts of monstrous images only analyse monsters through the myths and texts that narrate their stories. As such, monsters are mainly treated as symbols of evil, foes to be defeated by a virtuous Greek hero or god, creating a sharp dichotomy between monsters and humans. But this rationalistic, logocentric approach ignores the other side of the coin: that monsters are material embodiments, capable of not only inflicting terror and danger on viewers, but also attraction. As I hope to demonstrate, monsters were powerful multivalent visual and material symbols operating within different social contexts in Archaic Greece. Attending to certain formal features which are transculturally understood as monstrous and which appear prominently in Archaic Greek art (e.g. corporeal hybridity, frontality, monumentality or exaggerated facial traits and expressions), I contend that monstrous images produced a double and contradictory effect on viewers. On the one hand, a push, a sense of peril, respect and repulsion; on the other hand, a pull, for monsters produced attraction, too. This cognitive dissonance afforded by Archaic monsters has more to do with drawing the beholder in and inviting them to engage phenomenologically with them than solely with inspiring terror. Images of monsters function in more complex ways than the ‘apotropaic’ purpose so often attributed to them by modern classical archaeological scholarship. I suggest that monsters are themselves ‘good to think with’, especially for exploring the complexities of contexts of alterity in Archaic Greece, most notably religion, initiation rites and funerary rituals.
The Programme:
Sophie J Williamson is a curator based in London and Margate. She is initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a research programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, London, and was previously part of the inaugural team at Raven Row, (2009–13), London. Her writing appears in frieze, Art Monthly, Elephant and Aesthetica. She was Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016) and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Curatorial Fellow (2020). Her anthology, Translation (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press) brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. Her cross-disciplinary programme Deep Ecologies, working with urgent colonised permafrost landscapes, is currently sanctioned by the UK Foreign Office; and she is currently on a one-year Research Residency at Jan van Eyck Academie, NL.
17th August, 08:00AM (UK)
Undead Matter:
Entangled lives of geological ancestry,
deep time and ever-turning matter
Sophie J Williamson will give an introduction to her curatorial practice Undead Matter. Weaving together the intimacies of dying, from the personal to those across deep geological time and the celestial expanse, Undead Matter navigates the organic and non-organic lives that resurface rhythmically over millennia. It has emerged through intersecting conversations with artists, poets, dancers, writers and musicians, as well cryomicrobiologists, death doulas, paleogeologists, permafrost geographers, mineralogists, archaeoastronomers, woodworkers, quantum physicists, bondage masters, cryonics speculators, indigenous elders and others met along the way. Each collaborator offers their own perspective on our place within the infinite impermanence of universal matter: past, present and possible. Undead Matter considers the universality of death, extinction and ever reforming matter as phenomena to understand existence: alive with agency, permeating the contemporary and redirecting futures.
Aliya Say is an art writer, editor, and strategy consultant based in London, UK. Her current research is concerned with botanical abstraction in the work of twentieth-century artist-mystics, including Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, and with the intersection of vegetal ontology, mystical states, and ecological thinking. She is doing her PhD at Aarhus University, Denmark, under the supervision of Prof. Jacob Wamberg and Prof. Michael Marder. Her other interests include art in the age of Anthropocene, the present and future forms of human and more than human intelligence, mysticism and nature-connectedness, and their wider effects on the planetary ecology. Aliya has worked across strategy, development, and public programming in galleries, art foundations, tech sector, and academia. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Artforum, frieze, The White Review, The Art Newspaper, and others. She is a recipient of the Novo Nordisk Foundation grant and a former research fellow at the Serpentine Gallery, UK.
19th August, 08:30AM (UK)
Mystical consciousness
and Thinking with Plants:
from Demeter to Emma Kunz
Our age – plagued by the global ecocide and fossil fuel addiction that engender the destruction of habitats and the extinction of multiple forms of life, as much as the acute disconnect between humans and their environment – needs healing. In my research, I explore the interconnection between mystical states, artistic practice, and ecological healing. I am interested in plants’ unique forms of thinking and being, in spiritual artistic practices drawing on vegetal ontology, and the promise of mystical attunement with the more than human world against the epidemic death cult of techno-capitalism.
Bringing together the strands of art, myth, and spiritual ecology, we will explore artistic practices that draw upon profound visionary experiences in order to produce alternative ways of seeing and relating to the world, particularly those that stem from, and further inspire, empathic attunement to plants and other nonhumans.