Beuys100
Social Sculptures

The Social Sculptures event series kicked off with a workshop for local artists, which started in April and continued in September 2021. The impactful term social sculpture, which Beuys developed in the early 1970s, is centred on the belief that art could include the entire process of living – thoughts, actions, conversation, and objects – and could be enacted collectively by a wide range of people, beyond artists.

The exhibition featured the practices of artists Spyros Anastasiou, Mehveş Beyidoğlu, Stella N. Christou, Eirene Constantinou, Rafaella Constantinou, Marietta Mavrokordatou, Andreas Papamichael, Simone Philippou, Zoe Polycarpou, Korallia Stergides and Nicolina Stylianou. Their artistic approaches employ different media, comprising of sound, sculpture, engraving, photography, installation, performance, some of which are participatory, and so forth. Yet they share a departure from the concept of ‘artwork’, unveiling within and drifting throughout hybrid forms and processes of art-making.

The works and actions created for the exhibition presented social sculpture in its diversity and plurality, as acted and mediated through the participants' encounter and exchange. Sculpture is explored as a metaphor of movement, a metaphor we live by as society. Metaphor in its etymological sense to “transfer”, or “carry across”, seems to rearticulate the relationship between plurality and discursive practices through which the idea of movement occurs.  Social Sculptures’ movement carries across compositions of reality, not because it reflects the aim or will of an individual and a singular artistic act, but because it derives from collaborative praxis, which is enacted and restaged. By sharing ways to get closer to the unceasingly forming and reforming of social compositions we are part of, the featuring artists grasped the notions of ‘social’ and ‘sculpture’ in their plasticity and resilience.

Audiences will have the opportunity to get to know Beuys and his work through a selection of films.