ATHENS.- The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, is presenting, from 5 April to 3 June 2012, a new work by Anna Tsouloufi - Lagiou entitled Forms of Life - Survival Kit in the Metropolis in the framework of the series EMST Commissions 2012. This series of works is commissioned by the museum for the Project Room and it is realized with the support of Bombay Sapphire gin.
The new project of Anna Tsouloufi - Lagiou deals with concepts and issues related to contemporary biopolitics and has specific references to the ideas of leading contemporary political philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Felix Guattari, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. For the work, the artist chooses eight people that live and are active in the city of Athens; individuals, which the artist respects and admires, and who are involved in the social and political life of the city. They participate in collectives and aim at the preservation of the common goods. Through a series of photographic representations of her protagonists, eight video-interviews that are presented through monitors, and the respective experiential maps that she designs in collaboration with them, she aims to record and examine the modes of living and the everyday practices of those people within the city. Tsouloufi reveals the various and different faces of each person and poses questions around whether we ought to have or benefit from the existence of different roles in our lives in order to survive in a metropolitan center. Working in collaboration with her protagonists and combining real as well as staged elements, she creates a political work with poetic overtones, in order to talk about modes of resistance and survival in regards to the deadlock of the current crisis.
Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou was born in 1971. She studied in the Athens School of Fine Arts specializing in sculpture and photography; also specialized in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the MFA Program of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and in the sculpture dep. of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2001 participates in collaboratives with interest in art expressed within the public sphere and the commons, sociopolitical issues and urban space configuration, with the Network Nomadic Architecture-Athens, PAC Multimedia- Skopje-Republic of Macedonia, Verpeilt Brigade – Athens, Filopappou Art Group – Athens. She has exhibited and participated in shows and workshops in Greece, Germany, Italy, Bosna-Herzegovina, Republic of Macedonia, Albania, and US-Chicago. She works in research around identity and subjectivity, while she thinks and feels of the human as a sculpture in a sociopolitical environment. Her actual work consists of sculptural installations –usually temporary and ephemeral- interventions in public space in association with ephemeral performative actions, the results of which remain as reminiscent documentaries of various kinds by using tactical media, like photography, video, posters, stickers, texts and more. She lives and works in Athens.
