An Eye-Opening Conversation with Kostis Stafylakis
Courtesy of artist
Kostis Stafylakis is a visual artist and art theorist, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Expanded Media, and Forms at the Athens School of Fine Arts. His work navigates the online and offline realms of fringe social groups, exploring the intersections of mimicry, politics, and contemporary identity in the post-internet era. Recent solo exhibitions by Kostis Stafylakis include "GZPRM GOPNIK" (2023) and "Chloroquine Juggalo" (2021) at KEIV Athens, "Readiness: Civil War" (a duo show with Theo Triantafyllidis) at panke.gallery (2022), and "KavecS" at Neue Ravensburger Kunstverein (2017). He has also co-curated The Overkill Festival (2023) and the 4th and 6th Athens Biennale, among others. Stafylakis's projects have been showcased at major international events, including Bureau Europa, the Onassis Foundation, Palais de Tokyo, Steirischer Herbst, and Media Impact at the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.
UZOMAH: What driving forces fuel your continuous creation of art, demonstrating your unwavering commitment to your craft?
KOSTIS: As an artist, I always strived to stage situations that can disrupt our habits, or the ideas we stand for. I enjoy losing control over my work’s interpretation, and observe the clash between different responses. I always admired artworks that produce more dissensus than consensus, miscommunication rather than accord. In some early interventions, realized with my colleague Vana Kostayola, we tried to hijack the frame of art and its institutions to mime social reality. We appeared in galleries and biennials staging live simulations of alternative therapy centers, migration agencies, fringe political groups, academic conferences, and so on. In the recent years, I find pleasure in staging immersive installments to share a great part of my intimate explorations into global communities that fascinate me, or scare me; hence these recent exhibitions that dive into the world of doomsday preppers, juggalos, gopniki and others.
U: What mistake have you made in your career that actually benefited you? How did you turn it around to be a positive experience?
K: Due to the precarious and uncertain nature of the local (Greek) art scene, I thought that I can act as a mediator, instigator of local art collectives, builder of some shared space of artistic collaboration, etc. I guess I painfully learned to deal with the discontents of this process and discover a more balanced way to collaborate with a much smaller number of cultural workers and friends. I guess I’m also gradually learning how to claim credit for what I do. So, nowadays I mostly present solo-shows and two-person shows that nonetheless require the contribution and involvement of a wider network of practitioners (digital designers, musicians, performers etc.)
Kostis Stafylakis, On an island, K-Gold Temporary Gallery 2024 photo by Olga Saliampoukou
U: As a professor, how do you approach teaching your students how to find themselves through their creation of art and the development of various mediums to self express?
K: After studying fine arts in Athens, I had the opportunity to undertake post-graduate studies in Art Theory and Continental philosophy in the UK. It’s been 14 years since I received my PhD and, meanwhile, I have been teaching at various universities in Greece. In 2023, I was appointed Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Expanded Media and Forms at the Athens School of Fine Arts. My formation is interdisciplinary and I do strive to pass this to students who inquire something more than a traditional art education. So, together, we try to compose a mind-map of how art expanded since the late 20th century, emphasizing how contemporary visual culture and internet technologies affected the concept of the artist. In the studio, I’m trying to establish a balance between theory and practice, delivering frequent lectures on paradigms drawn from art’s social experimentation since the 80s and 90s, from post-situationist initiatives to the early internet era of net.art and the tactical media, to various forms of online and offline artistic activism, to the post-digital and post-internet condition. We share texts, discuss critical topics, and realize personal and collective projects that frequently result in public display. In collaboration with prof. Vassilis Vlastaras, Studio 11’s academic staff offers a post-media understanding of art, sensitive to the interplay between social reality, desire, and technology.
Kostis Stafylakis, On an island, K-Gold Temporary Gallery 2024 photo by Olga Saliampoukou
U: Can you discuss further the inspiration for your latest exhibition of your work? How will it bring attention to the art scene in Greece and contribute to the art world?
K: So, my show at K-Gold Temporary Gallery instills a tendency I developed since the quarantine days in Greece. As a personal refuge, I started seeking for online communities that intrigued me and began to infiltrate them through online mimicry, and through personal transformation eventually. After indulging with diverse groups, such as the doomsday preppers and the American juggalos, my radar drew me to contemporary Russia. My timeline was soon bombarded by channels which stream sequences from Russian everyday life, always depicting it as surrealistic, awkward, dumb, rough and so on. The image of the Slavic/Russian gopnic, wearing an adidas jumpsuit and a flat-cap, always rises as a meme invented to represent the core of post-soviet Russia. So, the material comprising my “On an Island” show is nothing more than the result of my intense exposure to that online footage. I try to rework these images, and reenact these videos to render them less laughable and more unsettling or ecstatic; it occasionally becomes intimate, even erotic. It’s all situated into this space I describe as a memes’ cemetery.
U: How do you maintain your connection and awareness of the global art world, particularly outside Greece?
K: I always try to connect and collaborate with likeminded practitioners who navigate the same post-digital space. My curatorial practice has helped with that a bit. I recently co-curated the Overkill festival in the Netherlands. Entitled “The outburst of the digital swamp”, the festival engaged into a playful mapping of current scenarios to recalculate global balance. Along with artist Theo Triantafyllidis, we designed a LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) game that traversed the festival’s space, staging the conflict between four different clans and agendas, inspired by contemporary environmentalism, and refracted through popular fantasy culture. There, we teamed up with artists such as Most Dismal Swamp, Samuel Capps, KOTZ, BCAA System, Juliette Lizotte, and others. I crave for collaborations that can infect our aesthetic language.
Kostis Stafylakis, On an island, K-Gold Temporary Gallery 2024 photo by Olga Saliampoukou
U: Why is it important for artists to take risks? How do you take risks in art?
K: As visual artists, we produce images, texts, scripts, associations, signifiers etc. This is already risky business today. I suppose that you take some risk when you deviate from the dogmas of the art world; those agendas drenched in superficial goodness. I gladly risk misrecognition. I risk by producing art, and writing texts, that often don’t serve some benevolent cause.
U: Can you discuss further the inspiration for your latest exhibition of your work?
K: Sure! With K-Gold’s director, and my show’s curator, Nicolas Vamvouklis we agreed that the site of the island should inspire this new installment. We thus designed the expansion of my material into an immersive territory that would resemble a bear’s den. After of months of exposure to online material from contemporary Russia, my timeline was infected by countless reels showing bears engaging in friendly activities with humans: bears assisting men in their workout routine, humans feeding bears with spoons, cuddling with bears and so on. We know that, since the inception of Web 2.0, algorithms verge towards the taming of nature, and of animals in specific, by dressing them in cuteness. In contrast to this cybernetic logic, we’ve considered various local rituals which involve animals, and we also wanted to evoke that, prior to the internet, bear tamers would roam the Balkans. In my show, the bear swallows vintage wooden toys from Russia, proudly displays the heads of its victims, and undergoes surgery in front of the show’s audience.
For more information about Kostis’s artwork please visit his site, he can also be followed on Instagram. For more information about the K-Gold Temporary Gallery please visit the site and follow the gallery on Instagram.
