State of Concept announces a new series of exhibitions entitled Bona - Fide and dedicated to contribute to the promotion of young Greek and international artists and critics/curators. It is with great pleasure that we inaugurate this new chapter with visual artist Vera Chotzoglou and curator and critic Christina Petkopoulou.

bona fide

/ˌbəʊnə ˈfʌɪdi,ˌbəʊnə ˈfiːdeɪ/

adjective: bona fide; 

1. genuine; real.
   "she was a bona fide expert"
2. real not false:

“Make sure you are dealing with a bona fide company”. 

1. legal or honest: 

“bona fide commercial transactions”

noun

1. good faith; absence of fraud or deceit; the state of being exactly as claims or appearances indicate: 

“The bona fides of this contract are open to question”.

1. the official papers, documents, or other items that prove authenticity, legitimacy, etc., as of a person or enterprise; credentials: 

All our bona fides are on file with the SEC.

The term bona-fide literally means in good faith, however it has various usages today. In a legal framework it is used to represent something that is presented in honesty, showing legality and good faith. The most common use of the phrase is to discuss something that we consider authentic. 

Inspired by this terminology, we present through this new series of exhibition the practices of young artists commissioning young critics/curators to write a new text on their work, aiming to strengthen the dialogues between young practitioners and to create a new space for the production of new discourse on contemporary art in Greece and beyond. 

BONA-FIDE 1: Vera Chotzoglou 

25/9 - 20/11 

at State of Concept’s  -1 floor

Opening 25th of September, 13:00 - 20:00 

‘A pair of plastic, white horns on the table. Your mum’s shirt on the hanger. Metal long nails spur from your gloves. Tonight, you will be a carnivorous flower. You will spread your arms and embrace me tight. Tomorrow, you will make land amongst us on your space-snake and we will clap your landing. We will sleep until the time the night reveals our next favourite city in the dark. Vera Chotzoglou follows with their gaze, people and listens to the sounds they produce when they breathe, sleep or dance. Chotzoglou stares at the cities, the buildings and apartments that host human presence, and the spaces that suffer from the lack of it. They are mesmerized from the choreography of the body movement, even when it is simply breathing. Chotzoglou studies the skin: naked, or covered in satin, vinyl, velvet, glitter, colours and wounds, appearing melancholic in the blue light of dawn and flushing during the night. The artist observes human faces, the spaces and the objects that surround them, in the same way that a child feels the urge to fit the whole world in its mouth to comprehend it.

Three recent films from the artist’s practice are presented, Rausch (2018), S W E A T (2020) and Monstera (2021). 

Vera Chotzoglou lives and works in Athens and Berlin, and works mainly with time based media. They are an Athens School of Fine arts BA & MA graduate, Department of Visual Arts, Fine Arts & Art Education (2013-2018). They studied in Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (ΑDBK) in Munich (2016-2017) with an Erasmus+  scholarship. They were awarded with the audience award for the short-film S W E A T at 22th Thessaloniki International GLAD Film Festival (2021) and the audience award for  the short film “Munich almost killed me ½” at 2th Piraeus Film Festival in Athens(2018). They are one of the Stavros Niarchos Artist Fellowship fellows, ARTWORKS (2019). They have exhibited internationally and nationally at: Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival Thessaloniki-Greece (2021), Les  Mains Gauches-Queer Feminist Film Festival, Marseille, France (2021) Ribalta Experimental Film  Festival, Vignola Italy (2021) FilmÓptico - Art Visual and Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain(2021) 22th  Thessaloniki International GLAD Film Festival (2021), Interface video art festival,  Zagreb-Croatia (2020), 26th Athens International Film Festival (2020), Centrum  Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2020), Eos Gallery (2019), Athens, A. Antonopoulou Gallery, Athens (2019),  GRRL HAUS CINEMA, Berlin-Germany (2019), Hacker Porn Film Festival, Rome (2019), Platforms  project, Athens (2019), Foto Wien, Austria (2019), 6th Athens Biennale, Athens, Greece,(2018) Inshort  Film Festival, Lagos, Negiria (2018), Action Field Kodra, Thessaloniki, Greece (2018), 2th Pireus Film  Festival,Athens-Greece (2018), Belleve di Monaco, Munich-Germany (2016), TAF Gallery, Athens  (2013) et al. 

Christina Petkopoulou, born in 1992 in Athens where she lives and works, has studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and completed a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the Panteion University of Social Sciences. Between October 2020 and January 2021 she curated Lipiu, a contemporary art project and a group show at A-Dash space and along Asklipiou street in the center of Athens and digitally with the support of the  Greek Ministry of Culture and Stavros Niarchos Foundation. She is a researcher and curator of the archive of Athens Report, a crowdsourcing online platform. She has curated exhibitions and educational programmes as a freelance curator (Playing Ground, Automatic Transmission, 2019, Liminal Aristeidis Lappas solo show, Praxitelous 33, 2016, Choro-graphies-Points of flight, Artscape Athens, 2014 and more). She has worked for the Greek Contemporary Art Institute (ISET) researching and documenting its archive and she has also collaborated with several cultural institutions such as the Athens Biennale (2013, 2015), Art Athina (2014, 2015) and Archaeological Dialogues (2015). In 2016 she was chosen for the Neon Foundation curatorial exchange programme  in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and in 2019 she has been awarded with the curatorial Artworks Fellowship. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.