DESTE PRIZE 2011 - The Best from Greece

Posted on: 23/May/2011 The DESTE Prize was established in 1999 and is awarded every two years to a Greek artist living in Greece or abroad. The Prize aims to showcase the work of a new and emerging generation of artists and it is an integral part of the Foundation’s policy for supporting and promoting contemporary art in Greece.

The six shortlisted artists for the DESTE Prize 2011 – Alexandra Bachzetsis, Anastasia Douka, Irini Miga, Eftihis Patsourakis, Theodoros Stamatogiannis and Jannis Varelas – will show their work in an exhibition that will take place for the second time at the Museum of Cycladic Art between May 25 and October 30, 2011. This collaboration between the DESTE Foundation and the Museum of Cycladic Art is part of the latter’s “Young Views” program, which aims at launching a dialogue with a younger generation, at keeping the public up to date with the latest developments in contemporary cultural production and at ensuring the dynamic presence of a space for the exchange of ideas.
An international jury of six will select and announce the winner of this year’s DESTE Prize on September 14, 2011. The Prize is accompanied by a grant of €10.000.

The work of Jannis Varelas is defined by the pursuit of sets of historical references, with the purpose of recomposing and redifining them through new apperceptions. The artist is interested in the exploration of mechanisms that produce meaning within human perception, as well as the ways that meanings correlate, shift or collapse within human psychological state. In addition, he is also interested in the mechanism of self-definition resulting from every person’s own mythologies. This searching directs Varelas every time in the use of different materials and media, like drawing, collage, video, sculptures.

Anastasia Douka examines human procedures, along with whichever model of knowledge or retransmission of information, and their products: architectural elements and geographical models, ancient cultures and contemporary popular icons, precious and everyday objects, human anatomy and machine anatomy, fantasies and theories with their proofs. She constructs condensed objects out of joint that carry on different layers elements of the above. Hollow dies of familiar objects and symmetric wood fold-outs come together into a new unit. Every unit is after the hard-hidden gold in the bowels of the earth, the way adventurers do it.

In her work, Irini Miga uses personal and historical references, always through an allegoric gaze at reality. One of her primary goals is to establish a dialogue between the past and the present. Miga is interested in discovering the poetry and romance, generated through the manipulation of old, distant events and cultural products, by giving birth to novel meanings and interpretations.

Alexandra Bachzetsis’ work constitutes an inquiry into genres of performing arts, techniques of choreography and forms of scenic behavior. Her main interest lies in codes that govern gestures, both in everyday life and on stage. Bachzetsis’ choreography scrutinizes the mutual influence between the use of gesture and movement in the ‘low’, ‘commercial’ genres – such as romantic comedy, TV soap, or hip-hop video-clip – and in ‘arts’, such as ballet, modern dance and performance. The artist tries to arrive at new ideas in dance performance inducing a productive crossing and translation between the hitherto isolated or even mutually exclusive cultural fields. In her performances, Bachzetsis takes on stereotyped modes of representation of female body in contemporary popular culture, show business and sex industry. She diverts clich

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