ARTWORKS

Greece

Curatorial Residency Exchange
ARTWORKS (Athens, Greece) – SAHA (Istanbul, Türkiye)

Program Overview
ARTWORKS and SAHA are pleased to announce a collaborative Curatorial Residency Exchange Program, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and professional development between Greece and Türkiye. This initiative offers curators the opportunity to immerse themselves in the host country's art ecosystem over a six-week residency.

Founded in 2017, ARTWORKS is a nonprofit organization that aims to create a fertile and nurturing environment for Greek artists through funding and public engagement opportunities. ARTWORKS is supported by its founding donor, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. In partnership with ARTWORKS based in Greece, SAHA hosts one of the ARTWORKS' curatorial fellows at SAHA Studio for six weeks.

SAHA supported participants of the program

Nikolaos Akritidis
September-October 2025

Nikolaos Akritidis is a curator and geographer based in Brussels. His work documents urban contexts, the cultural memory carried by their inhabitants, and the histories found between layers of the built environment. With a focus on urban ecology, care, and experiences of migration, Akritidis traces the coexistence of human and more-than-human lives that give breath to the city’s constant state of becoming. A graduate of Goldsmiths and UCL, he has recently curated projects in partnership with RAVNIKAR Projects (Ljubljana), Cité internationale des arts (Paris), koraï project space (Nicosia), Fondations 312 (Brussels), and the UCL Urban Lab (London).  

During the program, Akritidis focused on urbanism, architectural history, and Istanbul’s green spaces and gardens. At the end of the five weeks, he realized the second edition of Periodical Observations, a publication he had first initiated at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. While the first edition revolved around the laundry room of Cité des arts, the publication was reimagined in Istanbul through the İMÇ complex where SAHA Studio is located and the city’s tea culture.

Alper Turan
May-June 2025 (Athens)

Alper Turan’s curatorial practice and research explore the intersections of state violence, censorship, and transnational queer resistance. Engaging critically with global cultural productions of HIV/AIDS, undetectable aesthetics, and the politics of visibility, his work investigates how art navigates the areas between text, body, and image within contested public spheres. Turan conceives the exhibition as an experimental laboratory, a space for collective knowledge-making and political action.

He was the 2023–24 Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and the 2023–24 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Currently an adjunct curator at Protocinema, Turan is also a founding member of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based organization dedicated to transnational artistic exchange and support. Turan is pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto. His curatorial projects have been featured at institutions including Whitney ISP (NY), ArteEast & Wallach Gallery (NY), Slavs & Tatars’ Pickle Bar (Berlin) & Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Queer Museum & Volkskundemuseum (Vienna), Protocinema (İstanbul) and the 13th Sharjah Biennial. His writings have appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, November Magazine, Metropolis M, C Magazine, Artnet, and OnCurating.

During his residency in Athens, Alper Turan has examined how far-right violence and repression resonate across Turkey, Greece, Germany, and the U.S., focusing on their impact on queer and dissident communities. Through collaborations with Athens-based artists and institutions, he has explored collective strategies of survival and resistance, centering queer methodologies and transnational solidarity. His research aims to build curatorial frameworks that challenge dominant narratives and imagine shared, liberatory futures. At the end of his residency on June 2, 2025, at 19:00, Turan gave a public talk titled “Curating Undetectable.” at the Institute for Contemporary Greek Art (ISET) During his presentation, Curating Undetectable, Alper discussed his curatorial trajectory, focusing on projects that have emerged as responses to censorship, institutional violence, and restrictions on freedom of expression, primarily in Turkey and internationally. Drawing on specific examples of exhibitions in Istanbul, New York, Rotterdam, and elsewhere, he explored how curatorial practice can open space for alternative public discourses and collective forms of knowledge production. 

Akis Kokkinos
October-December 2023

Akis Kokkinos is a curator and founder of DEO projects in Chios Island, Greece. Over the last ten years, Akis has worked for major cultural institutions in the UK and Greece, private collections, as well as independent projects. He studied the MA Curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art (2018-2020), fully funded by a double NEON scholarship, the Schilizzi Foundation, and the RCA continuation fund. In 2021, Akis was awarded the Develop Your Creative Practice by Arts Council England and participated in the Young Curators Residency Programme at the Fundaciòn Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid. In 2022, he curated the group intergenerational show Doomed companions, unsubstantial shades at the Hellenic Residence in London; commissioned and produced by NEON. The exhibition presented 18 artworks of Greek- speaking migrant contemporary artists including some historically-significant pieces from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Gift. His projects have been featured in international media and platforms including Frieze magazine, Artforum, Damn Magazine, Art Basel Stories, ESTADÃO, El Pais newspaper, among others. Akis’ curatorial practice is focused on ways to disrupt the ‘objective’ and institutional by introducing or supporting other less appreciated and recognised forms of knowledge. Through multidisciplinary discourses, eco-feminist, non-western approaches, and other non-rational thoughts and philosophies, his practice focuses on the less spoken, invisible or liminal. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022). In December 2023, Akis will become the first-ever Fulbright Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC, conducting curatorial research on the global-art initiatives of the museum.

Ioanna Gerakidi
May-June 2023

SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow Ioanna Gerakidi, writer, curator and educator will be travelling to Istanbul for a 6-week curatorial residency program at SAHA Association, where she will get the chance to further develop her research and practice. During her residency, Ioanna will research the subjects of companionship, kinship, witness and solidarity for writing a lexicon of psalms and spells, of idiolects and neologisms, spoken by the ones whose voices haven’t yet been heard. Through engaging diverse communities, her research longs for inventing, transcribing or legitimizing a language of trauma, suffering, catastrophe, political and personal turmoil.

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational and anti-colonial studies. Poetry and other diaristic and archival schemes are often embedded in her practice. She has collaborated with and curated group and solo shows and events for Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens Biennale, State of Concept (Athens), Haus N (Athens), Hot Wheels Athens and Studium Generale of Gerrit Rietveld Academie (at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), among others.
For detailed information: Curatorial Program | Ioanna Gerakidi

Eirini Fountedaki
October-November 2022

The second curator in residence as per SAHA’s partnership with the Athens-based ARTWORKS was Eirini Fountedaki (Athens, 1991). The curator worked at SAHA Studio in the period of October-November 2022, visited artist studios the majority of which were women artists who work with video and sound, while exploring relevant archives, art institutions, and places of memory in Istanbul. During the public presentation she gave at SAHA Studio on 12 November, Fountedaki shared with the audience her experience as the resident of these two programs and details regarding to her ongoing research.

Eirini Fountedaki (Athens, 1991) is an independent curator and writer based in Athens and Berlin. In 2019-2020, she was the co-curator for public programs such as the monthly film series Residing in the Borderlands at the Berlin-based SAVVY Contemporary—The Laboratory of Form-Ideas. She is one of the curators selected to participate in the curatorial workshop titled How now to gather organized during the 11^th Berlin Biennale in 2020. She worked as a research assistant for the publication and exhibition projects at the Bergen Assembly between 2021 and 2022, a period during which she also co-curated film programs for Sinema Transtopia, like the Sounding Womanhood series that focused on feminist perspectives through sound in film.

Eva Vaslamatzi
May-July 2021

Eva Vaslamatzi (Athens, 1990) is an independent curator and writer working between Athens and Paris. Most recently, she was the co-curator for visual arts at DOC!, a non-profit multipurpose space in northeastern Paris (2017-2019), while also working as an assistant curator at the Palais de Tokyo (2018-2019).

Vaslamatzi was in residency at SAHA Studio between May and July 2021. Vaslamatzi visited artist studios, archival and art institutions in Istanbul. She presented her curatorial research at the SAHA Studio Open on 15–19 June and developed her network. She completed her curatorial research by a group exhibition, I heard it from the valleys in Haus N Athen, held on 2 October 2021 – 5 November 2021, featuring works by 6 artists, including Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, and Marina Papazyan from Istanbul. The exhibition's graphic design was done by Kibele Yarman.