On language, history, care
Artist talk: Theo Prodromidis
Friday, 11th of April, 2025, 7 pm - 8.30 pm
@tranzitiasi,
Address: Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, Iași
Theo Prodromidis will expand on his personal history of art practice through collaborative processes and working relationships as a starting point and take a self-reflective look through the challenges of aesthetic production of crisis (for and from Athens) but also through involvement in initiatives on solidarity education and social movements. Theo will invite us to follow threads of language, fragments of oral history and reflect upon places of care.
His visit to tranzit Iasi is part of an artistic residency that is an ongoing interdisciplinary research thinking together with both individuals and collective formations from the position of intersectional struggles. Taking the form of a road trip that aspires to develop an artwork while moving, the residency will also attempt to locate the mobility of language and labour in the post-Ottoman and contemporary landscapes in the area of the Danubian Principalities, the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Taking as a starting point Theo’s Vlach/ Valach (nomadic) heritage, the residency process will formulate a response to the question of how to be both situated and nomadic in terms of crisis and need; the examination of the historical background will play a crucial role in forming a group to talk and produce about experiences of migration, mobility, war, mountains, the rivers and the sea.
Later this month, on the 23rd of April 2025, we will also host the public screening “2 or 3 ways we can make a portrait of each other” in which we will introduce three moving image works that the artist made in collaboration with others: “Growing up to the beauty of speed” (3min11sec ; 2017), “Children of the sun (acting)”, (27min, 2020) and “30 years and one day” (10min, 2021)
Theo Prodromidis (b. 1979, Thessaloniki, Greece) is a visual artist based in Αthens, Greece. He studied Contemporary Media Practice at the University of Westminster and was awarded an MFA in Fine Art by Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007. Theo’s artistic research and practice on performativity, participation and citizenship has been activated in both institutional and non-formal spaces of learning, action and exhibition.His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries, museums and festivals such as the Victoria Square Project, GMK Zagreb, 3rd Industrial Art Biennial, Furtherfield, Galerija Nova, State of Concept Αthens, the 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the 4th Αthens Biennale, i.a. Since 2021, he was the co-leader of “An album from our square", supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University and a fellow of AFIELD. His artistic research has been supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture and has participated, through the production of new work, in the program "Cοmmunities of Learning, Bridging the Gap of Isolation" initiated by WHW and supported by the Culture of Solidarity Fund of the European Cultural Foundation. In 2023, he was a resident artist at the Public Activities Department of Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
The main partner of tranzit.ro is ERSTE Foundation.
@tranzitiasi, www.tranzit.org, videostream.ro, unuplusunu.org.
Theo Prodromidis residency to tranzit Iasi is part of a mobility program that is funded by the European Union and the Goethe-Institut. However, the views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union. #CultureMovesEurope; #PushBoundaries #CreativeEurope
Faisal Khodsuz & Theo Prodromidis, Growing up to the beauty of speed, 2017, video still, courtesy of the artists