29. – 30.04.2025 | Talk and workshop
Maya Tounta: McCloud
"I forgot the opening line…Flight of birds, the flight of man... Man's similarity to birds, birds' similarity to man. These are the subjects at hand. And we will explore them for the next hour or so, hoping that we draw no conclusions, for otherwise the subject will cease to fascinate us. And alas, another dream would be lost," says the ornithologist at the beginning of Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970).
“Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment,” writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, referencing Husserl and the phenomenologists.
These are two passages that really stood out to me recently. They are not necessarily illustrative, but they offer a present notation that resonates with the art this talk will focus on—art created outside the formal canons of professionalized art-making, often produced privately and for personal consumption. This is art that captures moments of heightened awareness or emotional intensity—what we might call 'privileged moments'—or has the power to transform ordinary instances into such moments. It aggregates meaning and presentness, while intentionally resisting conclusion. The session will serve as a platform for sharing recently uncovered material from the archives of photographer George Tourkovasilis (1944–2021) and sculptor Christos Tzivelos (1949–1995)—represented collectively by Akwa Ibom, Melas Martinos, and Radio Athènes—with minimal mediation. This will include images, excerpts from texts, correspondence, and collected ephemera. The talk will provide context on how we came to know the works of Tourkovasilis and Tzivelos, highlighting works created in the context of friendship—works made with a specific audience in mind but never published. Building on this, I will discuss Akwa Ibom and the 15th Baltic Triennial, co-curated with Tom Engels, in reference to exhibition-making that, despite its public nature, strives to preserve some of the personal (and interpersonal) qualities of the art discussed here.
The workshop can last up to three hours, but it will include students contributing references—excerpts from literature, movies, music, or anything they find interesting from their own work or others’. There will also be a shared discussion that aims to capture some of the directness of the conversations shared by Hong Sang-soo’s language teacher in A Traveler’s Needs. If student references can lead to suggestions for specific site visits, even better—one person’s reference could become the site where we get acquainted with someone else’s.
Maya Tounta is a curator, writer, and artist currently based between Athens, Greece and Vilnius, Lithuania. She is currently the director of Akwa Ibom (Athens), a nonprofit exhibition space which she co-founded with Otobong Nkanga in 2019. With Gerda Paliušytė, Gediminas G. Akstinas and Liudvikas Buklys, Tounta co-founded Montos Tattoo in Vilnius. From 2021 to 2022, she was Art Director at e-flux journal. In collaboration with Tom Engels, she co-curated the 15th Baltic Triennial at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius in 2024.
Talk
29.04.2025 7 pm
Studio Widmann A 2.30