Danai Giannoglou: Glossolalia | Onassis Foundation

Danai Giannoglou’s curatorial research will focus on ideas that touch upon matters of language and translation in conjunction with the experience of homeness and belonging. In the past this research has taken the shape of exhibitions, multidisciplinary projects and publications, such as "Missing Homes" (group show) at Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn-NL (June 2021), "On the tip of the tongue" at Enterprise Projects in Αthens (May 2021) as well as the coordination of the online platform Enterprise Projects Journal since 2018. With the support of the Οnassis AiR Tailor-made Fellowships program, Giannoglou will research story-telling traditions and the practices of Greek and international artists who include linguistic systems, codes or written word in their work in an effort to explore the common ground between visual art and literature, language as a means of communication, but also oppression, the absurdity of translation, as well as the motivation and interest behind invented languages. The research will be informed by reading sessions and workshops that will be open to the Οnassis AiR community as well as to other participants.

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Enterprise Projects Journal, ed. Danai Giannoglou

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Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
2. Art Athina 2023, Talks Program, cur. by Danai Giannoglou. Panel discussion with Kostas Stasinopoulos, Kika Kyriakakou, Fanis Kafantaris.

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Photo: Alexandra Masmanidi
Chrysanthi Koumianaki, RSVP, installation and performance view, cur. by Danai Giannoglou, B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music, 2022

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Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
On the tip of the tongue, installation view, Enterprise Projects, 2021. From left to right: Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Kostas Roussakis

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Photo: Jimena Gabriella Gauna
Lydia Ourahmane, Survival in the afterlife, installation view, cur. by Monika Szewczyk & Danai Giannoglou, de Appel Amsterdam, 2021

Creator's note

My research for the Onassis AiR Tailor-Made Fellowship is part of an ongoing, lengthy research that has been accompanying my practice – and is my practice – for many years. In that sense, the fellowship was not the occasion to conclude a certain project or shape a specific argument but rather the opportunity for condensed and organized time to explore thoughts and possibilities. If I look for a tangible result of the residency, this would be a series of notes and scribbles on multiple notebooks as well as a binder of printed poems, essays, and newsletters.

I have always been drawn to language: how it functions, what we do with it, its endless possibilities, its inevitable, promising, and destructive character. In a certain way, my research on words and their translation took its first shape in 2019 while I was an Onassis AiR Emergency Fellow and participating at de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. I am glad I got to continue thinking and working on this matter, three years later, within the same framework.

During the residency, I focused on poetry, literature, and visual art practices that would first and foremost function as vehicles for my own understanding of the different relationships to language and translation as a right and as a struggle. Etel Adnan’s “To write in a foreign language” and Ocean Vuong’s “On earth we are briefly gorgeous” were two readings that turned out to be important pillars of my time at Onassis AiR, next to the visual art practice of Irma Blank and Gala Porras-Kim that I managed to research further in these past months. One of the most important aspects of the Fellowship was that it offered me the opportunity to find interlocutors in practices and people. Some of these interlocutors were already close – even part of the Onassis AiR community – some were farther and some I wish to bring closer.

My participation at the Open Day in December 2022 served as a moment to discuss these relationships and the thoughts that brought me to this research, in an attempt to understand where I was going and how I could continue going. My wish for the conclusion of the Fellowship is for it to become a live hybrid bibliography and set of references that will be shaped collectively and carry in its core the experience and idea of poetry as policy.

One of the structural components of curatorial work is that it is rarely self-defined, it is based on relationships, exchange, and practices beyond your own. A continuous research that goes in and out of frames is not an easy task and is definitely difficult to communicate when it is not accompanied or illustrated by a final, tangible – beyond my scribbles – result. However, I do believe in slowness and the powerful process of distilling and I am glad that Onassis AiR created a structure of trust around that.