Enter: New commissions to artists by the Onassis Foundation for artworks created in 120 hours at home

We stay at home. But we are “staying” connected.

The Onassis Foundation announces the commission of new works by artists across generations and the arts. Our conviction is that culture can become medicine in the quarantine period we are currently experiencing.

For the ENTER project, Onassis Stegi and Onassis USA have commissioned artists across the globe to prepare new works in 120 hours. The thought behind it is that we need to include and understand the present, to learn from it, to narrate and banish it, at the same time creating a digital time capsule, which will preserve the memory of this period for future generations. During the pandemic time-space, houses, apartments, gardens, roof-terraces and balconies become our new site-specific stages. Children, husbands and wives, grandparents, roommates, even pets become, alongside their household goods, characters and props, as the artist’s laptop is turned into a creative superpower.

The first artists to welcome us to their homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Montclair, and other places in the USA are: 600 Highwaymen, Maria Antelman, Kimberly Bartosik, Annie Dorsen, Kathryn Hamilton (SisterSylvester), Emily Johnson, Risa Puno, Radiohole, Isabella Rossellini & Paul Magid, Akira Takayama, and Stefanos Tsivopoulos. From Athens to Berlin, from the Vardousia Mountain to Beirut, from Cephalonia’s Karantinata to London, the following artists press ENTER: Elias Adam, Ziad Antar, Simos Kakalas, Evi Kalogeropoulou, Kareem Kalokoh – ATH Kids, RootlessRoot, Vasilis Kekatos, Lena Kitsopoulou, Maria Papadimitriou, Kostis Stafylakis & Theo Triantafyllidis & Alexis Fidetzis, Efthymis Filippou, Andonis Foniadakis, and Daniel Wetzel. Each one, but ultimately all together, create a series of works that beam from their living room over to ours, bringing the message that art cancels out distance.

Τhe ΕΝΤΕR project is not another quarantine diary, but a series of original works created in the conditions of the “here and now” in order to surpass it and bring us together through the world of onassis.org and the Onassis Foundation digital Youtube Channel.

Efthimis Filippou created a monologue about the human species possibly extinct, performed by an Italian in the time of the pandemic (Video 2: Body parts, fabrics and sports), Dimitris Karantzas turns his gaze to the everyday life of a man at home during the lockdown, performed in silence by Enias Tsamatis (Houseplants), OBIE award-winning theater-making duo 600 HIGHWAYMEN (Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone) have created the fictional narrative short film Fighting World, using images taken from Upstate New York between April 9 and 14, Maria Antelman’s video work AntiBody captures the emotional overtones stemming from the restriction of movement due to the pandemic, offering a form of physical and psychological resistance. After a month in quarantine choreographer, performer, and educator Kimberly Bartosik (2019 Guggenheim Fellow) created The Game (a game of absurd exchange), in collaboration with her husband, lighting designer Roderick Murray, and their daughter Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, inviting others to videotape themselves while playing it. Director, writer, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow Annie Dorsen created Training Text, Step 2250, a short cartoon featuring a text generated by a machine learning algorithm, trained on answers to the question “What is the meaning of life?”. Also featured is Happy Hours by NYC performance ensemble Radiohole: a desperate meditation on the extended passage of time as experienced through social distance.

From Monday, 4 May, the following artists welcome us to their homes. Elias Adam will present a different Hamlet. Simos Kakalas has prepared a series of videos titled Tarantino. Vasilis Kekatos created a short film about love that persists in a deserted world, with music by Pavlos Pavlidis (As You Sleep The World Empties). Through their world-famous Fighting Monkey Practice, RootlessRoot will help us manage better everyday life with a series of videos screened in sequel on a weekly basis. Inspired by the brand new song of American composer Active Child “Color Me”, also featuring in this work, Andonis Foniadakis created a duet that decreases distance choreographing, from his apartment in Paris, two dancers in Montreal through Skype (st Dominique bd Arago). Emily Johnson’s “dance” traverses one hundred years, teleporting the past in the future (inbetween Kwimiak, blue). Kathryn Hamilton (Sister Sylvester) created a series of microscopic scenes, focusing on behavioral changes of an organism, gene sequences, human DNA, also weaving Brecht into it. In Untitled [Junkopia Redux], Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ gaze is suspended between uncertainty for the past and agony for the future.

Press ΕΝΤΕR free of charge and time limit, and explore artistic works that reflect on the current situation

“We needed something to breath differently. To see and live through an experience proving that the mind does not stop giving birth to ideas when you enclose it, out of necessity, in the four walls of a house; that imagination does not stop, when we are surrounded by fear of what is happening, by the agony of what may come to pass. We turned towards the people who transport us to other worlds; to those who, with their art, enrich our lives. The artists. This group of people who tend to our soul and move our thought. How does a dancer dance in his kitchen? How many images capture the eyes of a director, when he spends most of his time on his couch? Is the entire house a scene? We enter in order to see. As guests. You too. ENTER.”

“The space created, filled and tragically sometimes taken away by COVID, has challenged how we experience and make new art. This strange combination of isolation and constant reaching out; of new ways of listening and talking, and of touching and being touched—have inspired us to create a new commissioning program called ENTER which we hope will be in part a kind of artistic time capsule, refracting the frustration, grief, comedy, and fear of this moment of pandemic. We hope this is just round one of many micro-commissions—all native to quarantine, digital delivery, and social distance. With these works we champion and support the artists who we believe will articulate our future, and enable them to stride forward in new forms. These artists (and their families, pets and homes!) represent a diverse array of ideas, genres, disciplines and histories—both familiar and new to the Onassis Foundation. Each has been made under severe time constraints with only the materials they had at hand. That is to say, we love their ambition and blemishes equally.”