Nikolas Ventourakis
Nikolas Ventourakis is a visual artist living and working in Αthens and London. His practice situates in the threshold between art and document, in the attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image. A quest that unfolds in the decisive years of the digital revolution, when a crucial overlap between producers and viewers seems to have reset all previous critical discourses. Central to Ventourakis's visual work is a denial for a one-way resolution and an invitation to embrace an ambiguous imagery, where the photographic is not yet real, and the familiar is a projection of a mix of memory –stemming from both private and media experiences– with abstract thinking. Ventourakis’s fascination lies in our need for stories to be conclusive, which cannot but clash with the impossibility for apparent pictures to provide any evidence nor "objective truth". This is why his work allows for bias and misinterpretation. Whatever the context –a gallery, a page or the screen of a computer– his photographic images seem to have no unanimous foundation and every viewer is left alone to fill in the missing blanks.
Ventourakis completed an MA in Fine Art (Photography) with Merit at Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London(2013) and is the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013). He was selected for Future Map (2013), Catlin Guide (2014) and Fresh Faced Wild Eyed (2014) at The Photographers’ Gallery as one of the top graduating artists in the UK. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at CalArts with a Fulbright Artist Fellowship and is a fellow of New Museum’s IdeasCity. He was shortlisted for the MAC International and the Bar-Tur Award. Recently he has exhibited at FORMAT Festival, Derby; the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale, Tirana; the parallel program of the 15th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul; “Hors Pistes 14” at Centre Pompidou, Paris; and “The Same River Twice” at the Benaki Museum, Αthens. Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala and is co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Αthens. In 2020 he was awarded the the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.
Nikolas Ventourakis is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals of Onassis AiR 2021-22 and of the Tailor-made Fellowships program 2022-23.
