Description: The Department of Fine & Applied Arts at the University of Western Macedonia presented its eight volume of event series “Performance now”, focusing on concerns around performance, public space and the social sphere in connection to the current pandemic. The rupture of the artist - audience relation, the new condition of gathering in the digital ‘space’ and changes in the physical experience of public space brought about by post-pandemic restrictions, transform the perception of one’s self and of the other. By “Isolating in public”, visual artist PASHIAS presents the journey of his practice in the pandemic era, through proposals for performance artworks that have been rejected or postponed, with complications and solutions, being restricted and adapting to changes of space, time and ‘manner’ of the live act and the relationship of artist to audience. This enforced ‘versatility’ gains its own performative dimension, presented as the work’s new reality, in order to re-examine the significance of art according to social settings and governing agents. Through the examination of PASHIAS’ artistic practice, curator and architect Dimitris Venizelos brings up the question of an already-existing dimension of distance within the work, embodied in the physicality of separating body as object and viewer as receiver, that can be paradoxically employed as a tool of connection and togetherness.

Isolating in public: The failed, the postponed, the restricted, the adapted & the optimistic in PASHIAS’ artistic practice for 2019-21

Online lecture for "Performance now v.8: Where are we now?" / Curated by Angeliki Avgitidou / Department of Fine & Applied Arts - University of Western Macedonia / 2021

Lecture Moderators: Angeliki Avgitidou, Dimitris Venizelos

Photo: Georgia Kostantinou by Sergio Vaccaro, Editing: PASHIAS