October 2025

Notes from Athens

Contemporary Art Spaces

Sascha Behrendt

Photo by Fotini Alexopoulou. Courtesy of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ).

What does art offer to a society in the midst of both local and global change?

Athens is a city of contradictions, beauty, and grit. Crowned by the serene Parthenon atop its rocky Acropolis, a proud relic of Ancient Greek civilization, it is now a fascinating mix of classical sites, neoclassical architecture, and postwar urban sprawl. Its streets below filled with cats, graffiti, dusty, cracked pavements, and the thrill of violet jacaranda trees. Occupied by Turkey for 400 years, after independence the capital was rebuilt according to the romantic architectural notions of 19th-century French, German, and English Western powers. It has evolved into a city that culturally still looks back, but through a new generation of practitioners, is reclaiming ownership of its present and future art narratives.

So how does one write about Athens and art, without layering more visions and fantasies onto its culture? The Greek economy is already fueled by tourism, ancient nostalgia, and shipping, and quickly I realised it was unavoidable. Instead, I can only share snatched glimpses via a fragmented, flawed, and foreign gaze. 

However, as Western capitalist art hegemony descends into slow-motion stagnation, with shrinking art-fair profit margins and auction-house pricing re-jigged, it was a joy to discover vibrant creativity and intellectual discourse within this socially aware and resistant city. Where diverse models to see, share, and discuss art exist. Here, artist self-presentation is not yet cynical, and away from the markets, possibilities feel fluid yet real. 

This is despite the Greek government, which, knocked by the debt crisis after the 2008 Great Depression, has had to prioritize funding to dramatic theaters (up to 400 exist) and museums with archeological artefacts (hello tourism), leaving most contemporary art spaces bereft of public support.

Wealthy private institutions with huge budgets, such as the Onassis Cultural Center (Stegi) and the glittering, futuristic Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, have stepped into this gap. With their huge, fabulous, architectural buildings, highly organised teams, and projects such as Onassis’s populist digital art festival Plasmata III  in the beautifully restored (by them) fragrant Pedion tou Areos Park, their influence and ‘branding’ can dominate through sheer economic power. Yet with a dearth of artist and curatorial financial support elsewhere, their fellowship programs and exposure have been a lifeline to many.

Nevertheless, scattered throughout Athens are smaller non-profits, founders of which studied critical art theory, philosophy, or curatorial studies abroad, coming home to focus on their own unique local concerns and history. Despite difficulty with funding, and already a wariness against creeping real estate gentrification, the horror of which we see now in Lisbon and Barcelona, many independent spaces host experimental works that, in more expensive cities, are just no longer possible. 

Susanne Kriemann, Pechblende (canopy, canopy), library for radioactive afterlife (rhizome cycle) mixed media, installation view TAVROS, 2024. Photo by  Stathis Mamalakis. Courtesy TAVROS.

The generous Tavros Art Space, founded and run by the visionary yet pragmatic Maria-Thalia Carras, with her curators Eirini Fountedaki and Manto Psarelli, is above a boxing gym, and named after its working-class area. It serves the local community, but also a loyal, wider arts network, through its exhibitions, film screenings, performances, talks, and workshops. It has recently started to publish books. Many exciting contemporary Greek artists have passed through its doors at one point or another. 

Within Athens, the polarization of extreme wealth versus a desperate need for funding has Maria-Thalia conscious of a shrinking Greek middle class, and therefore medium-sized organizations for contemporary art and culture. “It's important to have a cultural democracy,” she says, adding,  “What we try to do with every exhibition is think of it as a sort of a bracket for public discourse.” 

In these times of instability, whether geopolitical, or economic and closer to home, TAVROS feels like a nourishing and reassuring hub or meeting point for diverse art, conversation and experiences.  

Angela Melitopoulos, Matri Linear B - Surfacing Earth, installation view as part of AKIN exhibition at TAVROS, 2023. 

Photo Stathis Mamalakis.

Exterior image courtesy of Akwa Ibom.

Another independent space, AKWA IBOM, is an ethically structured and sustained non-profit run by curator and research archivist Maya Touanta, founded in 2019 with Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. Touanta is interested in hosting intersecting disciplines, more than just art exhibitions—from fashion by Kostas Murkudis, the designer and ex-assistant to Helmut Lang, to live music events. The spare, beautiful space with old oak floors is set within a neoclassical building in the anarchist area, Exarcheia. 

Here, I was lucky to catch Greek artist Danae Io’s exhibition Recording Angel, her film and sculptural works tackling the commodification and slippage of Greek identity, whether through the deceptive musings of 19th century Scottish painter James Skene, or government-issued pay phone cards, nationalistically featuring the Acropolis—yet ironically only needed and used by migrant workers. 

Touanta represents two artist-estates, Christos Tzivelos and George Tourkovasilis, under the project name RECORDS in collaboration with Helena Papadopoulos from Radio Athènes, and Andreas Melas of Melas Martinos gallery. Tourkovasilis was a photographer and rare documentarian of 80s rock and punk subcultures in Athens. He recorded life with a passionate, visual, and poetic sensibility, ignoring social norms — all with great aesthetic and philosophical flair. His silver gelatin portrait prints are to die for. 

Danae Io, Dial II at Recording Angel, Akwa Ibom, Athens, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Akwa Ibom.

Danae Io, Recording Angel (17’30”, 2025), film still. Courtesy of the artist and Akwa Ibom.

As the Athen’s art eco-system grapples with its country’s recent politics, economics, migration and history, in response, artist and writer collectives such as The Temporary Academy of Arts (PAT), 3 137, EIGHT / TO OKTΏ, and State of Concept (sadly now only online), have created frameworks for art and politics discussion panels, research projects, and IRL events. The artist and activist Georgia Sagri founded ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE as an online and physical semi-public site for poets, artists, and researchers. Enterprise Projects is a digital space created by curator Danai Giannoglou and artist Vasilis Papageorgiou that presents writings and discussions via  EP Journal, and organises IRL gatherings under the moniker Softwalls. Other alternative spaces include the artist-run Jacqueline gallery, Haus N Athens, Alkinois Project Space, Zoetrope, the new Cypher Gallery, and MISC gallery and publisher. These practitioners, along with others they work with, feel like an electrical undercurrent of arts within the city, responding to both local and wider shifts. 

One could perhaps ask whether some of the unpredictable programming, DIY, and impermanent spaces that exist out of necessity evade the hollowing demands of capitalistic commodification of art, and therefore keep alive, burgeoning original art ideas and expression.

Melas Martinos outdoor detail. Photo by Lorenzo Zandri. Courtesy Melas Martinos gallery, Athens

There are, though, commercial dealers and galleries influencing Athens in positive ways. One of the most beautiful spaces to see art is the architecturally transformed Martinos Melas gallery. Hidden amongst the tourist-cluttered streets of Monastiraki, its top floor opens onto panoramic views of the Rond Agora, two mosques, and the Acropolis. Art dealer and curator Andreas Melas shows impeccable sculptural works by American West Coast artists such as Ken Price (who I adore for his weird subversiveness), Ron Nagle, as well as the playful Swiss Nüri Koerfer, whose animals transformed into furniture have the magic of Klara Kristalova’s ceramics without the strange sadness. Melas quietly plays a key role in supporting the growth of visual arts in Athens, and represents, via RECORDS exclusively with Helena Papadopoulos, the estates of interdisciplinary artist Bia Davou, and mathematician, art innovator Pantelis Xagoraris.

Ron Nagle, Rojo Relations, 2024, for exhibition Ode to a Grecian Formula, 2025. Photo by Paris Tavitian. Courtesy Melas Martinos gallery.

Installation view, Ron Nagle: Ode to a Grecian Formula, 2025. Photo by Paris Tavitian. Courtesy Melas Martinos gallery.

Installation view George Tourkovasilis, Radio Athènes at Paris International with RECORDS, 2024. Photo by Pauline Assathiany.

Papadopoulos, a former New York and Berlin resident who is both free in spirit and taste, runs Radio Athènes as an institute for contemporary art. It is not a radio station, but a hybrid exhibition space and a curatorial practice, presenting lectures, screenings, and readings at 5 Petraki Street as its main base. Past exhibitions include Darren Bader, BLESS, Vlahos Vangelis, and Hairy Who’s, Karl Wirsum. Recently, she presented Italian artist Beatrice Bonino’s work within the meticulously renovated TOSITSA3, a historical neo-classical building with beautifully preserved frescos on its ceilings.

Beatrice Bonino, Little low self-inflamed flame, 2025, The opposite of low-hanging fruit, Radio Athènes, 2025. Photo by Yiannis Hadjiaslanis

Also at TOSITSA3, on alternate floors, were two commercial galleries: the Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery exhibiting photography by Greek poet and psychoanalyst Andreas Embiricos; and Hot Wheels Athens, run by Athens and London based dealers Julia Gardner and Hugo Wheeler, who co-operatively showcased as well as their own, works from London galleries, Sadie Coles HQ, a. Squire, Brunette Coleman and Emalin. 


Thirteen minutes away on foot, you can discover the small, independent Callirhöe gallery, founded by the German/ Greek, Olympia Tzortzi, who trained as a clinical psychologist before working in New York, Vienna, and Berlin. She runs her business with an idealistic passion for artists and their ideas, which I love, and also represents the formidable and talented Paky Vlassopoulou, who, as well as being a good artist, was one of the founders of the collective 3 137.

Big gallery Breeder is almost an institution by now, with regular participation in international art fairs and instant brand name recognition. Within the Athens art business, they have carved out their own corner, with art and design skewing towards a subversive pop aesthetic. However, its associate director, Nicolas Vamvouklis, who runs his own independent pop-up, K-Gold Temporary Gallery on the island of Lesvos, brings multiple sensibilities to the job, including knowledge of choreography, dance, writing, and curation, and it was he who introduced me to the artist Georgia Sagri and her beautiful interdisciplinary Breeder solo show KORE.

Georgia Sagri, KORE, 2025, installation view at The Breeder Athens. Courtesy the artist and The Breeder

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981, The Intermission x Galerie Enrico Navarra © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, installation view, The Intermission x Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2025 Photo: Paris Tavitian.

For a shift in scene, out on the south coast at the port of Piraeus, and easy to reach by subway, are several art outposts clustered along Polidefkous street. Piraeus is where the ferries and boats depart for some of the 227 inhabited Greek islands, so it has a wild and adventurous feel. It is a relief in the summer, when the city seethes in the hallucinatory heat of 90 degrees and up.

One art space there is The Intermission, run by Artemis Baltoyanni, who recently hosted the first exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work in Greece. A go-getter based between LA and Athens, Artemis brings a sunny and improvisatory energy, offering her space with its high wood-beamed ceilings as an alternative pop-up for international galleries to show work. I really liked the fact that she hosted NY artist Dena Jago’s paintings. Artemis brings an interesting international curatorial eye and can-do attitude,

 

A few doors down is the fearless Sylvie Kouvalis, running galleries both in London and Athens. In these economically unpredictable times, many have hedged their bets and played it safe, avoiding obscure or conceptually challenging works. Kouvali represents a daring mix; artists include the abstract Austrian painter Ulrike Müller, Leidy Churchman, former Scottish-based visionary Bernat Klein, and Cypriot Christopoulos Panayiotou. A recent show featured conceptual artist/photographer Hari Epaminonda.

Athens hosts many collaborative visual art projects between museums and private institutions. Over the summer of 2025 at the Benaki Museum in Piraeus, the important DESTE Foundation, founded by influential billionaire Dakis Joannou, presented In A Bright Green Field, showcasing 29 Greek and Cypriot artists, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Senior Curator at the New Museum in New York. It is the third group exhibition organised together, and was proudly promoted I saw, in New York.

Onassis AiR Open Day,, 2025. © photo Stephie Grape for Onassis Stegi.

As contemporary arts evolve in Athens, many residency programs have emerged, becoming important resources for knowledge exchange. In 2019, the hugely influential and well-funded Onassis Foundation began AiR, a much-needed international arts residency and fellowship program for artists and curators, providing studio spaces and a public platform. It recently launched Onassis Ready, which includes a huge three-floor former factory transformed into workspaces for large sculptures, ceramics, and digital technology. Its Technical Residency program adds specific mentorship and support for work intersecting art and technology.

Onassis AiR Open Day, 2024 © photo Pavlos Fysakis for Onassis Stegi.

Onassis AiR Open Day, 2024 © photo Margarita Nikitaki for Onassis Stegi.

Onassis AiR Fellows, 2025-26 © photo Alexandra Sarantopoulou for Onassis Stegi

Photo of Arch residency interior by Paris Tavitian. All artwork © Patricia Treib. Courtesy the artist.

Meanwhile, Atalanti Martinou’s ARCH is a private initiative and spacious art complex, offering residencies, exhibition spaces, a shop with editions, contemporary and vintage ceramics, and a reading art library. Martinou worked young in the high-pressure New York art world with the famed Per Skarskedt, whose impeccable taste with artists and museum-level shows included Cindy Sherman, Cady Noland, Mike Kelley, and Albert Oehlen. Martinou programs her own space in an organic way, listening to artists’ recommendations and responding to opportunities as they occur. This is a luxury she feels is possible in Athens. She says, “If people are focused and really truthful to what they're doing, there's space for everyone to do something that's good quality here.”

Installation view Patricia Trieb exhibition Icon Arms, 2024. Photo by Paris Tavitian. All artwork © Patricia Treib. Courtesy the artist and Arch.

Portrait of Sozita Goudouna in front of painting Cyclopmedia, 2023, by Mia Enell at Opening gallery New York, 2025. © Mia Enell.

Photo by Konstantina Sofianou. Courtesy of Arch.

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings/Street Performance Amsterdam, 2017, Photograph by Victoria Ushkanova

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings/Street Performance Amsterdam, 2017, Photograph by Victoria Ushkanova

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings/Street Performance Amsterdam, 2017, Photograph by Victoria Ushkanova

The People as One Body

The contemporary carnival has become a dull commercial festival that reminds rather [of] a march of the zombies. Bakhtin described the carnivals taking place in the Middle Ages as moments of profound reinvention… where everyone is equal. … To me, the carnival is supposed to give presence, voice and visibility to immigrants and to imagine a better society.” — Gluklya, 2018

On a grey October day in 2017, the streets of Amsterdam filled with the sound of Syrian and Russian folk songs. At the head of the procession, a banner read We Are All Refugees, held high against the damp air. Behind it came a motley assembly: a coat sewn from recycled grocery bags, a dress cobbled together from protest banners, papier-mâché masks with grotesquely oversized mouths. The march began at the former Bijlmerbajes prison, now a temporary refugee center; from barred windows above, a few faces peered down as the parade formed. The air smelled faintly of wet cardboard and coffee from nearby cafés. Every so often, the crowd stopped, and someone stepped forward to speak—stories of bureaucratic limbo, of families split apart, of the ache of homesickness. It was called Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings, and for its organizer, Gluklya, it was not simply a performance, but a shared act of resistance stitched together one garment, one story at a time. The project was born out of a long series of community conversations centered on issues of fair housing and the plight of refugees. 

If Joe Coleman’s Carnival was a tightly packed reliquary of personal obsessions —an inward spiral of relics, icons, and private mythology—Gluklya’s carnival works in the opposite direction, unfolding outward into public space and collective action. Both are rooted in the carnivalesque tradition: inversion of order, the embrace of the grotesque, the refusal to separate art from life. Coleman builds an intimate shrine to his own world; Gluklya convenes strangers to imagine a new one. Together, they suggest that the carnivalesque is not a fixed form, but a living spectrum — capable of being both an obsessive, private cosmos and an open-air rehearsal for another kind of society.

Gluklya—born Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya in Leningrad in 1969—traces her fascination with clothing to a deep dive into the subconscious, where garments became a way of navigating both existential and collective memory. Shaped by the devastation of the Soviet Union and the turbulent years of perestroika—when food was scarce—working with clothes became for her a method of overcoming trauma through solitude, imaginative play, and deep concentration. During long summer holidays at her grandparents’ house, she discovered her Aunt’s silk dresses in an old wardrobe. She danced and conversed with them, then transformed them into art objects by attaching fur collars from her grandfather’s coat, naming them The Androgynous and Hermaphrodite Couple. Later, in her St. Petersburg apartment, she hosted salons that brought together poets, intellectuals, and artists. At the height of these gatherings, male poets would joyfully change into her collection of dresses and dance—moments she identifies as the roots of her carnival. Her first performance, at the Assembly of the Untamed Fashion in Riga (1992–93), featured twelve naked men performing swans while wearing her hand-painted silks. From these beginnings, she has carried forward a practice where clothing is not just material but a second skin for memory, vulnerability, and collective transformation.

She came of age during perestroika, a time when the Soviet Union’s rigid ideological structure began to fracture. The underground cultural life that had existed in whispers and backrooms spilled into public view. For young artists like Gluklya, it was a moment of both liberation and uncertainty—censorship loosening even as political and economic systems collapsed. She gravitated toward art that blurred the boundaries between life and performance, politics and play, reflecting the volatile energy of that era.

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings/Street Performance Amsterdam, 2017, Photograph by Victoria Ushkanova

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings / Street Performance Amsterdam , 2017, Photography : Victoria Ushkanova

In 1995, Gluklya co-founded the Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) with artist Olga Egorova (Tsaplya). The collective staged sartorial performances in courtyards, vacant lots, and cultural institutions, merging the visual language of clothing with performance, installation, and political commentary. Clothing became, for her, a second skin for ideas—a language through which to explore questions of gender, social identity, and power.

The Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings emerged from her ongoing Utopian Unemployment Union—a transnational network of migrants, refugees, artists, and socially marginalized people co-creating new forms of public expression. In this framework, sewing workshops become political laboratories where personal stories are exchanged and transformed into costumes for collective action.

Her current project, Carnival of the Monsters, extends this approach to confront larger systemic forces—bureaucracy, xenophobia, climate crisis, gender violence, and economic precarity. Working with seamstresses and participants in Amsterdam, Central Asia, and Bulgaria, she is developing masks, costumes, and soft sculptures that personify these monsters. 

But Gluklya is not interested in simply portraying these “real” monsters. Her approach is to build solidarity among what she calls a cultural community of the weak—care workers, garment workers, mothers, people with disabilities—and to center their vulnerability as a political force. The next Carnival of the Monsters may paradoxically unfold far from the city streets, beginning on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan.

She draws from Indigenous traditions to understand how we arrived at the catastrophic climate moment we now inhabit. In particular, she has been inspired by the Kukeri—a pagan carnival in Bulgaria where villagers once mirrored the forces of nature that terrified them. The masks and costumes of the Kukeri were not decorative; they were talismans of transformation, made from grass, sheep’s wool, tree branches, animal skins, and dried flowers. The wearers became as frightening as the fears they sought to ward off.

For Gluklya, the lesson is clear: we must learn to frighten the monsters of our own time, not only by confronting them directly but by inhabiting them—by facing our own fears and fragilities so thoroughly that they can be turned inside out and worn as armor. In Amsterdam, Central Asia, and Bulgaria, she works with seamstresses and garment workers to create masks, costumes, and soft sculptures that embody these monsters. As with her earlier work, the process is as important as the final procession: conversation, labor, and solidarity are sewn into every seam.

Shaped by the collapse of one political system and the ambiguities of what followed, Gluklya’s work carries both idealism and pragmatism. She knows the promises and betrayals of utopian rhetoric firsthand, yet she continues to march, sew, and gather others into her process—insisting that the carnivalesque is not a relic of the past, but a living necessity for imagining the world otherwise.

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings/Street Performance Amsterdam, 2017, Photograph by Victoria Ushkanova

A Carnival that Never Ends

“Under, under, under the ground
a place so sensuously unsound
the earth’s rotten center
has never felt better
then when its been scattered and battered around” 

Fennel in the book Marshsong

I know these gestures, these energies. I grew up with them. I recall getting face paint at the Oregon Country Fair in the late 1970s, where naked hippies and the smell of weed wafted over our weekend camp. I remember the CalArts Halloween parties of the early ’80s, where installations made from plastic sheeting and discarded furniture were excuses for students to get weird in oddball regalia. I remember early Burning Man in the mid-1990s, when my friends and I dressed up like Jawas and rammed our makeshift Sandcrawler into an orgy called Bianca’s Smut Shack. Yes, there was bacchanalia, there were costumes, there was resistance. 

And yet, this isn’t nostalgia for a lost golden age of carnival. If anything, our political landscape is saturated with its logic. We live in an age of memes as mass laughter, body image curated for phone screens, and a buffoon as president. The grotesque body is everywhere: in viral videos, in presidential gaffes replayed as comedy, in the spectacular cruelty of public shaming. This is a political and affective carnivalesque, raw and unfiltered—one that thrives on inversion, ridicule, and spectacle.

Here’s the paradox: while our politics revels in this unruly energy, much of the art world—especially the progressive, institutionalized wing—treads with extreme caution. Fear of offending, of being “problematic,” has fostered a culture of careful speech, even as the world outside is drowning in obscenity, violence, and slapstick cruelty. The jesters have become the judges, the audience the executioner, and the stage a tribunal.

Coleman and Gluklya stand as two very different answers to this tension. His is the dark joy of 1980s punk: self-destruction as theater, obsession as devotion, pleasure and horror entwined in a private shrine. Hers is the utopian pageantry of communist street theater repurposed for the fractured global present: a public rehearsal for solidarity, stitched from the stories and bodies of the displaced. Between them lies a map of the carnivalesque not as a single form, but as a landscape—one that can be as intimate as a locked cabinet of relics or as expansive as a city street.

For me, the carnivalesque is not the binary opposite of reality but a terrain of desire and possibility. If, as Graeber and Wengrow suggest, these integrations of play have always been doorways into other ways of living, then the carnivalesque is not a fossil from a lost golden age but a survival strategy. It offers a way to think and feel beyond the tight circuitry of capitalist realism—not as a utopian escape, but as a rehearsal for values and relations that could exist in the here and now. 

It is the dream I keep returning to: the tarp-laden, mud-soaked carnival of Marshsong, its sideshows and broken rides calling to me in the night. Out where the sweat is in the air as the strobe light beckons. Out where the unsettling laughter swirls over a room of cluttered paraphernalia and heavy petting hotel rooms. Where the cops become robbers, the ghettos become sanctuaries, and the dice is rolled eternally. The air tastes like sugar and the museums offer amped up tributes to strange gods.  Where Saintlike communists dress up like Gargamel and East Village punks explode. This world, this dream world, beckons through silt and sand. I walk toward its call not knowing if I will come back.

Nato Thompson, Illustration for Marshsong, 2024

Carnival
Curated by Joe Coleman
Jeffrey Deitch
New York
May 3–June 28, 2025

Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer and performer who has exhibited for four decades in major museums throughout the world including one-man exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Barbican Centre in London, Tilton Gallery and Dickinson Gallery in New York. He was recently featured in the ground-breaking "Unrealism" show in Miami presented by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian.

His performance work from the 1980's was some of the most radical of its time, and can be seen in the films Mondo New York (1988) and Captured (2008). The book on extreme performance, Avant Garde from Below: Transgressive Performance from Iggy Pop to Joe Coleman and G.G. Allin by Clemens Marschall, explores Coleman's influence during this pivotal period.

An avid and passionate collector, Coleman's "Odditorium" is a private museum where sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts and works of religious devotion live together to form a dark mirror that reflects the alternative side of the American psyche. His work has been published in numerous books, prints and records.

Joe Coleman was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997). He has appeared in acting roles in films such as Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva (2000) and The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man (2015). He lives with his wife Whitney Ward in New York.

Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) Lives and works in St Petersburg, Russia and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Considered as one of the pioneers of Russian Performance she co-founded the artist collective The Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) which uses installation, performance, video, text and “social research” to develop the concept of “fragility” – relationships between internal and external and private and public. In 2012, the FFC was reformulated to the Utopian Unemployment Union, a project uniting art, social science, and progressive pedagogy that gives people from different social backgrounds the opportunity to make art together. Since 2003, Gluklya has also been a co-founder and member of Chto Delat group. Gluklya’s work has been exhibited in Russia and abroad in numerous groups shows as well as solo shows, including Wings of Migrants, Gallery Akinci, Amsterdam (2012); Utopian Unions, MMOMA, Moscow (2013), Reflecting Fashion, MUMOK Vienna , (2013 ), Dump Dreams, Scedhalle Zurich, ( 2013); Debates on Division: When the Private Becomes Public, Manifesta 10, Public Program, St. Petersburg (2014), Hero Mother, Berlin (2016), Universal Hospitality (2016), Vienna; Feminism is Politics, Pratt Institute, NY (2016) as well as Clothes for Demonstration Against False Election of Vladimir Putin, 56th Venice Biennale of Art, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor (2015).

From 2019 to 2023, in the context of her research project 'Two Natures of Colonialism: Russian and European'/Lives and Work of Oppressed Women, Gluklya visited Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan. Derived from this research she produced a body of work which  formed her exhibition titled To Those Who Have No Time to Play. (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2022–23).

In 2025, Gluklya was awarded a UK Research and Innovation Network Plus Art Fellowship as part of the Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in Transition'. This fellowship will culminate in a new project titled 'Carnival of Monsters’

Nato Thompson is a curator, author, and cultural strategist based in New York and Philadelphia, known for his influential work at the intersection of art, politics, and public engagement. A champion of socially engaged art, Thompson has held a curatorial role at MASS MoCA and was Chief Curator of Creative Time, where he produced landmark projects such as Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot, and Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures.

He is the Founder and Director of The Alternative Art School, an online global platform connecting visionary artists through accessible, artist-led education. His writing has appeared in major publications including ArtForum, Huffington Post, and Art Journal, and he is the author of Seeing Power and Culture as Weapon.

Thompson holds degrees in Political Theory from UC Berkeley and Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to work with leading contemporary artists and institutions to reimagine the role of art in shaping community and culture.