FELLOWS

Areti Botsari

2018/19 Athens

Areti Botsari was born in 1983 in Patras. She studied Political Sciences (University of Athens) and Cultural Management (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh). She currently works as an art curator based in Greece, organising and curating contemporary exhibitions in art institutions and festivals (Art-Athina, TAF-The Art Foundation, Saristra Festival etc). In Edinburgh, she worked as a Gallery Assistant at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, as well as coordinating the visual arts program of the Edinburgh Greek Artists Festival. She likes to develop exhibitions based on creative and stimulating ideas, so her last work was about... Boobs ! Motivated by the impact that arts and culture can bring to the local community, she believes that cultural managers should try to make these accessible to the audience in amusing and participatory ways.

Her involvement in the START capacity building program in Germany is a demonstration of Areti’s aspiration to gain skills and knowledge in the field of sociocultural management, as well as to meet new and creative people who inspire her to focus on her goals and develop her work. Following on from this Fellowship, her project ‘The Traveling Gallery’ aims to bring visual arts to communities in Patras through highly engaging exhibitions.

Project Title

The Travelling Gallery

The project is about bringing visual arts to the local community through highly engaging exhibitions.

The Travelling Gallery is a socio-cultural project that aims to give audiences throughout Achaia, Greece the opportunity to experience contemporary visual art exhibitions by renowned Greek artists that live and work in Greece. This mobile art gallery will travel with a vehicle across the region, visiting primary and secondary schools, yet touring to public spaces such as squares, parks, local authority areas and main public institutions.
The artists will be showcasing work in a variety of media, having as a main goal to create art of high quality, communicative and engaging to a wider audience. The exhibitions will be ranged from specially commissioned one and two-person installations to themed group shows, exploring new concepts and technologies, representative of current trends in contemporary art.

In addition to the art exhibitions that aim to create a positive impact to the local community, we aim to build a strong learning and engagement program through formal and informal learning. We aspire to make the best possible involvement of the local community by bringing working artists to them; in specific we plan to organise / design educational workshops and artist-led education events, aiming to explore ideas, skills and concepts incorporated in the exhibition.

Host Institution

St. Spiritus

Sozio-kulturelles Zentrum St. Spiritus offers an atmospheric platform for numerous events with a concert stage in the historic chapel and the open-air stage in the courtyard. The spectrum comprises live music, puppetry, theater, cabaret, readings and other live events. Associations and organizations value St. Spiritus as a gathering place and performance venue. Changing exhibitions in the "gallery in the chapel", artistic workshops, rehearsals of the St. Spiritus choir, regularly occurring art classes and the intercultural café all round out the offering.