Onassis Fast Forward Festival 5, Athens

A city of latent myths, histories and multiple truths: the Onassis Foundation has Athens at the core of its existence. Global and local at the same time, site-specific and also situation-specific, the 5th edition of the Onassis Fast Forward Festival is back to occupy public spaces, obscure buildings and established venues in the center of Athens: from the Acropolis Museum to the largest public parks and squares, from public buildings to private houses. There, at the once notable polis of ancient Greece, an unprecedented encounter takes place: socially-engaged artists from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa treat Athens as their local territory and give fuel for dialogues with the inhabitants and citizens.

In collaboration with Greek artists, researchers and residents, artists from Beirut, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Reykjavík, São Paulo, Singapore, St Petersburg, Stockholm and Tokyo unearth Athens’ ancient and recent past and/or share their investigation in similar fields by challenging the notion of expanding archaeology and revealing its multifaceted temporal and spatial dimensions. The bet lies in the idea of approaching Athens further and beyond a geographical site. Athens, a vital paradigm for the city as a palimpsest, reveals multiple layers of time and existence, traces of violence and catastrophes, historical discontinuities and epistemological opacities. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Onassis FFF explores the city in time and space, questioning scientific certainties and historical linearity.

World premieres, commissions and international co-productions, transcending the boundaries of visual and performing arts, are the corpus of the festival, yet its essence is found in the incidental encounters. Through the Onassis FFF, the non-converted are invited to see and re-see spaces that are otherwise invisible on an everyday basis, and treat the public space as grounds to which they have ownership rights. With a two-week program of installations, performances, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, lecture-performances and public debates, this year’s festival features over 18 projects and delves into questions about national identity, cultural heritage, authoritarian legacy of public memory and the interpretation of our erratic history.

This time, the Onassis FFF goes deep into the layers of the city. It brings contemporary art to the Acropolis Museum for the first time. It reimagines the urban system as a living organism whose life starts way back and becomes evident every minute of the present, affecting our everyday existence. Onassis FFF wants to raise curiosity and trigger discussions around what is happening right in front of our eyes, within us, around us. In a sense, it is all about “digging into the past to question our present” in the words of the Lebanese artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, who won the largest contemporary art prize in France, the Marcel Duchamp 2017, for Unconformities, an OCC co-produced project, now presented at the Acropolis Museum.

Curated by Katia Arfara, Artistic Director of Theatre and Dance at the Onassis Cultural Centre

With: Kader Attia, Ali Cherri, Chto Delat (Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Nina Gasteva, Nikolay Oleynikov, Dmitry Vilensky), Hikaru Fujii, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Iceland Dance Company (Erna Ómarsdóttir and Valdimar Jóhannsson), Anton Kats, Medie Megas, Leonardo Moreira, Rabih Mroué, Markus Öhrn, Walid Raad, Ho Rui An, Rayyane Tabet, Mark Teh, Ho Tzu Nyen, Akram Zaatari, Robert Zhao and more