The activities of the 16th Audiovisual Arts Festival of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts in collaboration with the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Lab (EPHMEE) of the Department of Music Studies of the Ionian University, were successfully completed with great participation of the university community and the local community of Corfu.
The 16th Festival took place from 11 to 29 May 2023, while the last activity of the Festival, which is part of the broader framework of artistic activities, the Group Exhibition "Exercises of the Gaze" by the Advanced Drawing Lab of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, is in progress and is hosted at ERSI Gallery, in Athens, until 8 July 2023.
The opening of the Festival took place with the exhibition of Leda Patta's "SEED STUDY" at the Municipal Gallery of Central Corfu & Interprovincial Islands, followed by a number of different artistic activities, in which students of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, professors of the same Department and of the Department of Music Studies, as well as invited professors and artists from abroad participated.
As was the case in previous festivals, last May the scientific and educational activities preceded the artistic events in the programme.
In the first part, the International Conference on Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges was held, with keynote speakers Marianna Strapatsakis, visual artist and former Associate Professor of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University and founding member of the Interactive Arts Laboratory, and Erik Knudsen, filmmaker and professor of Media Practice at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the UK.
The two-day conference was followed by the open cycle of seminars and workshops "AV-School" focusing on cinema and feminist performance with academic staff such as Maria Aslanidis and Iakovos Panagopoulos, both lecturers at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University, Assistant Professor of Pathology Aisen Caro Chacin, filmmaker and professor of Media Practice Erik Knudsen, and artists Justine Goussot, Daniella LaGaccia, Marcela I. Oteíza and Lyndsey Walsh.
In the second part of the Festival programme, artistic events and activities focused on students' works, faculty and invited international artists such as visual artist Leda Patta, director Spyros Kavakopoulos, performance artists Sara Cowdell, Justine Goussot, Daniella LaGaccia and musicians Martin Kaltenbrunner and Enrique Mendoza. Works from all levels of artistic studies (undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral) were presented with the results of this academic year's courses in the Department of Audio and Visual Arts and the Department of Music Studies.
From 22 May to 5 June, video screenings of film and documentaries, electro-acoustic music concerts, photography exhibitions, illustration-comics and installations and a series of live activities in the field of performance and gaming took place. Also, radio sound effects with Spyros Kavakopoulos and the theatrical performance "The Dinner Game" by Francis Weber by the student theatre group AVARTS THEATER were added to the general programme.
This year's collaborations with the Lab of New Media for Visual Arts of the School of Visual & Applied Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Kalamata ShortDocs Film Festival were noteworthy.
Many thanks to the local public and private institutions, to the teaching staff and student volunteers of the Ionian University for their support and to all sponsors for their contribution https://avarts.ionio.gr/festival/2023/en/sponsors/
For the support of the coordinating committee of the 16th Festival:
Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, Head of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts
Konstantinos Tiligadis, Deputy Head of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts
Hari Marini, Head of Artistic Activities
Michalis Panagopoulos, Head of the Scientific Conference
Dalila Honorato, Head of Educational Activities
Apostolos Loufopoulos, Head of Music
