Panos Kouros

Panos Kouros

Bio

Panos Kouros is artist and art theorist. His academic focus is on contemporary public art in relation to the archive, performance and politics of memory; on institutional critique, dialogic practices and critical pedagogy. His art practice involves public interventions in response to urban situations and institutional art contexts, using diverse processes and media, from architecture constructions, installations and performances, to collective modes of action and inter-personal encounters, mostly occurring outside art institutions. They have been extensively published and presented in many art venues in the US, Greece, Germany, Mexico, China, Italy, UK and other countries; among other, in 9th (2004) and 12th (2010) Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale of Sao Paolo (Urban Void collective 2007), University of Kassel in conjunction with Documenta 12 (2007), MIT Museum (2018). His works are part of individual and museum collections, such as the MIT Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, I.F. Kostopoulos foundation.
He has proposed the concept of performative archive action, which he developed in a series of art projects, as well as in research programs such as Archive Public (2012, Carathéodory basic research program, University of Patras) and Skulptur Projekte Münster Archiv (2018). He has been Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), MIT, the Institute of Cultural Studies (2010, 11) and the Department of Musicology and Media Science (2016) at Humboldt University. He is currently Associate in Hellenic Studies at the Visiting Artist Program of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies (2021-22). He is co-founder of Gregorios Pharmakis plural person (with A. Antonas) and member of Urban Void urban action collective in Athens. He taught at the Department of Architecture, MIT, the Massachusetts College of Art and gave lectures about his work in many universities. He has published numerous articles and research papers on contemporary art in scientific journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. Books include, among other: Constructing the Public Sphere: Topical Works 2002-07, 2007, Urban Void Actions 1998-2006, 2008, Acts of Uttering-together, 2008, Archive Public: Performing Archives in Public Art. Topical Interpositions, 2012.