Interview by Zeta Tzioti

Sotiris Bahtsetzis is among those who embody this expanded understanding of art. He serves as President of the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Practices, art historian, exhibition curator, and Artistic Director of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation. His work bridges theoretical research with an active presence in the field of contemporary culture. His academic career includes studies and research at Technische Universität Berlin, a Fulbright Fellowship at Columbia University, and numerous international collaborations across Europe and the United States. His scholarship focuses on contemporary art, curatorial practices, visual and media studies, and the intersections between culture, society, and the creative industries.

His recent books, Chrono-politics and Topo-economies: Understanding the Present and Designing the Future and Gender Is the Medium: Marcel Duchamp’s Work and the Remediation of Gender, further affirm a sustained research trajectory that connects art history with some of the most pressing issues of our time.

-Mr Bahtsetzis, in recent years your work has focused extensively on curatorship, visual culture, and the public reception of art. What do you consider to be the most significant changes that the digital era has brought to the way audiences “read” an exhibition?

-Over the past decade, curatorial practice, visual culture, and the public reception of art have undergone profound transformations under the influence of the digital age.

Perhaps the most significant change is that visitors no longer enter an exhibition as blank slates. They have already encountered images of the artworks through social media, read reviews and comments, and formed expectations long before stepping into the museum. The exhibition experience begins well before one’s arrival and often continues long after leaving.

At the same time, constant exposure to an endless stream of images has reshaped our attention spans, familiarising us with speed, fragmentation, and continuous shifts of focus. This presents a major challenge for curatorial practice, which is now called upon to create conditions for slowing down and reflection, allowing viewers to pause before an artwork and discover its multiple layers of meaning.

In a world of perpetual acceleration and digital mediation, art can offer something increasingly rare: time for contemplation.

Equally important is the fact that digital culture has fostered a far more active relationship between audiences and works of art. Visitors want to participate, compare, connect, and generate their own content. This does not mean exhibitions should become spectacles. Rather, curators should create frameworks in which visitors become co-interpreters of the exhibition narrative—with or without digital technologies.

-As the founder of the Laboratory of Visual Culture and Curatorial Practices at the University of Thessaly, which research fields do you believe will occupy the international scholarly community in the coming years?

-The establishment of the Laboratory reflects broader shifts within contemporary research. The boundaries between art history, philosophy of technology, visual culture, and curatorial studies are becoming increasingly porous, with the most stimulating questions emerging precisely where different disciplines intersect.

One of the most important areas concerns ecology and new forms of coexistence. Climate change has shifted attention away from representing nature toward understanding the interdependent relationships among humans, non-human life, materials, and the environment. This transformation influences not only artistic production but also curatorial practice, which increasingly addresses issues of care, sustainability, and collective responsibility.

Equally significant is the public role of art. In an era marked by polarisation, misinformation, and growing distrust of scientific knowledge, museums and exhibitions should not function as institutions of superficial consensus. Rather, they should become spaces for public dialogue where diverse forms of knowledge, participation, and democratic coexistence can meet.

At the same time, curatorship is increasingly understood as a cultural practice of knowledge production within the framework of the Cultural and Creative Industries—one of the European Union’s strategic priorities. An exhibition is no longer simply a means of presenting research; it can itself become a form of research, a way of thinking and producing theory through images, objects, and spatial experience.

This constitutes the central mission of our Laboratory, where theory and practice are approached as inseparable processes.

-Having observed the Greek contemporary art scene for decades, how would you describe its current state? Has it acquired a stronger international voice than in the past?

-Greek contemporary art is currently experiencing an especially dynamic phase. Compared to two or three decades ago, Greek artists now actively participate in international conversations rather than being perceived merely as representatives of a national scene.

They contribute meaningfully to global debates surrounding ecology, technology, migration, memory, biopolitics, care, and new forms of collectivity.

A new generation of artists works with remarkable theoretical sophistication, free from anxieties about international recognition or the need to demonstrate a specifically “Greek” identity. This evolution has been made possible through the development of new institutions, independent art spaces, residency programs, international collaborations, and curatorial initiatives. Even the period of economic crisis unexpectedly became a catalyst for greater international networking.

Where improvement is still needed is infrastructure.

Greece possesses exceptional artists and curators, yet it still lacks stable mechanisms to support artistic production, research, and international networking. More institutions are needed that invest not only in exhibiting art but also in producing it.

-Having worked in Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, what do you see as the principal differences between the Greek art ecosystem and those elsewhere in Europe?

-The principal differences lie in the structures that support artistic creation.

Across much of Europe, there has been sustained investment in museums, universities, residency programs, foundations, fellowships, and systematic funding for artistic research. These conditions enable artists to work with longer-term perspectives and to take creative risks.

In Greece, by contrast, artistic initiatives often remain fragmented, with success depending more on the commitment of dedicated individuals than on stable institutional frameworks.

Yet this relative lack of institutionalisation also constitutes one of Greece’s greatest strengths. Greater flexibility, openness to collaboration, and freedom to experiment can become significant creative advantages—provided they are accompanied by long-term strategic thinking rather than attempts to imitate foreign models.

However, when discussing the art ecosystem, we should not limit ourselves to museums and cultural organisations. The ecosystem begins in schools.

In an increasingly visual culture, the absence of Art History from primary and secondary education represents a significant gap.

Art History is not simply a subject for future artists or historians. It is fundamentally a form of visual literacy. It teaches students how to read images, understand how meaning is constructed, recognise stereotypes, and critically examine the ways images shape thought and public life.

In an era of deepfakes, misinformation, cyberbullying, and image-based violence, this is first and foremost an educational and cultural issue. Art History can cultivate critical observation, emotional intelligence, empathy, and openness toward diversity, helping young people understand that there is never only one way of seeing the world.

-The idea of “art for social change” has been a recurring theme throughout your career. Do you believe art still possesses genuine social and political influence, or has it been reduced to a symbolic role?

-I would be cautious both of the optimistic belief that art alone can change the world and of the opposite view that it is merely symbolic and politically ineffective. Reality is considerably more complex.

Art rarely changes laws or political systems directly. It does not govern societies or solve economic problems.

Its unique power lies elsewhere: in transforming the ways we perceive the world. It creates new forms of sensibility, new languages, new images, and ultimately new ways of thinking and imagining coexistence.

These ideas are explored in my recent book Chrono-politics and Topo-economies: Understanding the Present and Designing the Future, where I discuss concrete examples of how art operates in society.

Major social transformations often require this shift in the collective imagination before they become political realities. This is far more than symbolic; it is profoundly political.

At the same time, we should be careful not to evaluate art exclusively according to its social or political message.

If art becomes merely an instrument for achieving measurable outcomes, it risks losing precisely what distinguishes it: its ambiguity, its openness to multiple interpretations, and its capacity to generate questions rather than provide ready-made answers.

That is where its political power truly resides.

-As Artistic Director of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, you have helped develop a distinctive model that brings together art, landscape, and tourism. How can contemporary art contribute to sustainable cultural development in regional areas?

-I believe we should first reverse the way this question is usually framed.

Rather than asking how art can serve tourism, we should ask how tourism can become an opportunity for meaningful cultural experience. That is a fundamental distinction.

Art has often been used as a tool of cultural branding—a way to make destinations more attractive. While this may generate short-term benefits, it rarely produces lasting cultural value.

Sustainable development requires something deeper: art must become embedded within a place, engaging with its history, natural environment, and above all the people who live there.

This is precisely what we seek to achieve at the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation.

Our ambition is not simply to place artworks within spectacular landscapes. Rather, we aim to commission works that could exist nowhere else—works shaped by the encounter between artists and the specific geology, light, memory, and everyday life of a place, where the landscape becomes a co-creator rather than a backdrop.

Commissioning new works, hosting artist residencies, collaborating with researchers, and enabling artists to spend extended periods within local communities leave a far deeper and more lasting impact than temporary cultural events.

I would go one step further.

The Anthropocene challenges not only the arts and the humanities, but also our common sense and contemporary civilisation as a whole.

Moreover, sustainability concerns not only the environment; it is equally social and cultural.

A place becomes genuinely sustainable when it generates knowledge, creativity, and relationships of trust.

The Foundation’s award-winning project Chronotopia, by Canadian artists Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett, addresses precisely this issue. It invites us to understand the environment as an active participant in our lives.

Ultimately, I do not believe we will truly comprehend climate change until we experience it through the lenses of fiction—whether visual art, literature, or cinema.

People learn through stories and images that shape patterns of desire—not, unfortunately, through science alone, despite decades of scientific warnings about the climate crisis that we continue to ignore.

I believe this represents the future of cultural tourism: not the pursuit of spectacle or novelty, but the creation of experiences that fundamentally transform our relationship with place and genuinely enrich our lives.

Profile in Brief

Sotiris Bahtsetzis is President of the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Practices. He received his doctorate summa cum laude in Art History from Technische Universität Berlin, where his dissertation examined the historical development of installation art in the twentieth century.

He was a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University (2009) and a DAAD Fellow at the Museum of Installation in London (2001). He also serves as Artistic Director of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation.

His interdisciplinary research focuses on visual and media studies, curatorial practices as modes of knowledge production, social participation and cultural innovation, and the relationships among contemporary art, cultural policy, and the cultural and creative industries.

His recent publications include Chrono-politics and Topo-economies: Understanding the Present and Designing the Future (Gutenberg, 2024) and Gender Is the Medium: Marcel Duchamp’s Work and the Remediation of Gender (Futura, 2025).