Akis Kokkinos is an international art curator based in Greece. In 2021, he founded DEO, the first contemporary art organization on Chios Island, Greece.

For over thirteen years, Kokkinos has collaborated with major cultural institutions and private collections, while also undertaking independent projects. He has curated exhibitions and programs for esteemed organizations such as the Irene Panagopoulos Collection (Athens), NEON Organization for Culture and Development D. Daskalopoulos (Greece), Gasworks (UK), Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Spain), among others.

Kokkinos has worked closely with international artists on new commissions, including Paulo Nimer Pjota, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Maro Michalakakos, Francis Offman, Mohammad Alfaraj, and many others. His curatorial projects have received international press coverage from The New York Times, Artforum, ArtReview, Frieze Magazine, DAMN Magazine, Art Basel Stories, ESTADÃO, and El País.

Kokkinos has been honored with numerous international awards, fellowships, and residencies, including the Fulbright Fellowship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim (2024, NYC), the SAHA Curatorial Residency supported by ARTWORKS (2023, Istanbul), the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022, Athens), the Young Curators Residency Program at the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (2021, Madrid), and the “Develop Your Creative Practice” grant by Arts Council England (2021, London).

Kokkinos holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art (2018–2020) from the Royal College of Art in London, supported by scholarships from NEON, the Schilizzi Foundation, and the RCA Continuation Fund.

Why do we need residencies in regional contexts?

Elizabeth Chisholm

Valentyna Janů

Sara Enrico

After a flight from Athens to Paris, a train ride, a missed connection, and a few hours waiting in a kebab shop, I finally found myself in the southwest of France. While still at the kebab shop, Maria Hohmann, the residency’s coordinator, who would soon become a friend and residency companion, picked me up to drive me to the residency premises deep down the countryside. It’s dark, we are on a highway, and all of a sudden, a truck tailgating us aggressively, a scene equally fit for horror or comedy. We take a side road. No human presence around. Just me and this stranger I met 30 minutes ago.

And I am thinking - is it just the artworld that cultivates this kind of bravery? A field where trust is extended generously across people, places, and precarious situations, where one willingly disrupts the routine of daily life for encounters that feel, at first glance, entirely random? Art professionals are trained in the choreography of exploration: biennials in unfamiliar cities, residencies in far-flung locations, dinners with strangers who become collaborators by dessert. So this was simply one more entry into the genre.

After two hours in the dark - spatially and psychologically - we reach La Boissière, a family estate and home of Launch Pad LaB. Three artists had already been welcomed as residents a few weeks ago: Sara Enrico (IT), Valentyna Janů (CZ), and Elizabeth Chisholm (CA/UK). I had met them online weeks earlier; now we would spend a long weekend together.

The setting could have been directed by Éric Rohmer: a fireplace, a rotunda dining table, bread, cheese, wine appearing as if through divine intervention, and time - real, uninterrupted time - to connect. After years in London, New York, Athens, Istanbul, I know how rare it is to encounter such conditions. Regional residencies formalize what metropolitan life renders almost impossible: the slow architectures of attention, the long-duration conversations, the small domestic rituals that create trust.

Through our discussions, it became clear that each artist had arrived for entirely different reasons. Sara had just opened a major solo exhibition Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin, conceived for the gardens of GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano with Fondazione Furla, and came seeking decompression, space, and recalibration. Elizabeth, a London-based painter, arrived to unsettle her own habits, to see her work differently, to soften its edges. Valentyna, whose practice moves between film, installation and sculpture, came to clear the noise of the city and find silence for writing the script of her next film.

The residency’s structural intervention- its temporal generosity, its rural remove, its dismantling of the usual pressures- allowed these motivations to reverberate across one another, forming a constellation in which Maria and I were also participants. Such interventions matter because they suspend the urban demands of productivity, acceleration, and perpetual visibility. They create conditions for wandering, for failing, for reorientation- a methodology for allowing new systems of thought to emerge.

This constellation expanded the next day when Irene Aristizábal, Director of FRAC Poitou-Charentes, joined us. Over lunch we discussed her decision to leave her role as Head of Curatorial & Public Practice at BALTIC and return to France; the shifting geographies of artistic “centers”; and the dissolving promises of London, Paris, New York as inevitable destinations. We found ourselves in an unexpectedly intergenerational conversation about the gap between Millennials and Gen Z- their differing expectations for work, care, ambition, sustainability. Serious, naïve, cringe, hopeful: all of these exchanges reinforced the sense of safety and thoughtful friction required to undertake meaningful critique.

And so, the next day, I entered each studio for long, patient visits...

As I repack my clothes ready to get back to my "normal" life and say goodbye to the countrysideroutine, I’m thinking that residencies in regional contexts matter because they recalibrate our temporal and relational economies. They remove us from the accelerations of major art centres - where visibility often eclipses vulnerability- and place us in environments shaped by slowness, interdependence, and porousness. In these settings, artists and curators are no longer performing their roles within metropolitan ecosystems; instead, they are allowed to inhabit uncertainty, to reconfigure their practices, to think without the noise of expectation.

Regional residencies offer what cities no longer reliably can:
time,
quiet,
attentiveness,
shared meals,
expanded conversations,
the possibility of surprise,
and the suspension of professional choreography.

They generate the conditions for deep work - for rethinking methods, reframing problems, and forming constellations across disciplines and personalities. They provide a training ground for trust. They allow us to get lost- geographically, conceptually, collaboratively- and to understand that getting lost is often the beginning of new knowledge.

In this sense, regional residencies are not peripheral to cultural production; they are its catalysts. They are not “away from the centre”; they are laboratories where new centres- new ways of working, thinking, and relating- are quietly and insistently formed.

Thank you to the three resident artists for allowing critique to unfold without performance; to Maria Hohmann for her hospitality and care; to the staff at the house for making my stay so pleasant; to Sabel Gavaldon for his continued support; and to Veronique Parke and Sarah Elson for their generous commitment to sustaining art ecosystems in the places and moments where they are needed most.

Akis Kokkinos