Founded in February 2020 by academic writer and painter Nadja Geer, the One Minute Space in the neighborhood of Metaxourgeio in Athens was thought as a temporary art space during an art festival. As a temporary art space the concept was to exist only the one minute somebody perceives and feels it. The art experience thereby was situational and created in a certain moment between the recipient, the space and the art. According to Gilles Deleuze it is the affect that marks a cut in the transformation from perception to action. The eco-feminist performance “The Art of Falling Apart” brought the One Minute Space into existence.
Then the One Minute Space became a permanent art space, a non profit art studio in an area which is defined by another form of “studio”: a neighborhood famous for its sex workers and car mechanics. Now it has a yearly program to operate in the north of the historical center of Athens, consisting of exhibitions, conversations, performances and installations. OMS hosts an art residency and is collaborating with institutions abroad.
OMS aims to create a sustainable space that works like a catalyst for art and artists by providing the autonomy of the artistic process. Why keep a space open if not for others? Keeping the name signals that we are aware of the fragile nature of a get together in real time and space – especially in times of a global pandemic and where social interactions are controlled online by algorithms. We encourage the dialogue between young an established artists, Greek and international artists and the artists and the audience. We want to create a safe environment for artistic production. We thrive towards self-sustainability by new forms of communal cybernetic pay systems and by independent funding.
CONCEPT OF THE SPACE: For now OMS goes on working with the concept of situated action (“nowness”) as a method of generating nonconformist art and a valuable meta discourse. When it comes to artistic research we especially encourage artistic and curatorial practices addressing and investigating the contemporaneity of art, maybe even by working with Grounded Theory as methodology (through the collecting and analyses of data). The One Minute Space Athens is about what is happening now – as an idea of what might have happened in the future. We explore new forms of abstraction in the artistic research by transcending the idea of time and space, duration and interval, stasis and flow into new models and a new artistic methodology which is based on situational analyses.