Sub Rosa Space

Sub Rosa Space is an independent platform for performance, active in central Athens since January 2018. Founded by Macklin Kowal, a multi-hyphenated artist-curator-writer-academic, the space functions as a laboratory for experimentation and as a forum for direct encounter between artists and audiences. As a curatorial platform, Sub Rosa Space prods the aesthetic contours of power and authority—whether those thematics are figured in terms of state politics, structures of subjective representation, or historical traditions of art practice itself. In tandem with these critical questions is a fundamental openness as to what constitutes performance, or a performative or gesture. Deliberately, Sub Rosa Space does not define performance or suppose to present a vision of what performance would mean in the context of a post-crisis Athens. It is rather a space that endeavours to keep this question open, resisting the lexicological mandates that often befall the artistic scenes of peripheral cities when they find themselves, as Athens does, an object of international fascination within the art world. Sub Rosa Space is, in other words, an experiment in dilated contemplation, rallied around questions of force, agency, ability, and resistance.