Panos Fourtoulakis

In recent years, the development of media has transformed the way we experience moving images. Sets and Scenarios explores our heightened proximity to images and what it means to live under their influence. The online programme is composed of moving image works, text and performance that unfold in three acts.

Commissions by Eva Gold and Adam Christensen delve into notions of control, perversity, desire and heartache. Through text and repurposed film footage, Eva Gold devises scenes of obsessive voyeurism, unravelling how film permeates our dreams and the depth of our psyche. Adam Christensen invites the audience to a performance for the camera in his house-cum-baroque-theatrical-stage, obscuring distinctions between on- and off-set.

In times of reduced mobility, commissions by Aaron Ratajczyk and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi find motion between images. Aaron Ratajczyk stages a one-to-one rehearsal via video call – the screen as proxy to corporeal normalcy – while movements in time and history are proposed by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s multi-layered films. Presented through a fictitious map, the works expand into a rhizomatic network of different media.

For its inaugural week, Sets and Scenarios presented screenings of moving image works that expand our exploration of the relationship between viewer and screen as images penetrate retina and ear, before creeping beneath the skin, toward the flesh, muscles and viscera. The screening programme featured works and contributions by James Richards and Steve Reinke, Cerith Wyn Evans, Deborah Stratman, Shahryar Nashat, Mary Helena Clark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and others.

Sets and Scenarios is a collaboration between Jade Barget, Angela Blanc, Panos Fourtoulakis, Sha Li, Yi-Ning Lin, Charlotte dos Santos, and Lindsey Wiercioch as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary. 

Panos Fourtoulakis is a curator based in London. Focusing on a process-led and performative approach, his current practice primarily explores the affective and affecting possibilities of moving images. He is particularly drawn to issues of liveness, repetition, and contingency. Always working in response to the context of presentation, he considers the physical space, atmosphere, and subjectivity of the viewer and the ways these correspond to the work as central to the curatorial encounter. These concerns have been demonstrated both in his dissertation Living with Images and his graduate project Sets and Scenarios. By focussing on contemporary moving image programmes through the prism of post-cinematic theory, his dissertation examined notions of liveness and embodiment as these are reconfigured in the present tense. His graduate project explored these issues further by questioning our heightened proximity to moving images and what it means to live under their influence. 

Panos has curated a series of independent projects including …a casual event with dramatic storytelling at Goldsmiths CCA, If he’s innocent, he’s really fucked at Queen Adelaide, General Idea: Video Works 1977- 1984 at the Barbican Centre, Death Drive and A Strangely Glorious Opportunity for Fringe Film Festival amongst others. He co-curated Sets and Scenarios at the RCA in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, Cooperative Lunch #3: A Public Assembly at Cubitt and It’s a lot like life at the RCA. Panos has also developed a collaborative practice with Titus Nouwens.

Prior to the RCA, he studied Contemporary Art History at Goldsmiths, University of London (Graduate Diploma) and  Media and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (BA).