bio
Paris Legakis is a multidisciplinary artist, activist and theorist, born in 1981, Athens. In 2015, he completed the MA program Performance Studies, Tisch, NYU, where he was awarded for ‘Outstanding MA Work’. In 2012, he finished the MFA program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, Bauhaus University-Weimar, Germany and in 2009 he graduated from Athens School of Fine Arts. He has won scholarships from Fulbright Foundation, NEON Organization, Tisch, NYU and the Institution Panayiotis and Efi Micheli. He was a resident artist in ‘Incheon Art Platform’ and later he was invited to the ‘Honguen Seoul Art Space’ in South Korea, 2013. In 2015, he was invited to participate in the residency HomeBase Project Shaitama which was a pre-event to the Triennale Shaitama 2016, Japan.
In his work, Paris researches how art can be beneficial for the society and influential to politics. He has travelled to many different places worldwide conducting field researches and experimenting with different art practices of social engagement that aim to reveal different perspectives of everyday life and foster the idea of social change. His love for movement and contemporary dance that he exercises for several years has given him a rich vocabulary on performance making. Meditation is fundamental in his life and many times he incorporates it to his projects. His research interests focus on memory and emotions as mobilizing forces, geopolitical and social borders as areas for intervention, language and translation as processes of communication.
Paris has written the manifesto ‘Claim your Anger, on politics and political art‘ and he has created his own methodology ‘Irregular Temporary Interactions‘ (I.T.I) to implement his performances-actions. His projects have been presented internationally, including Benaki Museum, Athens (2016), Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague (2015), Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, Chicago (2015), Judson Church, New York (2014), Athens Video Art Festival (2014), Cyprus International Performance Art Festival (2014), Façade Video Festival, Plovdiv (2013), Marta Museum, Herford (2011).