Panos Kompatsiaris
Biographic Data
| ID | 366762 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Panos Kompatsiaris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Panos |
| FAMILY NAME | Kompatsiaris |
| SIGNATURE | KOMPATSIARIS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Research University Higher School of Economics |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2452-6109 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Indigenous Turn, or the Spectacle of Otherness: Cultural Political Economies of the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere
The 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, placed the figure of the foreigner at its center, drawing on Adriano Pedrosa’s curatorial idea that foreignness is a pervasive condition of human existence. Within a broad spectrum of “minoritarian foreigners,” the “Indigenous” emerged as a particularly charged symbolic figure. This article situates the Biennale as a global institution whose strategies of expansion and rarefication sustain its symb…
Gendered constructions of migration in Europe: An intersectional analysis of inclusionary and exclusionary discourses on social media platforms
This article explores intersectional discourses of migration and gender in the social media environments of three different European countries – Belgium, Greece, and Italy. For the analysis, we retrieved a dataset of 1000 posts per country about migration from Facebook and Twitter (now X) and we selected posts with a gender dimension. The article shows how the discursive struggle over migration and gender takes shape across inclusionary and exclu…
Your Seed is Your Life Force”: Masculinities of Spirituality and Entrepreneurialism in NoFap Lifestyle Gurus on YouTube
This paper investigates mainstream injunctions of contemporary masculinity on YouTube and what I will call “spiritpreneurial masculinity”, a construction that privileges both entrepreneurialism and spiritual values for producing the ideal masculinity. I particularly focus on how spiritpreneurial discourses play out around the so-called NoFap movement, which is an online movement with various dedicated websites, coaches, bloggers, and forums preac…
Gore kinship: The cultural economies of killing in an ethnography of invasive pufferfish in Crete
This article introduces gore kinship , a mode of multispecies relation requiring the animal Other's subjugation or death, through an ethnography of lagopsaro , a pufferfish deemed "invasive" in the Southeastern Mediterranean Sea. Where multispecies scholarship celebrates affirmative kin-making (e.g., Haraway, Braidotti, Tsing), the lagopsaro 's toxicity, destruction of fisheries and resistance to commodification instead generates extermination ec…
Platform Spiritualities: Entrepreneurial Selves and Post-Feminist Sensibilities of Russian Influencers
In this article, we look at how preeminent Russian-speaking influencers spread sensibilities of entrepreneurialism and post-feminism on social media platforms, and specifically Instagram. Drawing on platform studies, critical theory and material from influencer accounts, we explore the ways that platform-based spiritualities are embedded in the neoliberal economies of self-presentation, micro-celebrity and branding in Russia and beyond. We unders…
Curating climate change: The Taipei Biennial as an environmental problem solver
This article analyses the curatorial practices behind the 2018 Taipei Biennial by considering its ethos of public engagement that fostered a merging of artistic means and civic aims. Entitled ‘Post-Nature: A Museum as an Ecosystem’, the biennial confronted the timely theme of environmental precarity and positioned itself as a substantive stakeholder in the public debate on climate change. It mobilized the biennial platform to marshal artists, com…
Crafting values: Economies, Ethics and Aesthetics of Artistic Valuation
This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices, events, and materialities. The articles included i…
Curators, words and values: The Branding Economies of Curatorial Statements in Art Biennials
This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic …
Biennial art and its rituals: Value, political economy and artfulness
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the i…
Trolling as transgression: Subversive affirmations against neoliberal austerity
This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: its potential to stand as a form of cultural politics that may inform counter-hegemonic challenges to prevalent ideologies. Rather than merely perceiving trolling as a threat to normality or a proof of the internet’s dystopic character, we look at the ways that certain trolls employ the method of ‘subversive affirmation’ for effectively addressing curr…
On the Heroisms of Today: Experience, Memory and Risk as Anti-fascist Politics in Contemporary Art
Since around 2000, the strategies of participation and compromise in socially engaged art have contributed to modest victories providing at the same time an excuse to left-wing intellectuals to work with institutions of power. While these strategies allude to the redundancy of gestures of negation, the rise of explicitly far-right or neo-fascist tendencies in today’s world can challenge their efficacy from an emancipatory point of view. This arti…
The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art
Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal …
Whitewashing the nation: Racist jokes and the construction of the African 'other' in Greek popular cinema
This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other a…
Art Struggles: Confronting Internships and Unpaid Labour in Contemporary Art
This article explores the practices of recently formed and mainly UK-based art workers’ collectives against unpaid internships and abusive work. The modes through which these collectives perform resistance involve activist tactics of boycotting, site-specific protests, counter-guides, and whistleblowing and name and shame approaches mixed with performance art and playful interventions. Grappling with the predicaments of work in contemporary art, …
Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials: Curating Resistances in Contemporary Biennials
The idea of enabling resistant narratives to neoliberalism through dialogical and participatory works, steadily informs the agenda of perennial large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art (biennials) around Europe and the world. Somewhat paradoxically, the proliferation of such shows since the early 1990s depends on this very neoliberal model that values culture for its measurable outcomes. By discussing such predicaments of the “biennial phenome…
To see and be seen’: Ethnographic notes on cultural work in contemporary art in Greece
A key term in discussions on the nature of cultural work is the concept of ‘autonomy’, or ‘relative autonomy’, according to which cultural workers are capable of realizing themselves in the processes of work. This article wishes to problematize this idea by examining the quotidian reality of cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece during the current economic crisis. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on …
Environments of Aesthetic Decay
Trolling as transgression: Subversive affirmations against neoliberal austerity
This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: its potential to stand as a form of cultural politics that may inform counter-hegemonic challenges to prevalent ideologies. Rather than merely perceiving trolling as a threat to normality or a proof of the internet’s dystopic character, we look at the ways that certain trolls employ the method of ‘subversive affirmation’ for effectively addressing curr…
Whitewashing the nation: Racist jokes and the construction of the African 'other' in Greek popular cinema
This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other a…
To see and be seen’: Ethnographic notes on cultural work in contemporary art in Greece
A key term in discussions on the nature of cultural work is the concept of ‘autonomy’, or ‘relative autonomy’, according to which cultural workers are capable of realizing themselves in the processes of work. This article wishes to problematize this idea by examining the quotidian reality of cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece during the current economic crisis. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on …
Gore kinship: The cultural economies of killing in an ethnography of invasive pufferfish in Crete
This article introduces gore kinship , a mode of multispecies relation requiring the animal Other's subjugation or death, through an ethnography of lagopsaro , a pufferfish deemed "invasive" in the Southeastern Mediterranean Sea. Where multispecies scholarship celebrates affirmative kin-making (e.g., Haraway, Braidotti, Tsing), the lagopsaro 's toxicity, destruction of fisheries and resistance to commodification instead generates extermination ec…
Crafting values: Economies, Ethics and Aesthetics of Artistic Valuation
This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices, events, and materialities. The articles included i…
Curators, words and values: The Branding Economies of Curatorial Statements in Art Biennials
This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic …
Biennial art and its rituals: Value, political economy and artfulness
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the i…
Environments of Aesthetic Decay
Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials: Curating Resistances in Contemporary Biennials
The idea of enabling resistant narratives to neoliberalism through dialogical and participatory works, steadily informs the agenda of perennial large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art (biennials) around Europe and the world. Somewhat paradoxically, the proliferation of such shows since the early 1990s depends on this very neoliberal model that values culture for its measurable outcomes. By discussing such predicaments of the “biennial phenome…
To see and be seen’: Ethnographic notes on cultural work in contemporary art in Greece
A key term in discussions on the nature of cultural work is the concept of ‘autonomy’, or ‘relative autonomy’, according to which cultural workers are capable of realizing themselves in the processes of work. This article wishes to problematize this idea by examining the quotidian reality of cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece during the current economic crisis. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on …
Art Struggles: Confronting Internships and Unpaid Labour in Contemporary Art
This article explores the practices of recently formed and mainly UK-based art workers’ collectives against unpaid internships and abusive work. The modes through which these collectives perform resistance involve activist tactics of boycotting, site-specific protests, counter-guides, and whistleblowing and name and shame approaches mixed with performance art and playful interventions. Grappling with the predicaments of work in contemporary art, …
The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art
Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal …
Whitewashing the nation: Racist jokes and the construction of the African 'other' in Greek popular cinema
This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other a…
Biennial art and its rituals: Value, political economy and artfulness
The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the i…
Trolling as transgression: Subversive affirmations against neoliberal austerity
This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: its potential to stand as a form of cultural politics that may inform counter-hegemonic challenges to prevalent ideologies. Rather than merely perceiving trolling as a threat to normality or a proof of the internet’s dystopic character, we look at the ways that certain trolls employ the method of ‘subversive affirmation’ for effectively addressing curr…
On the Heroisms of Today: Experience, Memory and Risk as Anti-fascist Politics in Contemporary Art
Since around 2000, the strategies of participation and compromise in socially engaged art have contributed to modest victories providing at the same time an excuse to left-wing intellectuals to work with institutions of power. While these strategies allude to the redundancy of gestures of negation, the rise of explicitly far-right or neo-fascist tendencies in today’s world can challenge their efficacy from an emancipatory point of view. This arti…
Curating climate change: The Taipei Biennial as an environmental problem solver
This article analyses the curatorial practices behind the 2018 Taipei Biennial by considering its ethos of public engagement that fostered a merging of artistic means and civic aims. Entitled ‘Post-Nature: A Museum as an Ecosystem’, the biennial confronted the timely theme of environmental precarity and positioned itself as a substantive stakeholder in the public debate on climate change. It mobilized the biennial platform to marshal artists, com…
Crafting values: Economies, Ethics and Aesthetics of Artistic Valuation
This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices, events, and materialities. The articles included i…
Curators, words and values: The Branding Economies of Curatorial Statements in Art Biennials
This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic …
Platform Spiritualities: Entrepreneurial Selves and Post-Feminist Sensibilities of Russian Influencers
In this article, we look at how preeminent Russian-speaking influencers spread sensibilities of entrepreneurialism and post-feminism on social media platforms, and specifically Instagram. Drawing on platform studies, critical theory and material from influencer accounts, we explore the ways that platform-based spiritualities are embedded in the neoliberal economies of self-presentation, micro-celebrity and branding in Russia and beyond. We unders…
Your Seed is Your Life Force”: Masculinities of Spirituality and Entrepreneurialism in NoFap Lifestyle Gurus on YouTube
This paper investigates mainstream injunctions of contemporary masculinity on YouTube and what I will call “spiritpreneurial masculinity”, a construction that privileges both entrepreneurialism and spiritual values for producing the ideal masculinity. I particularly focus on how spiritpreneurial discourses play out around the so-called NoFap movement, which is an online movement with various dedicated websites, coaches, bloggers, and forums preac…
Gore kinship: The cultural economies of killing in an ethnography of invasive pufferfish in Crete
This article introduces gore kinship , a mode of multispecies relation requiring the animal Other's subjugation or death, through an ethnography of lagopsaro , a pufferfish deemed "invasive" in the Southeastern Mediterranean Sea. Where multispecies scholarship celebrates affirmative kin-making (e.g., Haraway, Braidotti, Tsing), the lagopsaro 's toxicity, destruction of fisheries and resistance to commodification instead generates extermination ec…
The Indigenous Turn, or the Spectacle of Otherness: Cultural Political Economies of the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere
The 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, placed the figure of the foreigner at its center, drawing on Adriano Pedrosa’s curatorial idea that foreignness is a pervasive condition of human existence. Within a broad spectrum of “minoritarian foreigners,” the “Indigenous” emerged as a particularly charged symbolic figure. This article situates the Biennale as a global institution whose strategies of expansion and rarefication sustain its symb…
Gendered constructions of migration in Europe: An intersectional analysis of inclusionary and exclusionary discourses on social media platforms
This article explores intersectional discourses of migration and gender in the social media environments of three different European countries – Belgium, Greece, and Italy. For the analysis, we retrieved a dataset of 1000 posts per country about migration from Facebook and Twitter (now X) and we selected posts with a gender dimension. The article shows how the discursive struggle over migration and gender takes shape across inclusionary and exclu…
Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (7 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works)