Self portrait

Nikolas Ventourakis is a visual artist living and working between Athens and London.

His practice situates in the threshold between art and document, in the attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image. A quest that unfolds in the decisive years of the digital revolution, when a crucial overlap between producers and viewers seems to have reset all previous critical discourses.
Central to Ventourakis's visual work is a denial for a one-way resolution and an invitation to embrace an ambiguous imagery, where the photographic is not yet real, and the familiar is a projection of a mix of memory - stemming from both private and media experiences - with abstract thinking. Ventourakis’ fascination lies in our need for stories to be conclusive, which cannot but clash with the impossibility for apparent pictures to provide any evidence nor "objective truth". This is why his work allows for bias and misinterpretation.
Ventourakis completed an MA in Fine Art (Photography) with Merit at Central Saint Martins School of Arts (2013) and is the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013). He was selected for Future Map (2013), Catlin Guide (2014) and Fresh Faced Wild Eyed (2014) in the Photographers Gallery as one of the top graduating artists in the UK. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at CalArts with a FULBRIGHT Artist Fellowship and is a fellow in New Museum’s IDEAS CITY. He was shortlisted for the MAC International and the Bar-Tur Award. Recently he has exhibited in FORMAT Festival, Derby; the NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, the Mediterranean Biennale of Young Artists 18, the parallel program of the Istanbul Biennale , Hors Pistes 14 at Centre Pompidou, and The Same River Twice, at the Benaki Museum. Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala, and is co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Athens. He is a 2020 Stavros Niarchos Artworks Fellow. 
The book mentioned in the interview at the end is Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
Current Exhibitions mentioned: Tell Me I Belong group show and Betwixt and Between. https://www.miscathens.com/exhibitions
To earn more about the Band that we discussed at the end of the interview, click here and see the video below; RAMDAT.

Unlikely Outcomes: An Improvision from NIKOLAS VENTOURAKIS on Vimeo.

Nikolas Ventourakis, XX. “It was a Good Sunday as far as I remember it”, 2021, mounted on Dibond, in artist’s frame, 80 cm x 100 cm. Installation shot from Tell Me I Belong Exhibition

Nikolas Ventourakis, IX. interior false memory composition - left 2019, inkjet print on baryta archival paper, mounted on Dibond, artist’s frame, 125x85cm (120x80cm print) Installation shot from Unlikely Outcomes.Exhibtion*