For this year’s Residency Programme for Academic and Curatorial Research of Contemporary Greek Art we welcomed Erika Dovey in the Art History direction, from June 10 to July 22, 2025.

Erika Dovey is a London-based art historian and emerging writer with an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute, where she specialised in Art and Empire in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1800–1900. Erika has written exhibition texts and artist statements for contemporary galleries, including Bo Lee and Workman and Roseberry Road Studios. Her recent MA dissertation explores the work of Hishida Shunsō and Yokoyama Taikan, focusing on their engagement with India. By challenging modernist narratives, she frames their art within cultural modernisation and highlights the Indian Ocean as a site of artistic and social transcultural collaboration. Her wider writing investigates the intersections of art, history, and identity, aiming to make critical art historical narratives accessible to wider audiences.

Erika Dovey was selected by a committee consisting of:
Caroline Levitt, Head of Art History Department, The Courtauld
Klara Kemp – Welch, Vice-Dean for Research, The Courtauld
Anna Somers Cocks OBE, Founder of the “Arts Newspaper”, Art Critic
Elizabeth Plessa, Art Historian-Curator
Dora Vasilakou, Managing Director, The Sotiris Felios Collection and Head of the Residency Programme.

Based on Erika Dovey’s research proposal, which focuses on the concepts of bodily experiences, the senses, and somatic configurations, a bespoke six-week programme was designed, including visits and guided tours to exhibitions, museums, and institutions, as well as meetings with artists from the Sotiris Felios Collection and art professionals in Athens.

Erika Dovey’s participation in the Residency Programme will culminate in a written essay titled “The Body as Lived Experience: Somatic Considerations in the Contemporary Greek Figurative Art”. This study examines contemporary Greek figurative art through the lens of embodied experience, focusing on works from the Sotiris Felios Collection. Drawing on theoretical tools from Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, the research centers on six contemporary artists from the Sotiris Felios Collection — Vavara Liakounakou, Maria Giannakaki, Vally Nomidou, Michalis Manousakis, Giorgos Rorris, and Stefanos Daskalakis — demonstrating how they shift the depiction of the body from the aesthetically beautiful toward the experiential, emotional, and existential. Through practices that approach the figure as a bearer of memory, desire, and vulnerability, their works highlight the figure not as an ideal model but as an embodied subject rich in inner tensions and sensory dynamics.

Curator of the Programme: Dora Vasilakou
The Residency Programme for Academic and Curatorial Research of Contemporary Greek Art is supported by The other Arcadia Foundation and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.