Every two years, Paxos Biennale invites international and Greek artists to the island of Paxos for a two-week residency program, during which they create the large-scale installations featured in that year’s edition.

We invite artists to step away from the urban pace and enter a different rhythm of creation, in dialogue with the island’s beauty. Nestled in the Ionian Sea, Paxos is a landscape of olive groves, turquoise waters, and sunlit cliffs, a place where time seems to stretch, allowing ideas to unfold with clarity. Over a two-week period, the resident artists come together to live, create, and exchange, forming a temporary collective dedicated to exploring new ways of thinking and making.

The residency is more than a production period, it is a journey of reflection and rediscovery. Artists are encouraged to work outdoors, to let the wind, sea, and light become part of their process, and to engage with the local community through workshops, collaborations, and shared experiences. Days are shaped by exploration: wandering the island’s paths, learning from its textures and stories, and transforming these encounters into large-scale installations that remain as traces of the dialogue between art and nature.

At its heart, the Paxos Biennale Residency is an invitation to reconnect, with the land, with others, and with oneself. It is a reminder that creativity is not only about producing objects, but about observing, feeling, and coexisting, about rethinking our place in the natural world through the act of creation.

“Working with artists who create in dialogue with nature is deeply inspiring. As they open their practice to the landscape, they also open inward, collectively discovering new ways of seeing and being.”

- Curator of the Biennale

Resident artists

2018:

Ricky Lee Gordon
Michael Sebastian Haas
Leonid Keller
Linus Lohmann
Yiannis Pappas
Quintessenz
Jewgeni Roppel
Rene Wagner

2022:

Clemens Behr
Julia Krahn
Thiago Mazza
Nuria Mora
Torsten Mühlbach
Talmon Biran
The Krank

2024:

Carolina Amaya
Dimitris Kontodimos
Dimitra Zervou
Dionisis Christofilogiannis
The Krank
Leonid Keller

Reflections

Dionisis Christofilogiannis

resident artist 2024

My participation in the Paxos Biennale Residency 2024 was a truly transformative artistic experience, during which my project The Skin was conceived through a direct and tactile dialogue with the island’s landscape, history, and biodiversity. Within the thematic framework MANIFESTO OF MEMORY the work explored the fragile connection between the human body and nature through a ritualistic process of applying biological latex onto the trunk of an ancient olive tree.

The residency offered an exceptionally welcoming and inspiring environment, providing ideal conditions for artistic research, reflection, and experimentation. I had the privilege to stay at the beautiful home of Marina, the founder of the Biennale, whose warmth and generosity created an atmosphere of genuine hospitality and creative exchange. Immersed in the island’s serene energy and in dialogue with the local community, the experience became not only a process of artistic creation but also a profound encounter with memory, time, and the delicate resilience of the natural world.