id-entities: imprints of personal data

ATHENS PRINTMAKING ART CENTER - PANDOLFINI & SIATERLI C.N.P.P. welcomes submissions from printmakers, visual artists and groups, from all over the world for its upcoming international printmaking exhibition with the topic ID-ENTITIES: Imprints of Personal Data which will take place in 2025 at ETCH INK art space_,_ in Athens (Greece).

The exhibition seeks to critically examine the general and widespread digitisation of human interactions and the impact of personal data processing systems in human lives. Writer, columnist and lawyer Francesco Carraro, draws attention to the risks of a complete digitisation of personal information, addressing the right to remain "analog", i.e. not to be fully and irrevocably digitized in regards to identity and profiling. A compulsory digitisation of human relationships is synonymous with ultimate control over all aspects of life. It also heralds a future of humanity regulated and guided in directions over which people have no authority or impact. Likewise, it means that society is being subjected to increasingly intrusive systems of control over the privacy of citizens, to the extent that they also even run the risk of being erased or "deactivated" by the same System at a single click of the mouse.

Where are personal data collected, how are they distributed, who are they shared with and how do they eventually determine our identities, our choices and decisions? Is it possible that art can outsmart the system? Could it constitute a source of resistance against the predetermined objectives and decisions of automated systems and softwares?

With the language of printmaking as a vehicle, ATHENS PRINTMAKING ART CENTER welcomes scenarios of resistance, fictional identities, subversive data flows, experimental profiles, creative "hacks", original visual falsifications and unconventional paths of escape. Artists are invited to renegotiate the notions of democracy, privacy, freedom and identity through their own scenarios of defiance. Moreover, they are encouraged to take a critical stance on the problematic parameters and risks associated with an information-based society, data diffusion, technology and the digitalisation of identity and human life. The exhibition attempts to map the dangers and hidden aspects of the automated processes of personal data, but also to propose ways of resistance focused on the idea of maintaining an analog self and an analog identity in a broad sense. Selected proposals will be exhibited in a curated exhibition at ETCH INK art space, in Athens, between February and June 2025. Official dates will be announced later in the year.