For this Artists at Work talk, ISCP artist-in-residence Maro Michalakakos will be joined by curator Ramsay Kolber. During their dialogue, Michalakakos will discuss the inspirations informing her practice, her approach to site-responsive installations, and the conceptual ideas guiding her ongoing creative journey. A Q&A with the audience will follow.
Maro Michalakakos, born and based in Athens, works across mediums including sculptural installation, painting, drawing, relief on velvet, and performance. Her work interweaves social and cultural references with personal and familial souvenirs, drawing on themes of memory, power, and the subconscious. Her visual universe borders on being dreamlike, constantly oscillating between fantasy and reality while probing the relationship between life and death. Her work appears in several collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Tate Britain, London; and Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, among others. Michalakakos was recently featured in the Guggenheim exhibition By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection (2025).
Ramsay Kolber is the Associate Curator, Collections, for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, currently living and working in New York. Previously, she held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York working on projects ranging from the Museum’s Collection Strategic Plan, a multiyear research project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In addition to her curatorial experience, she has held positions at the Brooklyn Museum; Chapter NY; Independent Curators International (ICI); and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, all in New York. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Osmos Magazine, 3rd Dimension, PMSA Journal, the 2019 Whitney Biennial catalogue, and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection Handbook and Art for Rollins: The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art Volume 4. She holds an MA in Global Conceptualism from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, with a focus on early intersections between art, technology, and conceptual practice.
