Annie Riga (b. 1997) is a Greek artist living and working between Athens and London. Her practice is grounded in feminist and posthumanist thought and engages questions of embodiment, permeability, and the politics surrounding bodies that strain or refuse containment. She approaches material instability as a site where inherited ideals of purity, coherence, and autonomy can be challenged and reconfigured.
Working across painting, ceramics, textiles, and installation, she examines how forms negotiate pressure and inhabit precarity. Leakiness becomes a generative strategy. Although it has historically been used to stigmatize feminized and nonnormative bodies, here it transforms into a mode of resistance and proposes porosity as a relational and ethical condition. Her work navigates the tension between holding together and letting go, and between structural desire and inevitable rupture.
Material behaviour sits at the core of this inquiry. Canvas slumps, pigments seep, and clay fissures, forming hybrid anatomies that behave less like images and more like membranes responding to force. Treating materials as responsive bodies rather than neutral substrates, she invites them to articulate pressures that resist mastery. Meaning emerges in what slips beyond the edges of control.
Many works begin on the floor with unstretched canvas, where pigments diffuse into tentacular formations. These surfaces are cut, soaked, folded, or stitched so they operate like provisional skins. They collapse, pool, or tether themselves to ceramic forms that act as porous anchors or prosthetic extensions. Suspended from steel scaffolds, bamboo rods, or handmade supports, the installations occupy a state of precarity in which painting, sculpture, textile, and body continually blur. Pigment drifting into folds or onto the wall asserts instability as a structural condition rather than an error.
Raised beside the Aegean Sea, her sensibility is shaped by early encounters with marine organisms whose movements such as pulsing, drifting, stinging, and regenerating influence her understanding of bodies in shifting relation to their environment. Instead of depicting these creatures, she translates their behaviours into gestures that carry vulnerability, resilience, and refusal.
Each work becomes an event rather than a resolved object and takes shape through proximity, pressure, and response. Stains, folds, fractures, and slippages function not as flaws but as residues of becoming. Through this material choreography, she asks what becomes possible when forms relinquish coherence and instability itself becomes a mode of knowing.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Education
PhD (Practice-led) Fine Art, University of the Arts London, 2023–2027
BA Fine Art, Falmouth University, UK, 2015–2018
Certificate in Art & Curatorial Studies, The New Centre for Research & Practice, 2021
Solo Exhibitions
2026 — Feverdream, Art Studio SSG, Athens, Greece
2023 — One Day I Walked Into a Memory, Megalou Alexandrou 40, Athens, Greece
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025 — KSENOI, Atopos CVC, Athens, Greece
2025 — Fashioning Frequencies, London College of Fashion, London, UK
2025 — Dandelion Fantasy, Plex, Athens, Greece
2025 — Taking Up Space, Patision 65, Athens, Greece
2024 — Crafted Narratives, Hypha Studios, London, UK
2024 — We Radicles?, Triangle Space, London, UK
2024 — What We Mean to Say, Banff Centre, Canada
2023 — Stigma, Dromokaiteio Psychiatric Hospital, Athens, Greece
2023 — NOMAS Magazine Spring Edition, Athens, Greece
2022 — The Quest for Tactility, Gallery Kourd, Athens, Greece
2022 — Remedy, TAF Foundation, Athens, Greece
2022 — Rebirth, Sealed Earth Gallery, Athens, Greece
2022 — Big Blue Dot: BCK Ceramics, Koufonisi Island, Greece
2022 — International Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg, Austria
2021 — Sluitersprijs, Kunstrai, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2021 — Mid Air, The Raw Cases Edition #2, DOOR, Dordrecht, Netherlands
2021 — I Believe You, I Believe in You, SK Gallery, Solingen, Germany
2021 — Live Alone Die Together, AKV St. Joost, Den Bosch, Netherlands
2020 — The Raw Cases Edition #1, Werkwarehuis, Den Bosch, Netherlands
2020 — FIBER Festival, Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2029 – Within and Without You, Interactive European School, Athens, Greece
2019 — Falmouth BA Graduate Show, Falmouth, UK
2018 — FOMO, Falmouth Art Gallery, UK
2017 — Mixed Arts Festival Thrown Gauntlet, Falmouth, UK
2017 — FA2 Exhibition, Poly, Cornwall, UK
2017 — Orange Sailors, Tschirztis Art Foundation, Athens, Greece
2016 — FA1 Exhibition, Falmouth University, UK
AWARDS & RESIDENCIES
2026 — Studio Kura, Fukuoka, Japan (upcoming residency)
2025 — Artist Fellowship, Vermont Studio Centre, USA
2024 — Artist Fellowship, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Canada
2022 — Artist-in-Residence, Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts, Austria
2022 — Artist-in-Residence, Big Blue Dot: BCK Ceramics, Koufonisi Island, Greece
2021 — De Slijters Prize, Award Nomination
SELECTED TALKS & LECTURES
2025 — Crisis/Death/Resurrection: A Painting Symposium, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland
2025 — UAL Researcher Development Programme: Spring Event, Doctoral School, London, UK
2024 — We Radicles? Long Table Performative Conversation, Chelsea College of Art, London, UK
2024 — UAL Researcher Development Programme: Summer Symposium, Doctoral School, London, UK
2021 — Live Alone, Die Together, Livestream Event, AKV St. Joost, Netherlands
2021 — Research Hub: Live Alone, Die Together, V2_Lab, Rotterdam, Netherlands
2021 — Presenting Research in Art & Design, AKV St. Joost, Netherlands
TEACHING & PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2025 — Graduate Research Tutor, MA Painting & MA Sculpture, Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK
2021–2023 — Visual Arts Teacher (full-time), Interactive European School, Athens, Greece
2023 — Curatorial Assistant, Krama Festival, Athens, Greece
SELECTED PROJECTS & COMMISSIONS
2026 — Visual and Written Contributor, Exploring Representations of the Female Body through
Sculpture, London College of Communication
2022–2026 — Children’s Book Project, Ydroplano Books — Illustrator for four published books
developed with schoolchildren from remote Greek islands; produced with Miles & Soul; funded by Action Hellas
PRESS
Insistrum Magazine — Interview, April 2024
NOMAS Magazine — Feature, Issue 19, Spring/Summer 2023
LIFO Magazine — Feature, May 2023
Hello! Greece — Interview, June 2022
Metropolis M Magazine — Feature, Spring 2021