BIO
KLEA CHARITOU
ART CURATION & CULTURAL PRODUCTION

KLEA CHARITOU
ART CURATION & CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Klea Charitou is an art historian and curator based in Milan. She holds a BA in Greek Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MA in Art History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and an MA in Curating from Université Rennes 2 in France. In 2021, she completed her PhD at the Athens School of Fine Arts, focusing on the relationship between logos and art in 1970s Greek art. She later taught History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 2021 to 2023.

For over a decade, she has worked as both a freelance curator and as part of teams within various European organizations, holding roles across curatorial and project-management positions. Her professional experience spans institutional and independent contexts, among them documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, where she contributed to exhibition research, coordination, and production. It also encompasses exhibitions such as Symbiotics at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens; After the Explosion… You Hear the Light at the artist-run space 3 137 in Athens; and This Is Not My Beautiful House and Political Speeches at Kunsthalle Athena, Greece.

Her art-historical and theoretical training has enabled her to conduct in-depth research into the work of several artists—including Miriam Bäckström, Alexandra Manousakis, Sofia Portalakis, Markos Armaos, Cally Spooner, and Anastasia Ax—with whom she has collaborated on the creation and organization of their archives and catalogues raisonnés. She has also worked closely with them on the development of their artistic practices within diverse exhibition frameworks.
Alongside this work, she has contributed as an editor and writer to exhibition catalogues and art magazines, among them Artforum International and South as a State of Mind. She has also participated in residencies and held curatorial fellowships in several programs across Europe. In 2019, she co-founded miss dialectic, an art operator in Athens that advances artistic and curatorial research with a strong emphasis on the production of new work through interdisciplinary collaboration. Since 2020, she has served as a curator and consultant for artistic development and strategy at Balkan…Projects, an organization dedicated to elevating artistic practices and educational initiatives for artists from the Balkan region.




My research focuses on the relationship between art and language, and on their mutable dynamics—structures, genres, and transformative potential. Grounded in my background in literature and linguistics, my curatorial and art-historical practice examines language as both a communicative tool and a coded system shaped by rules and patterns. Drawing on the legacies of minimalist and conceptual art, I approach language as both an artistic medium and a subject—open to repetition, reformulation, reinterpretation, and productive mistranslation.

I expand this inquiry by seeking conceptualisms beyond the dominant Anglo-American canon, foregrounding practices that emerge from peripheral or locally situated contexts. In these settings, I examine how conceptual methodologies intersect with cultural knowledge, collective memory, and alternative epistemologies, thereby challenging the hegemonic narratives within conceptual art history.

My research extends into systems theory, examining forms of language shaped by mathematical principles, scientific models, technological infrastructures, and myth-making. Using a structuralist perspective, I explore how language presented in artworks constructs the myths through which societies conceive reality. I am particularly interested in how these myths materialize as systems and codes that shape dominant patterns while also reflecting diverse social conventions.



Parallel to these inquiries, I research weaving and textile traditions as systems of narration and knowledge transmission. I examine how textiles function as storytelling devices—encoded forms of knowledge passed across generations. My interest centers on the loom’s geometry and algorithmic logic, tracing its connection to early computation, from punch-card binary systems to the foundational—yet often obscured—role of women in the history of technological innovation.

Through my research-driven curatorial practice, I bring historical and contemporary works into dialogue, focusing on artistic engagements with mathematics, optics, and technology—from kinetic art of the 1960s to contemporary digital experimentation. I am particularly drawn to artists who employ archival research, diagrammatic thinking, and coded structures, and whose practices frame the machine as both promise and paradox, revealing instability alongside poetic and speculative potential.

My work explores the human impulse to give form to invisible networks—linguistic, spiritual, and digital—proposing that systems are fluid rather than fixed, that technologies carry mythological weight, and that language operates as a connective tissue across time.





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