Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is an art historian and curator, currently a research fellow and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Her current project explores the aesthetic and material strategies that women artists developed to resist nuclear technologies from the late 1970s to the present, with a focus on antinuclear feminist groups. This research unfolds through on-going archival research in the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and France. (Supported by a VENI grant of the Dutch National Science foundation (NWO), 2024 – 2028)
A first iteration took the form of the group exhibition …that creeps from the earth (2024), at TAVROS, Athens. Concurrently to that research, she was, from 2022-25, the scientific advisor of the exhibition Atomic Age. Artists Grappling with History (2024–25), at the Musée d’art Moderne, Paris.
Her interdisciplinary scholarship, at the intersection of art history and the environmental humanities, centers on nuclear aesthetics and engages the visual culture of extraction, material histories of art and the environment and feminist discourses. Ongoing research interests and essays-in-progress touch upon curatorial interventions around toxicity in science museum collections, the use of X-RAYS in irradiated environments by women artists and the staging of toxic risk in antinuclear feminist performances in the 1980s. Her research also unfolds through site-based artistic research and currently this includes engagements at two nuclear sites in France: with Susanne Kriemann, in the former uranium-mining region of Limousin, and with Agnès Villete around the Gravelines nuclear power plant, which is built on reclaimed land near the city of Dunkirk.
Her publications have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Environmental Humanities, Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, Camera Austria International, Journal of Curatorial Studies and Transbordeur, amongst others. Her work has been published in English, French, German, Greek and Dutch.
She is a board member of the Environmental Humanities Centre, VU. Her research and curatorial work has been supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Goulandris Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the Anna Polke Stiftung and the Mondrian Fonds.
Previous positions include:
- 2022–23: junior research fellow, Käte Hamburger Kolleg, RWTH Aachen University
- 2017–2021: PhD fellow, École des hautes en sciences sociales, Paris, supported by an Onassis foundation scholarship, for a dissertation entitled Dwelling, Extracting, Burying: Nuclear Imaginaries in Contemporary Art (1970-2020)