Vasilia (lovingly referred to as ‘Lia’) Karabatsos is a skilled curator and creative coordinator with a practice grounded in contemporary art, community engagement, and the stories objects and spaces carry.
Selected Exhibitions
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Selected Exhibitions 〰️
Create4Adelaide
Curator | Adelaide Festival & Sabir | Adelaide, Australia |
2023-2024
Create4Adelaide was a year-long, large-scale initiative inviting thousands of young people both from Australia and abroad to respond to the environmental issues shaping their futures through visual art, design, and storytelling. My role was both organisational and hands- on: I liaised directly with schools and artists, researched and developed the curatorial framework, selected and ordered works, wrote all wall text, led installation teams and installed technical elements, and facilitated public Q&As with young artists in front of live audiences. I held the curatorial vision across an enormous volume of work and an enormous number of voices, shaping something coherent and urgent from material that was deeply personal to the people who made it. The project culminated in physical and digital exhibitions at the 2024 Adelaide Festival.
Touch Starved
Curator | Carclew Arts Organisation | Adelaide, Australia | 2023
Touch Starved was South Australian Instution, Carclew House’s, major annual exhibition and I conceived and built it from the ground up. I identified and selected thirteen emerging Adelaide artists whose practices I felt were asking the right questions about what COVID had done to people, specifically what it had done to our need for closeness, for contact, for one another. Working across installation, sculpture, video, and interactive work, I held the curatorial vision across thirteen different voices and thirteen different ways of making, shaping them into something that felt like a single, necessary argument. The premise was urgent: what happens to human beings when touch is taken away? I built an exhibition that held grief and tenderness at the same time, creating space for audiences to sit with something they had collectively experienced but not yet been given room to process.
