At the David Pace Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art San José, Martha Sakellariou occupies the space, as both resident and agitator, transforming it into a site of contemplation and quiet insurrection. Preparation(s) for a Dinner 2025–2026 continues Sakellariou’s ongoing Revolution is a Dinner Party series. The table remains unset, gestures are incomplete, and anticipation hangs in the air. Visitors encounter a space where acts of care, labor, and waiting become political gestures. In this durational work the exhibit is never the same, the acts are announced by posters and the audience encounters different scenarios that respond to emotional states of an absent “hostess” who communicates with “guess” through manuals and audio announcements. Link to project pdf

Revolution is a dinner party

The Glass Gallery, Palo Alto Art Center: Revolution is a Dinner Party reclaims the domestic sphere as a vital site of political resistance and social inquiry. By centering the table as a stage for both intimacy and diplomacy, this project bridges the personal and the political through site-specific installations and community-engaged programming. Drawing on the contrasting legacies of the mythological Circe and the historical Eleanor Roosevelt, the work explores the cultural intersections of a Greek-born identity within an American context. Through a combination of salvaged ceramics, archival fragments, performance and participatory sessions, the exhibition invites the public to consider how everyday rituals — acts of hosting, sharing, and gathering — can serve as profound catalysts for societal transformation. press release + curatorial text

the yellow wallpaper

Inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, this durational piece exhibited inside a Palo Alto residential house, explores the stifling confinement of a woman writer isolated by her husband. As an audio reading of the text is heard, a performer physically erases the words from the wallpapered book pages, leaving behind only fragments of the text that reveal 19th-century attitudes toward women’s mental health. In dialogue with this erasure, a dancer performs a series of movements imagining an alternative fate: one where the heroine breaks free from her physical and mental captivity. Performances by Jennifer Lee and Victoria Dombroski.

THE WARDROBE ARCHIVES

This collective exhibit features personal artifacts contributed by women as part of the Five Domestic Parts exhibition held in a residential home. The collection was open to the public to explore and was activated during the exhibition with an improvisational dance performance. Participants contributed items that fit within a standard box, representing their personal realities or perceptions of womanhood and domesticity. Each box contained a diverse array of domestic objects, including ephemeral records, shopping lists, confessional texts, personal letters, food, flowers, toys etc The performer improvised acts around the wardrobe to express the frustrations and rebellions of the woman as a carer and a homemaker.

Credits: List of contributors pages 6-7. Performance by Hearther Arnettt @ kristindamrowcompany

THE GOLDEN HOMES

This series of photo-based and on-site improvisational performances explores home, memory, and loss. The work centers on a specific typology of Athenian property: homes in neighborhoods transformed by migration, shifting social patterns, and the aftermath of the Greek economic crisis. Many of these structures have been repurposed by foreign investment into transient, short-term housing.

The rapid change of ownership and functional status has erases a big part of the domestic and cultural identity of these homes but also creates a new ambiguous reality and an anticipated new life. Repositioning the female homemaker and hostess in homes at this transitional stage, is an act of inhabiting a fictional, interim state where the meaning of "home" is imagined rather than experienced. Ultimately, the work maps the human condition across the transitions from past to future, and from habitable structures to abstract notions of living. Performance by @AtHenaS

PLAT DU JOUR - A CULINARY ACTION

Presented as an interdisciplinary dialogue between an artist, a writer, and a chef, this project explores the realities and mythologies of home and female identity through the rituals of food and ideas of sustenance. Drawing inspiration from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1903 study, The Home: Its Work and Influence, the work examines domestic dynamics through the lens of the female homemaker.

In this space, food is both a core element of homemaking and a catalyst for shared social experience. This multimedia exhibition — featuring video, text, textiles, artist’s books, prints, and food sculptures — culminates in a communal dinner. Link to project info