Almost White, Colors of Milk Event

Almost White, Colors of Milk by
Irini Athanassakis
Film screening, Book launch and conversation:

S.F.K.B. publishing is delighted to invite you to the book launch of our new publication as part of Independent Space Index 2024. The three-day exhibition will be framed by all titles published by Salon für Kunstbuch.

What is the color of Milk? Is it white? Or almost white? The images in this book show forty colors of human milk. They have been drawn from found footage images representing breast milk and human milk. The essay by Romana Sammern is addressing “Colors of Milk” in art history, Meredith Stone comments the film “Almost White” based on the colors of milk and the concept of “almost” and motherhood, and Anna Kathrin Bleuler and Michael Brauer reflect the meaning of white food in “Diner en blanc: The art of white dining dining in medieval and early modern aristocratic culture”. The “Milk Poem” by Irini Athanassakis is a result of her visit of the historic Milk Kitchen « Milchküche » in the legendary Semmelweis Frauenklinik in Vienna, one of the early «lactarium » institutions and questions milk as part of the human body transformed into a commodity.

Irini Athanassakis lives and works as artist and author in Paris Region (F) and on Kea Island (Greece).
Trained in Sculpture, Transmedia Arts, Art History and Philosophy, (PhD), she co-operates with artists and scientists. Her art works and articles have been shown and published internationally.
Considering milk, hormones, eggs and gametes as material, as agents and systems of meaning and exchange, she also reflects on them as an example of symbiotic processes. She is the editor of the book MILK. Gabe, Lust und Verlust (Design Nik Thoenen, Vienna: Passagen Editors), which won the Austrian Award for the most beautiful art book in 2018.
Together with the microbiologist David Berry she published “STILLLEBEN. Becoming Symbionts” in Performance Research “On Microperformativity” edited by Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker in 2021. Objects, images, videos and performances on the milk and the microbiome have been shown in Le Générateur, Paris 2023, AIL Vienna 2022, Magazin 4 Bregenz 2021, Leonardo Lectures 2019 Art&Science Department at the Medical University Vienna and Cairotronica, Cairo 2018.
She is currently a Fellow at w+k, the Interuniversitary Institution for Science and Art at the University Salzburg and the University Mozarteum working on KORE in/fertility and Fellow at IPU International Psychoanalytical University Berlin on MUTTiER. Was nicht gesagt werden kann.

Salon für Kunstbuch
Archival Practice Unlimited
open to produce - to edit - to exhibit