7 FELLOWS JOIN THE ART EXHIBITION “REBETIKO”

The art exhibition Rebetiko, organised by the Culture, Sports & Youth Organisation of the City of Athens (OPANDA), aims at visualising the essence and iconography of rebetiko music, through 125 works by 50 modern and contemporary Greek artists, including Yannis Tsarouchis, Tassos and Alekos Fassianos. The exhibition will be hosted in three venues from 10 February to 3 April 2022.

The thematic exhibition Rebetiko “is all about love, escape, ‘joyful mourning,’ and all the thoughts, memories, and symbols associated with this ‘major occurrence in modern Greek culture’”, according to its curator, Christoforos Marinos (OPANDA Curator of Exhibitions and Events). As he points out in the exhibition’s catalogue, its aim is to represent rebetiko music and its “mythology” through a contemporary visual outlook, and explore how contemporary visual artists can engage emotionally with rebetiko and “translate it into image”.

“To this day, when the words rebetiko and visual arts are mentioned in the same breath, the first things that come to mind may be Alekos Fassianos’s illustrations for books by Elias Petropoulos, Tassos’s engravings for [Sotiria] Bellou’s album covers, or the zeibekiko dancers that were such a frequently represented subject in Tsarouchis’s paintings”, writes Marinos, adding that “Rebetiko intends to expand the visual representation of the world of rebetiko, fundamentally changing the way it is perceived in the visual arts”.

The mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, pointed out in his statement that the majority of the works showcased have been commissioned by the Municipality of Athens specially for this exhibition, so that contemporary artists can converse with the artistic heritage left by the great moderns, on the theme of rebetiko and its interpretation by people of our times. The exhibits include paintings but also engravings, photographs, video and sound installations and performances.

Among the featured artists we find the names of iconic modern painters, sculptors and engravers, such as Yannis Tsarouchis (1910–1989), Tassos (1914–1985), Alexandros Korogiannakis (1906–1966), Giorgos Sikeliotis (1917–1984), Lambros Orfanos (1916–1995) and the recently deceased Alekos Fassianos (1935–2022), as well as contemporary visual and performance artists, from Sotos Alexiou, Panos Charalambous and Alexandros Psychoulis to Katerina Zacharopoulou, Maria Tsagkari, Maria Louizou, street artist Cacao Rocks and the artistic collective The Callas.

The exhibition (10 February – 3 April 2022) is hosted in three venues –the Municipal Gallery of Athens in Metaxourgeio, the Arts Centre of the City of Athens at Eleftherias Park and the foyer of the Olympia Municipal Music Theatre “Maria Callas”– and admission is free. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, with texts by the participating artists, guest writers and rebetiko scholars.