“TERMA ASKLIPIOU”, MYRTO XANTHOPOULOU | BOOK LAUNCH

Myrto Xanthopoulou invites you to the book launch of “Terma Asklipiou” by Myrto Xanthopoulou on Thursday 27th of November, from 19:00, at her studio space at 5 Arianitou Street, Athens 11472, Greece.The same day at 20:30 there will be a performance by Myrto Xanthopoulou.

The artistic world of Myrto Xanthopoulou unfurls through small- and medium-scale works— sculptural assemblages and constructions born of humble, fragile, and often perishable materials: remnants of daily life such as packaging paper, bags, notebooks and note pages, models, sticks, reeds, plaster, tape, glue, paint, cigarette papers. And also: words and phrases written, glued, woven, cut apart, erased. Her works demand time and painstaking handcraft, a resolutely manual process through which the artist stretches her endurance and the resistance of her materials to decay. Through friction, repetition, and exhaustion, she seeks to forge a bond—both physical and spiritual— with materiality.

Her practice is firmly autobiographical, language-driven, and idiosyncratic, revealing her attentiveness to everyday life—visible and invisible, hidden and apparent. Infused with humour, playfulness, and a hint of existential unease, she lends significance to all that unfolds around us and all that we live through, again and again. Hers is a profoundly personal, inward-looking body of work, distilling the familiar, the mundane, and the candid into a poetics of the everyday. She experiments with the meanings that words convey, but also with rhythm, self-expression, poetry, autobiography, loss, and weariness. Her concerns curve toward affect and intimacy; she navigates states of love and longing, care and fatigue, disappointment and depletion.

Language, forms the very ground from which her artistic research and practice sprout. Xanthopoulou engages literal meaning and metaphor, plays with slang as readily as with the incomprehensible or the absurd, the overlooked and the paradoxical, embracing open meanings and the expressive indeterminacy of the words and phrases she welds together. Hers is a language that houses both the verbal and the non-verbal—the latter surfacing in pauses, erasures, tears, smudges, and the worn materials embedded in her works. In the simple, colloquial Greek she uses, we encounter stray words with double meanings, phrases that attempt to articulate, signify, but also negate, upend, or dismantle. Her language is silent yet sonorous, zestful yet on the brink of collapse, raw yet tender, open yet immediate; a language that repeats and falters, trivial yet poetic, wounded yet desirous.

This book records the artist’s world: her works alongside the notes scattered across her studio – on her desk, in her notebooks, pinned to walls – a trace of the making itself. And I say making deliberately, for this is precisely how she works: she sticks, unsticks, composes, decomposes, recomposes, breaks apart, balances, weaves—only then do these processes settle into the form of works, deciding which of these many makings will transcend the studio doors. This book scans her sketches and constructions, the scribbled comments and notes, before they fully crystallise into Works, before they assume their final shape. Here, repetition—of works or parts thereof—becomes essential, enabling the most penetrating observation, examination, and reading of her practice.

Xanthopoulou’s titles play a central role; they form the poetic core of each piece. Asklipiou St, Last Stop gathers the meanings these two words hold for her—together and apart: Asklipiou Street, where she kept her studio for years; the close of that life-cycle; the last stop of the 026 bus she used to ride; the existential dead-ends one can slip into; the fading of an urban condition and the new beginnings marked by the gentrification of Asklipiou and the broader Exarcheia area. In this title, the personal meets the collective; the autobiographical enters into dialogue with the political. —Daphne Vitali, Art Historian, Curator at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens

Book Launch
Myrto Xanthopoulou
“Terma Asklipiou”
Edited by Katerina Vazoura
Design by Studio Lialios Vazoura
Photos (177-191 pp) by Peter Nikoltsos

Language: Greek
Pages: 192 pages
Format: 143 × 210mm, soft cover with flaps
Editions: 200 copies

October, 2025

ISBN: 978-618-87122-5-6

*Myrto Xanthopoulou is ARTWORKS Fellow