GROUP EXHIBITION “MARGINS OF COLLAPSE”

THIRAS opens its doors with Margins of Collapse, a group exhibition curated by Dinos Chatzirafailidis.

The exhibition brings together seven artists working across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video and works on paper. The exhibition is concerned with material, architectural and perceptual structures at the point just before they fail to function. The selected works focus on conditions that precede collapse rather than depicting it as event: states where pressure builds without release, forms pushed slightly out of alignment.

The exhibition unfolds across a sequence of compressed and open spaces where spatial arrangements make balance feel provisional. Some works treat the architecture as a structure already compromised, inserting objects where circulation tightens, puncturing walls, activating thresholds. Others hold back, introducing pause or delay where density might be expected. The two tendencies stay in friction throughout. Anticipation gathers, disperses and reconcentrates. Elsewhere, image and sound share the same body, where eleven minutes of fragmented footage are absorbed into a raw wall surface.

Materials absorb, resist or contain forces that remain unseen, while weight and texture press back. Steel bends without breaking; mineral surfaces carry traces of extraction; drawn lines hesitate between measurement and drift. Each attends to moments that come before a shift: a vibration, a brief pause, a movement slowed, diverted or suspended.

Reduced forms oscillate between function and abstraction, resisting the clarity of either, as the works give no clear account of themselves. Fault lines cut across the exhibition as both geological realities and psychic formations, the tectonic and the interior folding into each other.

References remain deliberately open. The exhibition resonates with a prevailing atmosphere of unease without anchoring itself to a single context or fixed reading. What it traces instead are the subtle fractures running through systems, bodies and territories, present but not yet broken open.

The exhibition is pulled between two registers of scale: small panels grouped tightly, photographs that reward proximity, a mound that rises slowly from the floor, set against works that occupy the room bodily and structurally. Neither cancels the other out, and neither settles. Certain works do not address the viewer frontally but demand a different kind of attention, downward or circular. Distance and duration become the primary coordinates.

What remains is a charged stillness, where disruption is sensed but never fully arrives.

MARGINS OF COLLAPSE
June 19–August 29, 2026

Participating artists:
Stelios Kallinikou, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Athina Koumparouli, Christian Lagata, Irini Miga, Cezary Poniatowski, Evangelia Spiliopoulou

Curated by:
Dinos Chatzirafailidis

With the support of:
Adam Mickiewicz Institute

THIRAS
100 Thiras Street, 104 46 Athens, Greece

Opening:
Friday, June 19, 7 pm

Opening hours:
Wednesday–Friday: 4-8 pm
Saturday: 12-5 pm

*Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Athina Koumparouli & Irini Miga are ARTWORKS Fellows