Author: gourgourini

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

The exhibition series The Palpitating Root opens on 24.11.25 in the city of Florina and turns its attention to the magical channels running through manifold realities. Each chapter will present new works by contemporary artists, developed through on-site research in this borderland region where nature, rich historical narratives, and diverse traditions coexist within a cinematic landscape. For the first episode, Konstantinos Kotsis and Despina Charitonidi conduct field research and present a performative sculptural intervention titled The Last Map in the neighborhood of the municipal market which will be presented on 24/11 at 19:00 on Tagmatarhou Naoum Street.

Drawing from magical realism, as it appears in literature and as explored in feminist and postcolonial studies, the exhibition highlights the inescapable entanglement of the natural and the spiritual, searching for the elements that constitute “the mystery breathing behind things.” By allowing ground-up, local, and oblique narratives to emerge on surface, The Palpitating Root challenges singular interpretations of history, nature, and gender, inviting us instead into a queer perspective, attuned to their countless expressions.

Konstantinos Kotsis creates multimedia installations informed by sculptural thinking, focusing on naturalistic and folkloric observation within broader social and economic landscapes to intertwine personal and historical narratives. Despina Charitonidi, working across sculpture and performance, investigates the relationships between nature, materiality, and human-made structures. In their collaborative research and final work, “materiality becomes a starting point for reflecting on the relationship between locality, collectivity, and historical linearity, drawing from the dawn of human societies,” as they mention.

The Palpitating Root inaugurates the ΦΑΝΚΑ Florina Art Residency Program, produced by A-DASH. Later episodes throughout the year will feature Maria Varela, Catriona Gallagher, and the artist duo Phantom Investigations (Ino Varvariti and Giannis Delagrammatikas). Curated by Christina Petkopoulou, the Residency Program aims each year to welcome artists, writers, and curators to Florina, offering them the opportunity to conduct site-specific research, produce and exhibit work through collective processes, in response to the curatorial prompt of each thematic chapter. Its annual themes draw inspiration from local narratives, the sensibility of liminality, and the unique qualities the above can offer to artistic practice, production, and research.
The Palpitating Root is supported by and under the auspices of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

The Palpitating Root
Ep. 1: The Last Map
Konstantinos Kotsis / Despina Charitonidi
24.11.25, Florina
Curated by: Christina Petkopoulou

*Κonstantinos Kotsis & Christina Petkopoulou are ARTWORKS Fellows

We say “Oops!” apologetically. We say “Oops!” hypocritically. Surprised, we exclaim “Oops!” for an accident we ourselves caused—for something we supposedly did not expect to happen that way or to have such an outcome. We use “Oops!” for a minor setback, a misfortune, or a mistake. We say “Oops!” and shrug our shoulders indifferently.

We are cartoons in an animated series: we have no feelings, no bodies, no thoughts. We trip each other up, we fight, we laugh mechanically. We kill one another and come back to life, again and again. We are the absurdly violent heroes of the short stories of Russian author Daniil Kharms, who lived through the gloom of the Stalinist 1930s. We are the burlesque clowns of American cinema in the dark years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

We are creating our own avant-garde cabaret of the interwar period. Our materials are humble, our aesthetic is DIY, and our music is pre-recorded. We stage our own farcical duets—the twin souls of sworn friends who, like Tom and Jerry, chase each other endlessly, or, like Laurel and Hardy, fall, collide, get up, and fall again without mercy.

We are reacting to a world that seems increasingly absurd and grotesque. Wars, rearmament, far-right leaders, militarism, racism, closed borders, fake news, erratic policies, blatant economic bargaining, scandals, manipulated justice, cover-ups, impunity—and the unthinkable: genocide and ethnic cleansing broadcast live from a colonialist, apartheid-style pariah state, supported with money and weapons by the “Holy Alliance” of the willing in the Western world.

Concept & coordination: Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis
Texts: Daniil Kharms
Director and adaptation of Kharm’s texts: Vassilis Noulas
Set design & Costumes: Kostas Tzimoulis
Assistant director: Elisavet Xanthopoulou

Performers: Christina Karagianni, Stavros Karambatsos, Pierre Magendie, Despoina Hatzipavlidou

Μ54
Menandrou 54, Athens 104 31
Première: Friday 21 November 2025
21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30 Nov. and 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21 Dec. 2025
Starting time:  21:00
Duration: 65 minTickets: https://www.ticketservices.gr/event/oops/

Upper Ankyle, the new artist-run space in Athens, presents from November 6, 2025, to January 17, 2026, the group exhibition Land Attunements, featuring works by Vasilis Galanis, Konstantinos Giotis, Tasos Gkaintatzis, Chrysa Gregoriou, Panagiotis Kefalas, Eleni Odysseos, Stephanie Iris Orati, Martha Panagiotopoulou, Despina Sanida-Crezia, Alexandros Tzannis, curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. The exhibition opening will take place on Thursday, November 6, at 8pm.

Through a series of paintings, sculptural, archival and other vernacular gestures that respond to both inhabited and imagined lands, Land Attunements unfolds as a reflection on how we, as human beings, inhabit, rest, transgress, or fight for the spaces around us; not to possess them, but to feel sheltered within them. The exhibition engages with the historical and sociopolitical framework of its location while seeking tools of resistance to the exploitations, appropriations, and seizures of landscapes, resources, and lives—human, non-human, and more-than-human.

By briefly encountering urban legends, oral stories, unstated words and embodied images, yet also documents and archives that have informed their relationships to spatial realms, the participating artists explore multi-sensory rituals, remnants of once-living organisms, keen intuitions and acute memories. Their works open up ways of thinking about public space as a site of inscription, whilst allowing for the unpolished to be looked at as a means for reimagining temporal and spatial relations.

The land, its surfaces, and its subterranean processes are approached not as neutral or static entities but as restless terrains that grow through decay, letting wandering to exist as a right and rest as a form of resistance. Across gestures of gathering, protest, touch, and dance, the exhibition maps an alternative syntax of the real and the speculative, where observation turns into a conversational matter.

Land Attunements invites viewers to attune. It’s a show made with the nonlinear yet unlimited possibilities of listening to the spaces that surround and sustain us, proposing a paradigm in which care, attention, and embodied presence circulate and multiply across lands, times, and beings.

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator, and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, and psychoanalytical studies. Poetry and other diaristic and archival schemes are often embedded in her practice. She is the founder of CHEAT CODE, a platform dedicated to alternative knowledge production and artistic development.

Upper Ankyle is an artist-led initiative founded by Vangelis Tzolakis and Tania Kapoglou, initially active through exhibitions and events in a temporary space in London. Now based in Kolonaki, Athens, it operates as a hybrid model between a gallery and a project space, encouraging active community engagement. Focusing on what often goes unnoticed—underground flows, hidden stories, and forgotten narratives—Upper Ankyle explores the memory of places and their psychosocial transformations, drawing its name from the ancient Athenian deme Ankyle Kathyperthen, which once extended across the area of Kolonaki and beyond.

INFO

Land Attunements
Group Exhibition at Upper Ankyle

6.11.2025 –17.01.2026
Opening: Thursday, November 6, 2025, 8-11pm

Curated by: Ioanna Gerakidi
Participating artists: Vasilis Galanis, Konstantinos Giotis, Tasos Gkaintatzis, Chrysa Gregoriou, Panagiotis Kefalas, Eleni Odysseos, Stephanie Iris Orati, Martha Panagiotopoulou, Despina Sanida-Crezia, Alexandros Tzannis

Visual identity: Alex Brouhard

Website: upperankyle.com | Instagram: @upper_ankyle

*Ioanna Gerakidi, Vasilis Galananis, Konstantinos Giotis and Alexandros Tzannis are ARTWORKS Fellows.

Within a circle of ten meters in diameter, three artists move continuously along repetitive paths, in sync with the rhythm of an electronic metronome that is amplified throughout the space. By pressing four buttons, each viewer can alter the tempo or stop it entirely, forcing the bodies to move more slowly, much faster, or to freeze completely until the next intervention.

To what extremes can these choices lead? And what are the criteria that define them?

An experiment in balance, control, and disruption that explores the embodied tension of managing a situation of collective responsibility.

The three artists first met through their collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute and the organization NEON, in the group exhibition (long duration) performance AS ONE (Benaki Museum, Athens) in 2016. Since then, they have been exploring long-duration performance and collaborating with one another.

TEMPO
Aristotelous Square (Leof. Nikis), Thessaloniki
8 & 9 November 2025
17:30 – 21:30

Conceived and performed by:
Virginia Mastrogiannaki (Athens)
Alexandros Michael (Thessaloniki)
Yannis Pappas (Berlin)

Concept & Performance:
Virginia Mastrogiannaki, Alexandros Michael, Yannis Pappas

Sound installation design: Theodoros Kleissiaris (Kleissonic)
Communications: Lia Kesopoulou
Visual communication design: Eva Temponera
Documentation: Christos Kyriazidis
Production: vatiras

With the financial support of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Supported by the Department of Visual and Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and To Pikap.

*Virginia Mastrogiannaki is a visual arts ARTWORKS Fellow

The exhibition of Andreas Ragnar Kassapis consists of paintings and textual elements that reference urban landscapes, interior spaces, and objects.

Through painting and poetry, the artist explores the distance between the city and its representation, between natural landscape and artificial image, between cultural and psychic geography. This exploration does not aim to establish oppositions; rather, it approaches these conditions as inseparable and symbiotic.

Using form, colour, line, tone, perspective, and written word as his vehicles, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis investigates the relationship between landscape and object in the post-internet age, and the changes this relationship brings to our perception and to the mechanisms of memory.

annex M: Andreas Ragnar Kassapis – Shame is an object in space
Curated by Danai Giannoglou
Exhibition duration: November 5, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 12:00 – 20:00
Thursday: 13:00 – 21:00 (free admission)
Monday: closed

The exhibition will be closed on December 24, 25, 26 & 31 and January 1, 2 & 6.

* Andreas Ragnar Kassapis & Danai Giannoglou are ARTWORKS Fellows

Performance artist and academic Dr. Despina Zacharopoulou (Royal College of Art, London), will be giving a 3-hour master class focused on potential ways that one might start rethinking what is at stake in contemporary performance art, and how one might use performance-led methodologies for their own artistic practice.

The master class will include a lecture, a practical workshop and a Q&A session.

Learn more 

Register

*Despina Zacharopoulou is a visual arts ARTWORKS Fellow (2021)

remnants of ongoing activity unfolds as a collective, evolving space – something between a studio and an office – an alternative kind of workspace, where the precarious and often invisible conditions of artistic production are revealed through ongoing activity and availability.

Focusing on the traces of process, it foregrounds personal objects embedded in the daily routines of professionals of the dance field across diverse practices, positions, and perspectives. These objects function as carriers of memory – remnants of habit and material presence – elements that co-shape the landscape of creative labor, as articulated through brief written narratives and situated experiences.

remnants of ongoing activity is part of a series of curatorial gestures by undercurrent, revolving around the notion of labour. It coexists with the presentation of the publication working (in) statements, opening up a shared space for questions and dialogue.

curated by: undercurrent

together with: AMR, Angeliki Margeti, Angeliki Stellatou, Angelos Papadopoulos, Agni Papadeli Rossetou, Anastasio Koukoutas, Androniki Marathaki, Anna Pangalou, Αspasia-Maria Alexiou, Vassia Zorbali, Vitoria Kotsalou, Yiannis Tsigkris, Despina Sanida Crezia, Eleftheria Arapoglou, Eliza Alexandropoulou, Ellada Damianou, Elpida Orfanidou, Elton Petri, Ioanna Angelopoulou, Ioanna Karategou, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Joanna Toumpakari, Katerina Gevetzi, Katerina Delakoura, Kostas Tsioukas, Lia Chamilothori, Maria Koliopoulou, Maria Papadopoulou, Marianna Panourgia, Μarina Tsapekou, Betina Panagiotara, Nadi Gogoulou, Nefeli Gioti, Pagona Boulmpasakou, Pierre Magendie, Polena Petersen, Polina Kremasta, Rallou Karella, Rodia Vomvolou, Sofia Pouchtou, Sofia Danae Vorvila, Steriani Tsintziloni, Thenia Antoniadou, fart, Fotini Stamatelopoulou, Chara Kotsali, Christina Reinhardt, Christina Skoutela, Chryssa Georgiou, Xenia Koghilaki

Dates: 1/11 & 2/11
Time: 18:30-22:30
Space: EIGHT / ΤΟ ΟΧΤΩ, critical institute for arts and politics
Address: Polytechniou 8, Athens, 104 33
map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/6C8c1xXTfyx8QaGv6

 * Saturday 1/11: 19.00-20.00

Public launch of the publication working (in) statements by undercurrent – working (in) statements was initiated as a research project by undercurrent on the notion of work/labour in the field of dance, from/within the Greek context. The publication juxtaposes part of the collected documentation from the participatory encounters, while capturing personal traces through disparate, subjective, and fragmentary reflections and positions. Τhe edition was visually designed by Kostis Sotiriou. (working (in) statements was made possible by the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and with the support by the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation )

****** remnants of ongoing activity is made possible through the friendly contributions of all participants, as the project has not received any financial support.

bio undercurrent

undercurrent is an independent curatorial platform for discursive, performative, and educational practices in and beyond the field of dance, choreography, and performance. It develops and implements diverse cultural projects through unruly modes, divergent formats and mediums. It envisions to expand the critical discourse within the local context of what is performing arts today, as well as to reinforce various plexes of collaboration and communication with the international context. undercurrent was initiated in Athens (GR) in 2022 by Christina Karagianni, Elena Novakovits and Nassia Fourtouni.

*Christina Karagianni & Nassia Fourtouni are SNF ARTWORKS Dance Fellows

Moulting: the biological process where an animal sheds an outer covering, such as feathers, fur, skin, or an exoskeleton, to make way for new growth.

Crux Galerie is pleased to announce Maria Louizou’s solo exhibition titled Moulting Season. The exhibition presents a series of new sculptures that explore the theme of dwelling, from skin to home, as a means of protection, as well as temporary places of release and regeneration. Included in the exhibition are the wax sculptures Dwellings, which were commissioned for the exhibition “In a Bright Green Field” of the DESTE Foundation and the New Museum in partnership with the Benaki Museum, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari.

Sculptures made of wax, clay, steel, and plaster temporarily welcome bodies, highlighting the space left behind when their period of transformation is complete. The exhibition Moulting Season visualises precisely this process of transformation and its relic. At the same time, the ceramic works formed based on the human scale, are activated through the human presence and voices, being utilised as musical instruments. The program of live activations around and within the works performed by the artist will be announced shortly.

Portrait by Alex Kat

Maria Louizou holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts and in the National School of Decorative Arts (ENSAD) in Paris. She studied theory of music (classical and electronic) in the Athens Conservatoire. In 2020 she was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020). Her research The Body in Contemporary Sculpture, Greek Tradition, and Polyphonic Composition won a grant by the Greek Ministry of Culture in 2020.

*Maria Louizou is a visual arts SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020)

The exhibition Disappearing act / second life brings together practices that experiment with the materiality of the analog image, still or moving, and with the processes that it is intertwined. By testing the limits of their medium, the participating artists investigate process and performativity as essential components of their production. Whether the material is found or documented by the artists themselves, the exhibition balances between the gradual appearance and disappearance of the image, focusing on the “second life” it acquires as a material entity penetrating our digital era.

At the center of the exhibition lies a fragile looping system for super8 film, which stands as a promise of continuity while depending on a delicate balance, turning the system itself into an exhibit. Its content presents us with a montage of super8 film fragments shot over the last two decades by Constantinos Hadzinikolaou that have been previously “rejected” by the artist or served as tests before the official shooting: fragments that found no place in his work either because they did not integrate into the whole or were not considered technically sufficient. The work Here’s a scene (2025), emerging from the random arrangement of this repressed diary-like material, becomes formalized through each repetition, while at the same time it’s being pushed toward deterioration through its continuous use.

On the opposite wall, Isabelle Ha Eav Ruiz’s Looking for the spirit of the river (2025) stages the emergence of a hidden urban river through a 19th-century printing technique that uses a natural material—the arabic gum (gum bichromate printing). By reviving this forgotten method used in Pictorialism, part of which unfolds in water, the artist captures her imaginary vision of the Ilissos river, searching for its traces in watery areas around the city of Athens. The enlarged negatives she uses for this process become artworks themselves, as in the one presented in the show (found in the Greek Literary and Historical Archive, Courtesy of Melas Family Archive, Photographic Archive ELIA/MIET) depicting two figures believed to be by the Ilissos river. Both works stand as a symbolic ritual for the gradual reappearance and fading out of a vanished place.

In Stavros Kassis’s work, found photography functions not only as an image but also as archive, gesture and intervention. For his piece Turista Desaparecido (2024), the artist uses found photographs taken during a trip where we follow the protagonist around different streets and monuments of a city. The figure was carefully erased, in a way that removes the personal features of the depicted individual, though accentuating its presence within the image. Revisiting memories and shifting parts of it is also what the artist practices through his research and collage process, as a way to examine the distortions applied in urban and historical space through the touristic gaze. This research extends into three dimensions, with works that incorporate materials from public space, such as fragments of furniture, construction materials etc. – granting them a second chance—like the photographs—to coexist through new relationships and dynamics.

Finally, in both exhibition halls and in a way that they face each other, are placed the works of Philip Fleischman, titled One Meter of White (2025), two “self-referential” photograms made from 16mm film. In Fleischman’s practice, the processing of film as a medium overcomes the information it carries, often leading him toward minimalist results. By removing the film’s perforation, he deprives it of its ability to function as a means of image reproduction. Placing the film directly onto the photosensitive surface in different ways, he treats it as a material freed from its identity as a source of stable and repeatable information. This performative approach connects to the reclaiming of the material for a fluid identity that offers it more possibilities for existing in space than its original use allowed.

With works by Philipp Fleischmann, Isabelle Ha Eav Ruiz, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou and Stavros Kassis; curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

02 October – 15 November 2025

*Eva Vaslamatzi is a curatorial SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2019)

HAUS N PRESENTS FIRE SPIRITS

11.09.2025 – 18.10.2025

Fire Spirits unfolds like a held breath. Between Athens’ underground presence and its secrets, this exhibition sits in the debris of a future that never arrived, and a past that refuses to settle.

Scattered throughout the exhibition are fragments of a world suspended: debris on the floor, floating fabrics, piled chairs, an acid green painting, and scattered canvases. Metal hands jut out from the wall like claws, tearing at space-time, their etched messages surfacing from a suspended elsewhere.

These elements resist narrative closure, composing a kind of material séance where the sensorial and the spectral converge; staging a haunting feeling, holding the air like breath, a piano echoing, like waiting, like memory that insists on returning not as image but as a ghost.

The works do not merely represent the past or anticipate the future, but inhabit the unfinished, and we linger with what remains unresolved and unrested.

Works by: Konstantinos Giotis, Sem Lala, Nancy Lupo, Vera Lutz, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Eva Papamargariti, Jeff Wall Production, Georgia Sagri, Iris Touliatou, Theodoros Tzannetakis, Amalia Vekri

Kairi 6, Athina 105 51

Sunday Closed
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 5–8 PM
Thursday 5–8 PM
Friday 5–8 PM
Saturday Closed

* Konstantinos Giotis, Eva Papamargariti, Iris Touliatou and Amalia Vekri are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

The fiction film “Arcadia” by director Yorgos Zois (ARTWORKS Fellow 2019 & ARTWORKS Grantee 2025) has been selected as Greece’s official submission to compete for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

Yorgos Zois is a filmmaker. His work has been recognized at some of the world’s foremost film festivals — including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, Telluride, and Clermont-Ferrand — and has earned numerous international awards and distinctions. In Greece, he received the Hellenic Film Academy Award for Best Short Film for Casus Belli, as well as seven awards at the Drama International Short Film Festival, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. His debut feature, Interruption, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2015 and earned him the Hellenic Film Academy Award for Best New Director. His short film Out of Frame won the European Film Academy Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2012, while he has also served on the official “Lion of the Future” jury at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. His films have been broadcast by major television networks such as CANAL+ and ARTE, and have been selected by the renowned Criterion platform. His second feature, Arcadia, premiered in the official Encounters competition of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and went on to win the Best Director Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival, among many other international honors. In Greece, Arcadia received the Iris Awards for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay from the Hellenic Film Academy, and was the only Greek film nominated by the European Film Academy.

In 2019, Yorgos Zois received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship awarded by ARTWORKS, while in 2025 his latest film in development “Phrychtoria” was selected for the 2025 ARTWORKS Grants program.

The group exhibition Sacred or Monsters, through a composition of sculptures, video performances, inscriptions, and sound archives, longs to explore the multifaceted meanings and connotations of identity as a malleable or mutable structure carrying the possibility to undemonize every Other, stripping away its semiotic weight as dangerous, dirty, or abnormal. Post-human entities, mythical creatures, ever-transforming beings, and exhausted yet resilient psyches and bodies coexist, shaping a narrative completed through its fragmentation—an uncanny chronicle that at times frightens, dazzles, disorients, while simultaneously illuminating, informing, and empowering.

The exhibition aims to reintroduce the self beyond its immovable and fixed entity and, along, to think of history as a fluid, an often temporal or paradoxical system. How can we reframe monstrosity, a construct that often generates, imposes and perpetuates psychosocial and geopolitical hierarchies? How can we turn it into a tool for dismantling power structures, authoritative gazes and identity norms?

The works exhibited, emerge from what remains unspeakable, subterranean, disguised; they arise from and with malformed bodies, they grow into divine species, they speak of myths and imperceptible gestures. The cavernous, the secret, the transcendent—that which is often perceived as chthonic, foreign, or undesirable—are the main vehicles through which the artists renegotiate conflicting structures and erratic behaviors we humans enact daily.

The exhibition first seeks to recognize and then affirm these constant yet spasmodic clashes. Starting from the building’s depths, situated in a seemingly inaccessible portal, Petros Moris’ marble diptych sculpture titled Entropy as Hardship / Entropy as Kinship explores the entropy as a condition that legitimizes both disintegration and recomposition, confronting them as mechanisms for reevaluating the anarchic, or the opposing. By using an aesthetically idiolectic scheme, a language borrowing elements from both tectonic geologies and the urban landscape, Moris’ sculptural installation introduces a series of persistently mutant questions around a tongue-less, willfully incomprehensible vocabulary. In his work, the oracle, in its duality, encourages us, audiences, to query our contact with the visible or intelligible, to be initiated into that which consciously chooses the covert, to find in the unknown a haptic form of resistance.

The monstrous, now seen as a parable, gains new meaning—it becomes perceivable through its potential, its manifested reservation, or its sanctity. Marina Xenofontos’ sculptural installation, through the video performances Pinocchio, 2008-2009/2025, To Egon Schiele, 2008-2009/2025 and Am I a puppet, 2008-2009/2025 which interact asynchronously, seeks to reinforce this absurd resilience, investigating the idea of an other that dwells within the self. By transforming her own identity, the artist look with, rehearses, and performs each gesture as an encased imitation; her props and postures enact the stubbornly odd. Through prosthetic extensions that alter her face, through threads that determine her movements, and through gestures instigating the body’s appearance, the works long to exist as allegories uttering desires, emancipations, imperatives, transpositions. The puppet steps to the stage, only to deforming herself, to claim her agency, to expand her limits.

Tainted and sacred, the ideal is profane, the marginal’s the focal point of a narrative that both belongs to and eludes otherness. Doves in the Kitchen, the sculptural, echoing constellation of Niki Danai Chania, which is placed on the Foundation’s rooftop, brings together the exhibition’s narrative. Her work assembles personal diaries with stories where demons carry freedom, grave offerings accompany another kind of birth, reflections attest vulnerability. By encountering a material like metal—capable of freezing or heating based on its surroundings—and by re-evaluating the semantics of gold as a material tied to the emblematic or pompous, the artist negotiates the relationship between the unholy and the blessed, the fabled and the real, the unwanted and the cherished.

How can the monstrous, no longer confined to a narrative associated with the abject, the repulsive, the external, or the menacious, serve as an example, a motive, or a medium for the disassembly and reshaping of a collective identity, a resilient body, a reality grounded in imaginative possibilities? How can our actions, interactions, and decisions be informed by those of mythical, unnoticed, peripheral, or just other beings—validating an ongoing dialogue between the past and the future, bridging the dispersed and the complete?

The exhibition Sacred or Monsters wishes to exist as a series of hypotheses and inquiries—voiced by what is deemed inferior yet took the place of the prominent; by what was unspeakable but found space to exist; by bodies which grew bigger in order to be freed.

Artists: Petros Moris, Marina Xenofontos, Niki Danai Chania

Curator: Ioanna Gerakidi

Artistic Director: Marina Miliou Theocharakis

Exhibition Coordinator: Nefeli Siafaka

Communication: Marina Kampouroglou, Christina Oikonomou

 Duration: September 25–November 27, 2025

Opening hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 13:00 – 17:00

Admission: Free

*Ioanna Gerakidi and Petros Moris are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows

Eleonora Siarava was resident choreographer at UniArts Helsinki for the development of her artistic work and experimentation with methodological tools, composition devices and creative media.

Eleonora Siarava is a choreographer working between Greece and Germany. She has presented her work in Greece and internationally. She creates enigmatic multilayered performances experimenting with aesthetic forms, imaginary-real spaces, overlapping temporalities, hybridity, atmospheres. For her piece The Body and the Other~ premiered at Tanzhaus NRW, TEMPS D’IMAGES Festival, was supported by the program »Transfer International« of NRW KULTURsekretariat of Germany, Ministry of Culture and Science of NRW, artistic grant I-Portunus/Creative Europe and collaborated with Mixed Reality and Visualization Institut for the implementation of digital technology. Since 2020 is supported by the Ministry of Culture of Greece. She created the pieces BLUE BEYOND presented in National Theatre of N. Greece, Tanz:digital/ITI Berlin, Frankfurt LAB Emerging Artists 2023, Who knows where the time goes-potential destination #1 (Roes theatre, residency at SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographing Development/Interdisciplinary Incubator, Prague), I am Dancing in a Room (MOMus-Stereoma Festival). She participated in Moving Digits/Creative Europe project for Dance and Digital Technologies, Tanzhaus Düsseldorf & STL Tallinn (2018-2020). Siarava has been awarded the S. Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS 2022-2023 in the field of Choreography, was fellow of START/Robert Bosch Stiftung & Goethe Institut and resident choreographer at UniArts Helsinki, Finland 2025 and ITI International Theatre Institute Germany/Motion Bank, Berlin, 2024. Her works have been included in the Media Library for Dance and Theatre – ITI International Theatre Institute Germany, one of the most extensive audiovisual documentation archives for the performing arts in Germany. Currently, she is preparing her upcoming piece (June July-working title) that will premiere in 2026.

instagram.com/siaravaeleonora/

per-dance.com

Ileana Arnaoutou and Ismini King are part of the Ducato Prize finalist exhibition at the Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza and have received the Residency Award along with Pascale Birchler and Andro Eradze.

Exhibition
The exhibition of the finalists opens at Cappella Ducale – Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza, on 20 September 2025 until 9 November 2025. The exhibition features works by Yumna Al-Arashi (USA), Ileana Arnaotou & Ismene King (Greece), Pascale Birchler (Switzerland), Cao Shu (China), Andro Eradze (Georgia), Evan Ifekoya (Nigeria), the TOMBOYS DON’T CRY collective, and Yuyan Wang (China) in the Contemporary category. The Academy category will feature works by Ylenia-Gaia Dotti (Italy), George Hiraoka Cloke (United Kingdom), Joyce Joumaa (Lebanon), Besnik Lushtaku (Germany), and Yanqing Pan (China).

Residency Prizes
Three residency Prizes are awarded to the most deserving artists selected from among the 80 selected (Contemporary + Academy). Each Residency Prize will consist of a three- to four-week artistic residency in various locations, both in Italy and abroad.

Myrto Xanthopoulou, represented by Citronne Gallery, is the recipient of the Art Athina Young Artist Award. Now in its fourth year, the award aims to support artistic creation as part of the fair’s institutional framework. The award, which includes a solo presentation of the artist’s work at MOMus–Alex Mylona Museum within 2026, was announced on Friday, September 19 2025, by jury member and MOMus representative, Yiannis Bolis.

According to the eligibility criteria, candidates for the Art Athina Young Artist Award must be artists up to 45 years old, living and working in Greece, and nominated by their representing gallery, in which they have held at least one solo exhibition. The award was established by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association, while Art Athina collaborates for the fourth time with MOMus–Alex Mylona Museum, one of the five museums of the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus).

After reviewing the 14 submitted nominations from artists and their representing galleries, the jury unanimously decided to present the award to Myrto Xanthopoulou.

The five-member jury consisted of:
Polyna Kosmadaki (Art Historian and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Benaki Museum)
Christoforos Marinos (Art Historian and Curator)
Thoulis Misirloglou (Art Historian and Artistic Director of MOMus–Museum of Contemporary Art–Collections of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the State Museum of Contemporary Art)
Yiannis Bolis (Art Historian and Head of the Department of Contemporary Sculpture at MOMus–Alex Mylona Museum)
Anna Mykoniati (Art Historian and Curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens–EMST)

Art Athina – Jury’s statement

According to the jury, Myrto Xanthopoulou’s work evolves with consistency and coherence, distinguished by the breadth and multiplicity of its artistic media—installations, constructions, drawings, video, performances. It demonstrates a particular interest in the use of language as an expressive tool, while disposable materials and everyday single-use objects form a fundamental element of her practice.

Art Athina is organized by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association and produced by BeBest. The event is part of the Regional Program “Attica 2021–2027.”

art-athina.gr
myrtoxanthopoulou.com

Neritan Zinxhiria won the Golden Dionysus at the 48th Drama International Short Film Festival for his film “Noi”, which was shot in Metsovo and had its world premiere at the Raindance Festival.

In “Noi”, Neritan Zinxhiria tells the story of a boy coming of age against the almost otherworldly mountainous landscape in which he grows up, burdened by the loss of his brother. When his older brother is killed by his beloved horse, the younger one must decide, through nightmares and visions, whether to kill the animal or forgive it. Blinded by revenge, he ultimately chooses a different path. The relationship between human and nature, the Greek landscape, and adolescence take center stage in Zinxhiria’s film.

Neritan Zinxhiria first won the Golden Dionysus in 2012 for his film Chamomile, while in 2024 he received the DISFF Documentary Award for Light of Light, once again using his lens to probe into the essence of the Balkan soul.

Neritan Zinxhiria is an ARTWORKS Fellow (2018) in the field of moving image.