AN ATHENIAN FOURSOME: SEA, SUN, DISAPPEARANCE, SEX
SEA
In Sofia Dona’s KATARAKT (2023), the swimmer inhales, turns, and with each stroke the horizon flickers—Turkey/Greece/Turkey—a border that behaves like a faulty eyelid. The village is Katarraktis on Chios, only 11 km from the Turkish coast, its name doubling the eye disease that clouds sight; Dona lets the frame mimic that blur so the line between coasts is less a cartographic fact than a condition of looking. The film taught me to accept intermittence as truth: some days the sea is where “West” ends and “East” begins; other days it’s just what I see—fluid, blinking, unstable. Bachelard treats water as a living mirror: unlike earth or fire, its images are fragile, shifting, refusing solidity—yet precisely in that elusiveness they seduce vision into dreaming. A glass mirror is “too civilized”; water renaturalizes seeing, giving a depthful reflection where the gaze doesn’t just look but becomes tactile—an “idealizing” vision that edits and remakes. Here in Athens, between West and East, going back and forth between different sides of the water, I am watching my reflection—my vision in dreaming—seduced by artworks that come in waves to me from my Athenian summer.
Sofia Dona, KATARAKT, 2023. Film still
From that blink, I walk into a different sea—Marina Gioti’s research on shipwrecks. Here, water stops being viewed and becomes infrastructure. In the bay of Eleusis, an informal ship-graveyard sprawls between the refineries and the mythic threshold to the underworld; ships sink out of registries but not out of time. Sounding the Silent World (2023–24) treats this seabed as a cultural landscape, with wrecks as living archives—rust, pollution, labor. Gioti built an interdisciplinary, maritime-archaeology survey: an offshore drift that mapped wrecks with sound—side-scan sonar, multibeam echo-sounders, hydrophones—so every “image” we meet is literally made of echoes. If KATARAKT trains the eye, Gioti trains the ear; she maps with sonar what sight disavows. The project refuses postcard Aegean; it listens for the toxic afterlives of commerce, the way rust becomes a reef for stories you can’t see from a ferry. The sea does not carry things away; it keeps them.
Marina Gioti, Kato Kosmos, 2023. Installation detail. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Dominique Fiat
Maria Papanikolaou’s sculptures, Escapes (2023), line up five grey plaster forms that echo ancient stone anchors; from each, a jute rope climbs toward the ceiling and then—at a precise point—opens into a small, deliberate gap, a cut you can almost measure with two fingers. It’s a modest intervention with huge weather: the anchor promises mooring and safety; the little opening in the rope narrates unmooring, release, refusal. Read in the Aegean’s present tense—where crossings, patrols, and delayed rescues script the sea as both corridor and trap—the work feels like an allegory for this double entendre: is this the lifeline interrupted or the necessary cut that lets a body slip free? The installation reads as both refusal and aid—a cut that could save a body from going under, or a cut that abandons one to drift.
At the seafront, my phone catches Turkish networks for a minute, then loses them to Greek—Turkey, Greece, no service, Greece—like KATARAKT’s eyelid. I carry the sequence with me: blink to accept the blur, listen to the sound of the wrecks, cut to make room for breath; the water is not a border but a method, and it edits me as much as I try to read it.
Maria Papanikolaou, Escapes, 2023. Detail. Plaster, jute rope, iron, dimensions variable. Photo: Angela Svoronou.
Vasilis Papageorgiou, Flower on the floor I, 2024. Painted steel and plexi glass, 45 x 10 x 10 cm, 2024, exhibition view, The Moths at CRAC, Alsace.
SUN
At noon, when the sun is on top, the form is made by glare.
A group of metal flowers stands across the floor. Each stem runs straight and then stops for a moment: a short transparent sleeve interrupts the line before it continues upward to the bloom. It’s a clean break in the line you can point to. This is Vasilis Papageorgiou’s Flower on the floor (2024). The petals are neat, almost machine-made, so your eye keeps returning to that small interruption—a tiny pause inside the plant’s rise. It reads as nature interrupting the economy—a remainder that jams the system—even when “nature” itself has been industrialized. Here the bloom carries daylight like weight. The interruption is where glare becomes pressure—the sun as something you balance against. Next to Maria Papanikolaou’s rope with a cut, the rhyme is clear: Papanikolaou cuts the line to stage escape; Papageorgiou interrupts the line to stage endurance. Both are forms of interruption, but one lets go, the other holds on—two survival grammars.
Papageorgiou’s recent work looks at the sun as a system—leisure and rest as industries built around sunlight—and at the infrastructures of tourism, planetary exhaustion, and late-capitalist extractivism. If the sun is an impossible image (you can’t look at it, only at what it does), he builds the effects instead of the icon. We never “see” the sun; we meet glare on glaze, heat turning into fatigue, daylight becoming schedule. His works take the form of loungers, towels, balcony awnings (the Athenian ‘tents’”), beach umbrellas, sunsets—and he shows how the sun industry becomes administered, budgeted, worn down. His ceramic sunset protocol is literal: he photographs the sky at sunrise or sunset, then recreates that light in clay on a hanging tile—turning sky into earth—and titles each work with two times: the observed sunrise/sunset and the completion time. It’s one scene holding two temporal registers. By pairing image-time with making-time, he turns a view into a timesheet, folding leisure back into labor with precise notation.
Vasilis Papageorgiou, 07:11 to 19:48, 2024. Ceramic, steel, 52,5 x 41,7 x 2 cm. Photo by: Stathis Mamalakis
Vasilis Papageorgiou’s visual vocabularies are indebted a lot to Rallou Panagiotou, whose works often feel like afterimages of a day spent under the sun—holiday glare turned into matter; she turns summer idleness into her methodology. She makes what she calls sculptural “topologies” out of materials tied to the built environment (marble, coated metals, plexi, tiles), always in relation to the body in leisure and reverie. Installed, they read like shorelines after the season: sunscreened plastics, architecture chips, fashion fragments, the light still humming in them. In Kalypso Vol. II (2016), a derelict 1970s–90s resort becomes a mnemonic device; her film essays the site while the sculptures echo its fixtures and cheap copies of global trends—T-shirts, lycra swimsuits mass-produced in Greece in the 80s. Panagiotou’s Greece is the marginal European periphery where modernity arrives secondhand—copied, misread, and re-styled—folding commodities and cosmetics—lycra, eyeliner, plastic straws—into sculpture; she’s long been interested in the zone where the natural is corrupted by commodity and where junkspace is what remains when modernization runs its course. I am leaving her work thinking that if Europe ends anywhere, it ends as strata where leisure, debt, and desire co-deposit.
Rallou Panagiotou, Tranquil & Unbroken (Sphinx Gold), 2015. Aluminium, VW car paint. Courtesy of the artist and Bernier Eliades Gallery
In Seven Types of Dust (2024), Danae Io sets her camera on the plain of Thebes at the hour when heat turns air to glass. The sun is felt on the screen—as shimmer on the horizon, as pressure on bodies that work the fields, as a schedule that times day laborers. The opening line—“On Thebes’ plain, the sun is burning the unspoken”—frames light as a force rather than a postcard; Thebes isn’t a tourist myth so much as a heat machine. The film keeps returning to solar arrays and wind parks that have spread across central Greece in the wake of crisis and foreign investment, converting farmland into energy farms with limited local benefit. The sun is never framed head-on; it’s legible as distortion, fatigue, and timetable—a rippling mirage that wobbles horizons and organizes labor. The dip of light carries an imperial residue too: American researchers sift a Greek landscape where ancient myth meets modern extraction; even the panels read as a new archive of the sun, an infrastructure that “stores” glare as data and demand. The result is less a mysterious image of antiquity than a noon day grammar of mirage: light thickens, language codifies, and history appears as a wavering seam between empire and maintenance.
Io keeps returning to Thebes—not just for mythology, but for what gathers there now: migration routes, logistics roads, agricultural seasons, energy corridors. It’s a ringed basin just outside Attica, historically cast as Athens’s unruly double. It’s where Oedipus solved the Sphinx’s riddle only to inherit a curse that will recur for generations (as he does not see rightly; when sight fails, the city sickens); where Antigone faced the state (primal scene of civil disobedience); where Dionysus undid the city with frenzy (the return of what authority represses) in her films it becomes a palimpsest. And following the line of thought she develops with Stathis Gourgouris (Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, 1996), Io treats myth not as a fixed inheritance but as a technology of nation-building—a dream-form that Europe has long used to anchor “the West” to an ancient past.
My time in Greece taught me the sun as administration. Vasilis showed me how light keeps time; Rallou, how leisure leaves residues; and Danae, how landscape keeps the heated pressure. Together they changed how I look at noon—I don’t ask what the sun shows anymore; I ask what it demands. I can’t watch the sun; I negotiate with it.
Danae Io, Seven Types of Dust, 2024. Film Still.
DISAPPEARANCE
Here, in the city of antiquity and ruins, things endure by subtracting themselves.
In The Heritage (2024), Maria Tsagkari doesn’t monumentalize memory; she processes it—more than that, she makes it disappear to reappear otherwise. A family house on Samos—built, repurposed, and abandoned after tragedy—survives as two walls; she has the stones crushed into aggregate and recasts them as letters scaled from her grandmother’s signature. By isolating each glyph until it no longer speaks, language is emptied of speech and turned into standing residue: a legible illegibility, disappearance as reformatting. In One Day (2023), with the church’s permission she removes the original glass panes that once protected Byzantine icons—panes fogged by decades of kisses and fingertips or worshippers—replaces the icons’ glass, then mounts the old panes on carved wooden bases inscribed with Tsagkari’s phrases inspired by the refugee testimonies; one reads, “one day when the words will lose all their teeth.” Words without teeth become, for Tsagkari, words without indexical images. In Flying Too Close to the Sun (Psiloritis, 2021), she compounds the method: a “film” realized as instructions carried by a curator up and down the mountain; photographs produced by timed envelopes; subtitles for a movie that doesn’t exist. Much of Tsagkari’s practice is a disciplined abstraction: the film distilled to subtitles, the image evaporated into script, the classical art object thinned to protocol. Earlier works fix the procedure even more starkly: in The Meeting Point (2013) she locates two ex-workers of a factory that was closed thirty years ago, invites them back separately for a blind reunion, covers the floor a 30 m² rectangle in ash, and lets their meeting write the surface—then photographs the choreography before the ash is swept. The ash becomes the garden of One More Garden, One More Circle (2013), an ephemeral ring later jarred and reused. Houses un-housed, icons de-iconized, films nonmade—what remains is not the thing but its testimony of survival, and that testimony requires disappearance to be shareable.
Maria Tsagkari, Front: The Heritage, 2024 | Back: Where the Birds Build Their Nests, 2024. Installation view: Flying too Close to the Sun, Art Space Pythagorion, Samos, Greece, 2024. Curated by Katerina Gregos and Ioli Tzanetaki, Produced by the Schwarz Foundation. Courtesy of the artist
Maria Tsagkari, One Day, 2023; New commission for My Past is a Foreign Country exhibition, curated by Akis Kokkinos. Courtesy of the artist and DEO Projects. Photo: Nikos Alexopoulos
Maro Michalakakos makes images by undoing matter. Working mostly with red velvet, she shaves the pile with a razor until figures, foliage, eyes, and wounds appear as bare underlayers—pictures revealed by subtraction. The protocol is simple and exact: upholster or stretch the velvet; draw with a scalpel; let the image emerge where color has been erased. She pushes the material beyond the panel, too—draping entire windows in patterned velvet so light bleeds through a soft crimson grid, turning a room into a stage; sweeping up years of shaved fibers and velvet “dust” to pour across floors or wrap columns, a monumental spill of residue that remembers every cut. Furniture, curtains, couches, even a chandelier of branches: domestic forms are set to perform, but the real action is the abrasion—the slow, tender violence that makes a face out of nap and absence. In her hands, red velvet is both altar and skin: what’s missing is what you see; what’s scraped away is what holds the image in place.
Maro Michalakakos, Red Carpet, 2011. Shaved velvet, 18×1.45m. Tate Permanent Collection.
Eleni Tomadaki’s paintings and drawings are solid abstractions that behave like incisions, reaching toward a pre-verbal register. She works through touch—swift, two-handed mark-making and improvisation—treating process itself as resistance to “conventional cultivation”; the image arrives through friction, not plan. The gesture is physical and edged: strokes that read like cuts, pictorial structures that hover between stab and caress. The violence is palpable. Surfaces oscillate between hesitation and chaos; lines feel scored as much as drawn; the palette often registers like a bruise. The knife recurs as a motif rather than a prop—a way to think the image not just for its potential to wound in a Barthesian sense, but as already wounded.
In the studio, her note says it best: “The paper becomes your body, and the brush the knife. My hands remain my hands. Sometimes it stabs you until it eliminates you, and sometimes it stops. I don’t want to kill you; you just need some holes, that’s all.’’ Those “holes” are her syntax: subtraction as mark, breath, wound—emptiness as negative space. Disappearance here isn’t pictorial emptiness but refusal: an insistence on appearing only as trace, letting the surface register contact without surrendering a figure. The knife is a tool of abstraction—yes—but it also remembers its other use; the work keeps both truths in tension.
In these works, disappearance isn’t vanishing. What’s scraped away, jarred, crushed, or cut doesn’t leave; it materializes—into forms, into panes, into a bruise of color—method for staying without surrender, a way to hold fast and show forth at once.
Εleni Tomadaki, What could it be everyone was after me they were blocking the ways out they were coming, 2025. Oil on linen, 240 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist
SEX
In Athens I had a lot of sex, which is another way of saying, I studied the city with my body and it taught me how a city touches back.
Nana Sachini’s sculptures begin like confessions between things, making intimacy out of contact points. Metal, fabric, resin, stone, latex—she lets them touch, lean, cinch, and sheath until a body appears in plain sight, then slips back into contour. She’s said gender, sexuality, body, and form are inseparable in her work; you feel it in how a fold behaves like a hip, a plug like a joint, a translucent skin like the moment before contact. Found parts become a tense truce between surfaces, often veiled or bound so that desire reads as pressure, not pose. The relations are choreographic rather than anatomical—what brushes what, whose weight is carried where, which seam heats into want. She’s a feminist of joins: binding, casting, muffling, veiling. I left her studio reading the sculptures as couplings (not pairs): closeness that never collapses into identity, a choreography of edges where the body exists as interval. Her modest materials gather fingerprints, spills, and time—intimacy as a way objects learn each other.
Image 12: Nana Sachini, Witch warrior Calypso, 2022. Digital print on plastic membrane, oxidized copper, aluminium, polyester, textile. 170X153X43cm. Courtesy of the artist
Similarly, Andreas Mallouris thinks desire through materials that remember touch. In Matthew 25:31–46, for I was hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, prisoner, a Uranian, a faggot (2021), velvet becomes a sensing surface—Andreas laid the fabric in cruising grounds, letting summer light slowly fix silhouettes of whatever’s briefly left behind. The sun does the exposing; the city composes. What returns to the studio is a field of negatives, much like a darkroom fixes a negative—a fugitive cartography where bodies don’t appear but their proximate props do; like a darkroom that fixes not the lover, but the conditions around the meeting. Mallouris’s On the Encounters of “Eros Breaking a Bow” at Zappeion Garden – a sequence of failures (2021–23) half-casts the marble Eros Breaking His Bow—whose original stands near the Zappeion, along those garden paths that lace the National Garden after dark—through a 3D scan, and braces the fragility with live rose stems. A classical god who disarms himself; desire un-aimed. The roses steady the break, but only with thorns. What you stand inside is a parable of civic sex as procedure: try/fail/try again; touch/withdraw/return. As Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant remind us, public sex isn’t a pathology of place but a way publics are made—improvised infrastructures of meeting that test where private ends and common begins. In Mallouris’s work, sex is a form the city takes on itself, and the materials answer back.
Andreas Mallouris, Matthew 25:31-46, for I was hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, prisoner, a Uranian, a faggot, 2021, velvet fabric, 294x185cm
Iris Touliatou stages temporary protocols—arrangements that expose the hidden infrastructures—plumbing, admin, HVAC, legal language—through which public life quietly governs intimacy. She treats intimacy as infrastructure, turning institutions inside out by scripting services, permissions, and encounters.
During Phenomenon 5 on Anafi, a small, remote island in the Aegean Sea (2023), Touliatou contracted a hairdresser to work on a fixed three-day schedule inside the exhibition; so visitors and neighbors can receive ‘‘haircuts, hairstyles, and zero cuts’’ within the show’s hours. The work is the service and its receipts. No object changes hands; instead, a relation is inaugurated—a public intimacy outsourced. In SCORE FOR COVERAGE (GIFT) (2023), after prolonged negotiation, she secures a one-year life-insurance policy naming Kunsthalle Basel’s members as beneficiaries and paints the full contract and beneficiary list across the gallery walls, binding her living body to the institution by actuarial calculus as a public service. It’s a staged intercourse—a temporal convergence of artist body with institutional body—where exposure, risk, and protection are made legible as a relation you can stand inside. Call it a sexual practice of publics: choreographies of consent, risk, and care that denude institutions just enough to let desire circulate as form.
For her solo exhibition, (appendage, 2022) at Grazer Kunstverein, Touliatou extends this logic by pulling the institution’s viscera to the surface; she plugged her micro-interventions directly into the building’s systems: untitled (oral) connected eleven public drinking fountains via a visible network of stainless-steel pipes to the Kunstverein’s water supply, so visitors activated, drank from, and heard the humming coolers—plumbing as sculpture. She also relocated the main entrance and signage (appendage) and kept all six doors unlocked as a score (untitled (lungs)), turning circulation into form; diverted members’ missed calls to a new black landline in the gallery (untitled (diversion)); shredded the institution’s old stationery into a pink fluff that drifted through rooms (untitled (sweet and low)). Rather than an “institutional critique” delivered from a critical distance, she actively denudes the public spaces in real time, making systems palpable; visitors move through a soft public of shared utilities where access, permission, and upkeep are felt as contact.
Each piece of Touliatou starts with a clear protocol (hire, schedule, collect, insure) and ends with a felt condition (touch, drink, smell). That’s how the sexual lives in public: permissions are negotiated, boundaries are re-lined, strangers become briefly entangled. Instead of presenting intimacy, she institutes it.
If the Athenian sun taught me what noon demands, sex taught me what touch requires: not confession or catharsis, but protocols—joining, risking, remaining.
Iris Touliatou, untitled (oral), untitled (still not over you) and untitled (sweet and low), 2022, Installation view as part of appendage, 2022, Grazer Kunstverein. Courtesy of the artist and Grazer Kunstverein. Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com