Sofia Rozaki’s densely symbolic, at instances surreal works are animated by the same interaction of historical types and on a regular basis rituals, native and international sensibilities and historic motifs filtered by means of up to date visible languages. Her multilayered compositions weave private and collective narratives with generational touchpoints, opening house to think about various futures whereas probing themes of id, reminiscence, trauma and sexuality.
Extra direct reflections on the influence of politics and economics in Greece seem within the work of Danae Io, whose follow explores the entanglements of surveillance, infrastructure and historic reminiscence. By movie and sculpture, she examines the sluggish bureaucratic decay of Thebes, the place historical ruins stand beside the gradual decline of native trade, drawing parallels between previous collapse and present-day realities. Her work is intently attuned to the constructed surroundings and its fractures, mapping tensions between historic layers and up to date circumstances that resist any linear notion of progress. In a single set up, a gaggle of bank cards types a part of an unsettling mirroring machine—a panopticon—that displays and distorts human conduct, revealing how financial programs form and management it. The binaries of consumption and reminiscence, recording and erasure seem unstable and shifting, like the sparkle of a surveillance feed or the fading sign of a used telephone card.
This isn’t the primary time the DESTE Basis has performed a key function in selling up to date Greek artwork. The Athens-based basis frequently organizes exhibitions and helps rising artists by means of initiatives such because the DESTE Prize, awarded biannually to a younger Greek artist. “In a Brilliant Inexperienced Discipline” builds on the legacy of earlier exhibitions like “The Identical River Twice and The Equilibrists” (2016), additionally organized by DESTE and the New Museum in collaboration with the Benaki Museum.
Along with its awards and strong exhibition program in Greece and overseas, the muse additionally engages with different disciplines. Its destefashioncollection artist commissions, as an illustration, have already resulted in two main exhibitions, debuting on the Benaki Museum in Athens earlier than touring to the Bass Museum in Miami, and within the aforementioned interview with Observer, Joannou hinted intriguingly that DESTE’s subsequent initiative will interact with design.
What’s on in Athens
There’s lots occurring in Athens this season past the festivities on Hydra, beginning with a memorable Marlene Dumas exhibition, “Cycladic Blues,” on the Museum of Cycladic Artwork. Recent off changing into the highest-selling residing lady artist at public sale—Miss January fetched $13.6 million at Christie’s in Might—Dumas places fourteen historical Cycladic collectible figurines from the museum’s everlasting assortment in measured dialogue together with her canvases. The millennia-old idols, lengthy learn as symbols of fertility and femininity, resonate in opposition to her trendy figures, which shift between vulnerability and power, seduction and intuition as they probe questions of gender and race. Curated by Douglas Fogle in shut collaboration with the artist, the present assembles works Dumas personally chosen from throughout her oeuvre.
A second, equally compelling change between up to date artwork and antiquities unfolds on the Acropolis Museum, just under the Parthenon. There, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz foregrounds the fragility of archaeological heritage and the cultural erasure that follows conflict, neglect and political turmoil. Artifacts from the Center East and the broader jap Mediterranean share house along with his painstaking reconstructions of objects looted or misplaced, inviting pointed comparisons with Greek and Cypriot patrimony. By weaving collectively tales of exile, migration, fractured civilizations and the worth of cross-cultural change, Rakowitz transforms the archaeological setting right into a discussion board for reckoning with loss, reminiscence and restore.
“Allspice” is the primary of a deliberate trilogy of exhibitions, “Michael Rakowitz & Historic Cultures,” developed by means of a collaboration between the Hellenic Ministry of Tradition, the Acropolis Museum and the NEON Group.
The Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork Athens, in the meantime, turns its gaze towards non-anthropocentric views with the exhibition “Why Take a look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives.” Spanning a number of flooring, the present facilities on the rights and well-being of animals, calling pressing consideration to the necessity to acknowledge and defend non-human lives in a world constructed on anthropocentric programs that exploit, oppress and brutalize them.
Among the many most haunting exhibitions tied to the theme is Janis Rafa’s “We Betrayed the Horses,” which investigates humanity’s longstanding want to dominate, management and subjugate highly effective creatures. The piece reveals the inhumane remedy these clever animals endure when compelled to carry out for human ambition, drawing a parallel to related dynamics of management, cruelty and emotional manipulation inside human relationships—notably within the realms of affection and sexuality.
Persevering with Rafa’s exploration of care and betrayal, sensuality and domination, the work considers the colonization of the animal world, the bodily subjugation of our bodies and the non-consensual relationships imposed by human wishes. Marking Rafa’s first institutional solo exhibition, the set up evokes the presence of horses not by means of direct depiction however by means of scent and punctiliously organized objects—human-made instruments designed to tame, management or categorical affection, but in the end misrepresenting love itself.
Emma Talbot’s newly commissioned textile set up Human/Nature (2025) is equally hanging—a monumental, immersive work dense with hydrosynthetic references and near-hallucinatory symbolism. On this kaleidoscopic composition, Talbot proposes a extra holistic connection between people and different species, one which acknowledges our shared energetic interdependencies. Shifting past the human perspective, she makes an attempt to enter the animal thoughts, imagining a world as seen and felt by means of non-human consciousness in an train in empathy and expanded consciousness that challenges the primacy of human expertise.
