24 hours in the Greek islands

A few summers ago, I was sitting at a sun-drenched table at Myller, my favorite café in Athens, sipping my “freddo cappuccino”—the typical Greek cold-frothed cappuccino. With its graffiti-covered glass walls and a young, alternative crowd, this tiny café sits in the middle of a small square in Psyrri, the city’s radical-chic and somewhat bohemian neighborhood. At the next table, I overheard a conversation about contemporary art, and my ears immediately perked up. A few minutes later, I had struck up a conversation with two young collectors who had just returned from a show opening at the DESTE Foundation on the island of Hydra.

Considered something of a local Positano, this island ranks just after Santorini as the Greece everyone dreams of, complete with its white and blue houses and a ban on car traffic, meaning luggage is carried strictly by donkey. Mountainous landscapes suddenly plunge into a sea of immense blue, with the Peloponnese just across the water. It is in this very setting that one can encounter the best of contemporary art, championed by the DESTE Foundation, an Athens-based institution with an international scope.

This was several years ago, when the only art scene I knew was Athens’s own – a rich one, spearheaded by local galleries of the stature of The Breeder, a three-story space hidden behind a towering, imposing brass door that would only open with the art world’s “open sesame”: “I’m here to see the exhibition.”

In the Greek capital’s ecosystem, the truly alternative spaces of the rebellious, anarchist Exarcheia coexist with mega-galleries like Gagosian, the dynamic projects of the Onassis Foundation, and finally, museums like the excellent EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Housed in a former brewery, it features futuristic escalators and an eye connecting Europe and the Mediterranean. And yet, starting with that chat with the collector couple at Myller, I began to realize more and more that the Greek art scene is not limited to the capital. In fact, every summer, a network of exhibitions unfolds across the various archipelagos, all reachable by ferry (or by propeller plane for the more daring).

When speaking of an insular art geography, the first question that arises is how much an exhibition program is designed for a local audience, and how much is for the exclusive benefit of passing tourists and collectors. It’s important for a show to be in dialogue, if not in a deep relationship, with its territory, and for the island itself not to be treated as a mere postcard backdrop. To answer this question, I found myself island-hopping this summer, encountering a series of exhibitions with different functions and for a diverse audience, but always with great attention to quality. The advantage of the island context, for art lovers, is finally having the time and the right frame of mind to experience art slowly, far from the chaos and worries of urban life.

Hydra, the Model for Insular Art
Hydra is the first point of reference when it comes to contemporary art on the islands; it is the outpost of the DESTE Foundation, whose Athens headquarters are in the Nea Ionia district. The latter is presenting the disconcerting exhibition “Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation” until November 26th. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Calvin Wang, and Taeyi Kim, it features works that are both disillusioned and disturbing (in full nineties mood) by artists born between 1960 and 1980, all part of the collection of Dakis Joannou, DESTE’s founder.

For many moons and twenty-five summers now, the DESTE Foundation has been commissioning a work for Hydra’s former slaughterhouse, a space just a short walk from the port. In photos and on social media, it can seem a bit underwhelming. The in-person impact, however, is the complete opposite and nothing short of spectacular. The experience of reaching the slaughterhouse, walking along a path overlooking a brilliant, boundless sea, is breathtaking. The installation of a huge, rotating golden sun on the slaughterhouse roof, a work by Jeff Koons, is an apparition that is simultaneously hieratic and kitsch, disorienting and fascinating, holding all its magnetic power.

The artist on display until October 31st is Nari Ward, a New Yorker born in Jamaica. He invades the slaughterhouse’s interior with fire hoses – a nod to the nearby Hydra fire station – which radiate from the floor and wrap around a human form reaching the ceiling, like a surreal snowman. The exhibition’s title is “Until That Day” and is inspired by the speech given by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie at the UN on October 4, 1963. In it, Selassie stated that world peace would remain a fleeting illusion “until that day” when the philosophy of racial superiority was definitively abandoned and human rights were guaranteed to all, regardless of skin color. This quote was later famously used by Bob Marley in his song “War.”

An anchor facing the sea, the same red as the interior, and a series of other works – including a phone booth outside filled with bottles and barbed wire (a reference to the artist’s hearing-impaired grandmother), a series of amplifiers blasting Jamaican music at full volume, and tables outside for a Jamaican game similar to checkers – create a dynamic environment aimed at attracting visitors on their way to the beach, who often stop by the space to enjoy the sunset.

Andros and Expanded Time
If the DESTE Foundation started with its space in Athens before opening a branch in Hydra, the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation took the exact opposite path. In 1979, they opened a Museum of Contemporary Art on their native island of Andros, only to inaugurate a magnificent museum in Athens forty years later. The Athens museum houses the best of modern art, from Picasso, Monet, and Degas alongside the great Greek names, with temporary contemporary art exhibitions in the Pangrati district. Rugged and meditative, the island of Andros is enormous and wind-swept, so much so that some trees even grow horizontally. In the narrow streets leading down to the sea, a spiritual silence reigns during the day, broken only by nighttime festivities of theater, music, folk dances, and open-air cinema. At the museum in the village of Chora, on the island’s northeastern coast, “Germaine Richier – Conversations” opened this June, closed in late September. The retrospective traces the career of one of the great figures of 20th-century European sculpture, who is unfortunately less known than her contemporary Alberto Giacometti or Louise Bourgeois.

A talented and celebrated sculptor in the last century, Richier was known for her existentialist and unsettling sculptures, as if lifted directly from a hallucination. In many of her bronze casts, the artist incorporated a wide variety of objects, rendering them unrecognizable in her final bronze sculptures, producing hybrid creatures from the 1940s onward. Thus, the exhibition features a fragment of an amphora taking the place of a female figure’s head, while algae and shells form patterns on the skin of semi-human figures.

The artist’s friendship with Giacometti soured in 1950 when the Maeght gallery, which represented them both, had to choose between them. Apparently, Giacometti issued an ultimatum: either him or her. The gallery kept him. “She never had a real dealer capable of promoting her work“, explained the Andros exhibition’s curator, Marie Koutsomallis-Moreau. “Though very famous during her career, the artist fell somewhat into oblivion and has only been rediscovered in the last twenty years. It’s important for us to introduce her to the local island audience, as well as to the very select visitors who come here“. And in this, the Andros exhibition, meticulously curated down to a full-scale reproduction of the artist’s studio, succeeded in its intent.

Chios and Adherence to Place
It takes about a day’s journey by sea to get from Andros to Chios, changing ships in Mykonos, but the journey is priceless and opens up an unexpected dimension of Greece. The most common comment I received from anyone I told my next stop was Chios was, “Chios is a bit different.” Different from what? From the postcard version of Greece, of course. But it is on this large island near the Turkish coast that art adheres to the genius loci, thanks to the DEO Projects foundation, founded by curator Akis Kokkinos. Each year, he hosts an exhibition with international names in different parts of the island. The geographic displacement is driven by the need to bring the aesthetic and moral relief of art to different local populations, as well as to invite culture-minded visitors off the beaten path. “If an artist or curator only hears about Chios without ever having been here, they risk ending up creating a work about mastic trees, the island’s most famous product, which has nothing to do with what’s happening here in the north“, Akis Kokkinos told me. He decided to dedicate this year’s exhibition to the island’s northwest region, sadly devastated by wildfires.

The chosen venue for the show is a striking century-old school in the village of Volissos, perched on a hill reminiscent of Tuscany, which today has no more than thirty students. “Most people are fleeing this part of the island,” Kokkinos says. The exhibition’s title is “Letter to an Ailing Father,” borrowed from Kafka as a reference to a figure “who should promise security, protection, support, yet fails to provide them.”

Among the fourteen internationally renowned artists gathered, six received new commissions after a research residency on-site. Vasilis Papageorgiou cast scans of mined and burnt plots of land in brass, placing them inside a hotel minibar: a bitter prediction for the fate of depopulated territories, which will inevitably become nature reserves or the next tourist destination. Shezad Dawood worked with color and sound, creating a series of paintings in dialogue with a sound piece on the acoustic landscape transformed by the fires. As one local confided to Dawood, without the trees to absorb the noise, you can now hear a donkey’s footsteps from a kilometer away. In another video, Nasan Tur filmed German hunters rationalizing the act of killing, a direct echo of Chios’s hunters – figures who are usually seen negatively but whose presence slowed the fire’s advance by keeping the undergrowth clear.

Every work is in dialogue, down to the smallest detail and aesthetic reference, with the classrooms of this school, which has remained almost unchanged since the 1950s-60s. Visiting the exhibition is a feast for the eyes and the soul. Looking out the window at the hills gives thought the space to expand and comprehend all the themes outlined by the show – from the ecological to the existential, to the intimate dimension, which materializes in a framed letter addressed to this absent father: the school, the institution, a patriarchal system that no longer has reason to exist and today shows all its weakness.

In the economy of an art system alternative to the urban one, these three models of art on the islands outline another way of appreciating contemporary art, far from the white cube or the city chaos that inevitably clutters our inner space, often making the artistic experience more strenuous and our thoughts more constricted and constrained. At the edge of the large doorway overlooking the hills of Chios at sunset, Akis Kokkinos summarizes for me the meaning of art in places blessed by beauty and cursed by their distance from the mainland, of which Chios is the emblem: “Our presence here makes sense the moment we commit to creating forms of repair, solidarity, and care.”