KATERINA PARRI
By Katerina Parri
On the video wall at Onassis Ready, the façade of the Greek Pavilion at the Giardini in Venice appears. It reads “Grecia,” and through its gates, looping videos unfold: Giorgos Marinos, Aliki Vougiouklaki as “Agent Nelly,” slogans in fuchsia lettering declaring “Greece of the Greeks, Christian Greeks,” “this is how nations live, without parliament or elections,” “taratatzoum.” A flood of images bursts before our eyes, some deeply familiar: stills from films such as Attack of the Giant Moussaka, Tsarouchis-like wings, party flags, newspaper clippings. And between the Pavilion’s columns, Hitler appears, along with scenes from the 1980s and two dates: 1934 and 2026.
The first marks Greece’s inaugural participation in the Venice Biennale; the latter, naturally, refers to the present moment, where we find ourselves at the press conference introducing the Greek Pavilion for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with Escape Room, the work by artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis, representing Greece under the curation of Giorgos Bekiaris.
From what little could be revealed – as Angelidakis himself noted, given the Biennale’s strict confidentiality – it seems the Greek Pavilion will leave a strong impression. It will be one of those installations that linger in memory, politically charged, filled with messages – “an ideologically loaded space,” as the curator described it. Escape Room has been framed as a contemporary Platonic cave. Yet, unlike Plato’s cave, in Angelidakis’ version, truth is not singular.
Angelidakis himself describes Escape Room as follows: “There’s nothing offensive in the Pavilion. There are two mechanisms. One resembles a bouzoukia stage, the other a kiosk selling tourist souvenirs. These are two mechanisms, like Plato describes, that can produce an image of truth. One is entirely digital and contains only the architectural fragment – the columns in pouf form. The other is what I’d call ‘à la turka.’ It’s about making something out of whatever you find in front of you. The Greece I relate to is a combination of both: the ‘à la turka,’ Ottoman Greece, and what we call the ‘Romios’ – the one who came from abroad and supposedly knew better. Both must coexist. So I mix the two.”
Escape Room invites us to escape versions of ourselves that passively accept a given condition. As Angelidakis explains: “I present Escape Room as a space of entertainment within the Biennale. A place where someone might even get confused and think it’s the Biennale party or the shop. But if they take out their phone and Google, say, the image of a female soldier, they’ll discover it’s Storm, photographed by Kostas Kouvaras.”
Curator Giorgos Bekiaris expands: “The conception of the work is rooted in Angelidakis’ long-term research into the relationship between archaeology, architecture, and history, approached critically as fluid and negotiable concepts. In Escape Room, the Greek Pavilion is not treated as a neutral exhibition space but as an active part of the work. The building, whose history begins in 1934, becomes an ideologically charged site with the characteristics of a national monument. Angelidakis appropriates its neo-Byzantine architecture to stage a contemporary digital Platonic cave – one where truth is no longer an absolute value.”
Borrowing from the logic of the escape room – a game in which players must observe and piece together sequences in order to escape – the installation presents a reality where truth and representation blur. The work offers fragments, leaving the viewer to navigate a multiplicity of stimuli with the possibility of escape – but not of victory.
The Pavilion, conceived as an escape room, dives into its own past in relation to historical and political circumstances. It encounters what could be described as a “selfie taken in a bathroom,” where the mirror is forever stuck in Year Zero (1934): the year the Nazis began persecuting homosexuals, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time in Venice, and the Greek and Austrian Pavilions were inaugurated.
As Angelidakis notes: “The national pavilions at the Giardini were designed to communicate the political beliefs of the governments that built them. Today, they stand as frozen fascist and/or colonial caves. If we replace the cave with the screen, what remains is every manifestation of MAGA as a staging of fascism in 2025.”
The artist shared further insights into his research: “Reading texts, I focused mainly on the 20th century. Greece had been invited in 1904, but times were difficult. In 1934, when they built a mini Hagia Sophia with replica columns – essentially a souvenir – it was like saying: Make Greece Great Again.
Until then, fascism was just a party. We hadn’t yet seen its consequences. In 1934, both Hitler and Mussolini staged elections. Hitler won with 90%, Mussolini with 99.85%. Mussolini invited Hitler to Venice for the Biennale, inaugurating the Austrian and Greek pavilions. Greece, soon under Metaxas, was heading toward becoming ‘number four’ in that alignment.”
Angelidakis’ work brings together research, history, and architecture, interwoven with political readings through images, archives, and familiar visual culture. All of this unfolds within an Escape Room that is both politically charged and playfully disorienting.
He also describes his starting point: “I saw the Pavilion as a kind of kitsch structure, almost punk compared to the clean, white modernist surroundings. Then I realized the columns are replicas from Hagia Sophia. I began to see the building as a souvenir of a time when Greece still aspired to reclaim Constantinople. That’s where my provocation ends. Everything else may not be humorous – but it can still be entertaining.”
Angelidakis splits the Pavilion in two: one side “national,” the other a “kiosk.” Playing with the dual meaning of pavilion and kiosk, he notes: “In Athens, the kiosk and the bus stop are places where you hear what’s going to happen – elections, news. The kiosk is a key icon of Greek identity.”
Bekiaris adds: “The Pavilion becomes a capsule where historical versions of Greekness are placed alongside lived, urban expressions, revealing the tension between reality and cultural fixations. GRECIA becomes a psychoanalytic subject – a metaphor reflecting the spectrum of Greek identity and its entanglement with authoritarianism.”
From what we can tell, Andreas Angelidakis will represent Greece with a sharp, politically charged work – one that invites reflection from every visitor who passes through the Pavilion’s columns at the 61st Venice Biennale, from May 9 to November 22, 2026.
It promises to be an experience: to step into everything Angelidakis has “mixed” – from the Pavilion’s birth in the era of fascism to the layered coexistence of history, politics, and contemporary Greek identity.
I’ll close with something indirect, yet deeply telling. Referring to the stories that interest him, Angelidakis noted:
“December 6 marks the first Battle of Exarchia… and years later, again a battle in Athens. But the battle that mattered to me was for Zak Kostopoulos – a battle that never officially happened, but for me, that is the real battle.”
Info
Andreas Angelidakis (b. 1968, Athens) is an architect and artist of Greek and Norwegian descent, based in Athens. He studied architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and later at Columbia University in New York. His artistic practice unfolds across a wide range of interdisciplinary interests, spanning architecture, publishing, writing, design, and exhibition-making. His works often begin as digital simulations and explore how the internet has reshaped perception and user behavior.
His work is characterized by the use of architectural signifiers and the creation of environments through which he renegotiates the relationship between viewer and artwork, highlighting the interplay between power, space, and infrastructure. In his practice, architecture becomes a vehicle for investigating identity, while the city of Athens and the notion of the ruin — ancient, contemporary, or digital — reappear as central motifs. Both his installations and his texts construct narrative environments that revisit the boundaries between the real and the virtual, historical memory and fiction, sincerity and humor.
His work has been presented at major international institutions, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), Onassis Foundation, documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hayward Gallery, ETH Zurich, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. His works are held in important international collections, including EMST, the Onassis Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nasjonalmuseet, as well as other public and private collections.
Giorgos Bekiaris lives and works in Athens. He studied Museology and Exhibition Design and pursued postgraduate studies in Cultural and Film Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Since 2012, he has developed projects supported by cultural institutions such as the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, NEON Organization for Culture and Development, Onassis Stegi, and Eleusis European Capital of Culture 2023.
Alongside his curatorial work, he collaborates regularly with artists on new productions and with platforms such as P.E.T. Projects, HYLE [matter], Souzy Tros, and T.A.M.A. His texts have been published, among others, in the context of Thanasis Totsikas’ solo exhibition With Minerals and Track Threads at Sylvia Kouvali Gallery (2025) and in the catalogue of the exhibition Ephemeral Party at Carco Parking in Athens (2025). He is the curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, featuring Andreas Angelidakis.
Recent curatorial projects include: Institute of Post-Epicurean Garden (Drosia, Attica, 2020–ongoing), Heather stays at 505 at Perianth Hotel (2021), Prizing Eccentric Talents I–III at P.E.T. Projects (2021–2024), Performative Encounters at HYLE [matter] (2021), Oikonomia at The Breeder Gallery (2023), Mystery 110 Orpheus (Eleusis European Capital of Culture 2024), and ROOM505: LORE at Perianth Hotel (2025). His curatorial work has been featured in international media such as Artforum, Art in America, ArtReview, NERO Editions, and Artsy.
Escape Room by Andreas Angelidakis is produced and presented at the Greek Pavilion of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The National Commissioner is the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus). The strategic partner is Onassis Culture.
Additional supporters include EKCOME (Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece) through the “Extroversion” program, Qualco Group, Qualco Foundation, National Bank of Greece, Ioannis and Maya Martinos, and Ioanna Martinos. The project is further supported by NEON Organization for Culture and Development, the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Anastasia Tsoureka-Sarakaki, Perianth Hotel, Aliki Martinos, Giorgos Petrocheilos and Diamantis Xylas, Irini Laimou, Thessaloniki Film Festival, “The Art of Life” company, ARCH, Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative (PCAI), Eleni Martinos, and Andreas Melas.
Official air travel sponsor: AEGEAN.
