“Forever is composed of Nows”: Two contemporary artists at New Hotel in Athens

The artworks of Petros Moris and Malvina Panagiotidi take over the reception and the art lounge of NEW hotel

NEW Hotel launches a series of art installations at the Art Lounge and in various other selected spots, under the general title Contemporary Artists at New Hotel in Athens. The aim of the project is to promote contemporary art in Athens, as well as  and the continuous and unpredictable reconfiguration of certain spaces of the hotel. 

Underneath the glistening surfaces, mythological creatures are about to wake up, delicate tangled threads wandering on the walls, scattered echoes trapped in time-shelves, archaeological fragments shaking up the hallways.

The artworks of Petros Moris and Malvina Panagiotidi take over the reception and the art lounge of NEW hotel creating a cosmos inside a cosmos.

The sculptures of Petros Moris emerge as a synthesis of archaic memories, geological matter and eerie artifacts. Both the anatomical “Vein I and II”, “Times Circle” diptych and the “Future Bestiary (Sphinx)” refer to an irrational and repressed aspect of antiquity. At the center of this artistic practice lies the metaphor of subterranean space; the domain of deep-time entropy, traces of a realm of bodily and spiritual anatomies. That materialized imaginary is bound to social and environmental transformations, unearthing the chthonic origins of what has been called the Past and what is called the Future.

Malvina’s Panagiotidi sculptural works reintroduce the spider as a symbol and a carrier of wider systems of perception and re-creation of the world (“My candle burned alone in an immense valley”). An oversized web traps anthropomorphic preys and becomes a reservoir of narratives.

The lifeless sculptures, scattered on the shelves of the Lounge, draw from the witch Erichtho described by the Roman poet Lucanus, who attempted to recreate life through the inanimate parts of the human body ( “More answers without questions” and other works ). Those fragmented parts compose a new body that echoes images of archaeological excavations. Unlike ancient witch Erichtho, they attempt an inversion: to raise questions of Nows instead of giving answers. Forever is composed of Nows.

Curated by Maria Kasimati Tsoutsia

A few words about the artists

Malvina Panagiotidi: (b. 1985, Athens) lives and works in Athens. She studied architecture at the University of Thessaly and art at the postgraduate program “Art in Context” at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Her artistic practice focuses on the intersections between occult modernism, the function of the
imaginary and uncanny human behavior found in different sociopolitical contexts.

Petros Moris: (b. 1986, Lamia) is an artist based in Athens. He has received a BFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MFA from the Goldsmiths University of London. In his works he explores issues of scale, entropy, the mythical, the geological and the urban with a series of eerie post-human sculptures
and mosaic slabs via the processes of digital fabrication and traditional sculpting techniques.