Tenant: A video installation by Pantelis Makkas

Tenant is the title of a new video installation by visual artist and video designer Pantelis Makkas, presented at Peiraios 260. A translucent, ephemeral house becomes the container for moving images -fragments of theatrical worlds Makkas has helped create over the past fifteen years. These video works, once integral elements of stage productions, now find new life in an autonomous, immersive setting.

“A tenant is not just someone who inhabits a space,” notes Makkas, “but one who remains in constant dialogue with it. In theatre, the tenant could be the play itself—an entity that settles into the stage and comes to life through actions, words, images, and emotions. Through performance, it temporarily takes residence in the audience, altering their inner landscapes.”

In Tenant, video is not a supporting player but a protagonist. It breaks free from the hierarchical structure of theatrical production to assert its own artistic identity. As an organic element within theatre, video invites us to reimagine how a story is told and experienced.

Drawn from a range of classical and contemporary works –Euripides, Shakespeare, and Molière alongside Harold Pinter, Dario Fo, and others -the images no longer serve the narrative structure of a live performance. Instead, they take on new life, untethered from stage direction or dramaturgy. They offer a distilled, recontextualized essence of the original plays.

Rather than simply documenting theatrical action, Makkas’s video works transform it. The camera re-frames and deconstructs familiar texts, offering immersive, sensorial reinterpretations. Hippolytus by Euripides, The Tempest and King Lear by Shakespeare, The Misanthrope by Molière—these canonical works are reborn through the lens of moving image, revealing layers of meaning often obscured in traditional stagings.

In Tenant, the stage dissolves into a fluid visual architecture. Characters emerge from shadow, words morph into light, and time collapses. The result is not just a new way of seeing theatre—it is a proposition for how we might re-inhabit and re-understand it. Video becomes not only a medium, but a method: a lens through which memory, mythology, and modernity coalesce.