All Aboard: Art in Transit

An immersive exhibition where art, time, and travel converge. “All Aboard” redefines the airport as a living landscape of transition and introspection

The non-profit urban organization artefact athens presents the contemporary art exhibition all aboard, curated by Kostas Prapoglou, taking place at the Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos” from October 9 to November 9, 2025.

Athens becomes the focal point of a daring artistic initiative. Featuring 40 artists from different generations and countries, all aboard is the first large-scale contemporary art exhibition in Greece – and among the very few worldwide – to be held inside a fully operational airport. The selected venue, the Express Facility, is a building situated parallel to the airport’s western runway.

The exhibition seeks to create a multifaceted condition of encounter, where contemporary art engages with the architectural memory and functional nature of a space of waiting. Beyond the material structure of the airport, it explores questions of existential and philosophical reflection, focusing on the dynamic of transition as a form of lived intensity. It examines stillness and movement as existential states, questioning whether displacement signifies progress or escape.

The airport, as both a geographical and psychological crossroads, transforms into a liminal space where experience is inscribed. The dormant building is reactivated, becoming a vessel of memory, time, and motion. This in-between point, oscillating between operation and pause, transcends its function as a transit site. Here, chronological coordinates fold onto themselves, and the notion of time gains an elasticity that dismantles Newtonian linearity, allowing for an experience grounded in Bergson’s concept of duration (la durée) – a fluid, asymmetrical, and heterogeneous form of conscious experience.

The airport’s own history becomes embedded within the artistic inquiry. From the dawn of aviation to the present, airports have functioned as spaces of exploration and cultural interconnection. Participating artists are invited to reimagine this silent space as fertile ground for creative reconstruction, drawing from historical, personal, and collective memory to highlight travel as a complex experiential journey. The focus is no longer on destination but on the in-between – a space of waiting where the self is deconstructed and reassembled.

At the heart of the exhibition lie the notions of memory, identity, and spatial rupture. The artists examine how an airport can mirror human wandering, revealing narratives of displacement, separation, and reconnection. The psychogeography of the airport is not limited to the movement of bodies or goods but evokes an underlying unease shaped by anticipation, desire, and a sense of loss.

The variability of this environment underscores a fluidity that is both geographical and emotional. How, through this fluidity, is the consciousness of the self shaped? What constitutes belonging in a world where mobility has become an everyday condition? These are questions that revolve around the philosophical notion of the self as process, engaging in dialogue with Deleuze’s concept of becoming – an identity in a state of constant reconfiguration.

Flight, once a symbol of freedom, today bears visible traces of control, restriction, and border logic, all intensified under the shadow of the recent pandemic. The artworks probe the conditions and inhibitions of movement, touching upon the complexities of migration, the impact of globalization, and the often invisible boundaries of surveillance. Biometric scans, data collection, and algorithmic monitoring redefine the traveler as a fragmented, quantifiable entity under continuous decoding.

By reinterpreting the idea of the airport, the exhibition seeks to reveal it beyond its utilitarian role. Waiting lounges, corridors, and checkpoints acquire existential weight. Acts of departure, transit, and return are imbued with deep ontological significance. Waiting itself becomes a transitional experience without beginning or end, where time expands and introspection deepens.

However, the journey is not confined to its material dimension – it functions as an allegory. Takeoff and landing set in motion an inner assemblage of past, present, and potential. The forty participating artists present installations, sculptures, videos, performances, and paintings to express this multi-layered field of inquiry. The sonic and visual codes of the terminal, together with the roar of aircraft, are transformed into a poetic undercurrent, amplifying the emotional resonances embedded in the act of travel.

The decision to “inhabit” a building with art is intentional. The exhibition becomes an act of reconstitution, a poetic creation where the obsolete turns generative. Through the artistic gaze, this architectural shell operates as an archive of suspended intentions, a fertile site for semiological excavation.

Invisible ecosystems and the presence of non-human life forms serve as reminders that human mobility unfolds within an expanded field of life. The rhythms of flora and fauna coexist with the programmed flow of human passage, underscoring a mutual interdependence. This coexistence of species invites viewers to reflect on how ecosystems shape and sometimes resist human interventions. While human temporality is measurable, the natural world moves to a recurring rhythm – one that remains independent of timetables.

The exhibition frames the airport, among other things, as a messenger of possibilities. Artists and visitors together co-author an ever-evolving narrative. The revival of the space mirrors humanity’s innate capacity for regeneration.

At the same time, the terminal becomes a springboard for reflection on consumption, a defining feature of contemporary travel. From the ecological footprint of air transport to the ephemeral nature of the souvenir, the exhibition questions the very notion of sustainability. The commodification of experience, the spectacle of adventure, and the transformation of memory into data-amplified by social media and the culture of the “Instagrammable”-all feed the construction of our curated selves.

The language of airports operates within a specific logic: concise, coded, and transnational. Announcements, signage, and automated voices compose a semantic web designed to guide but often capable of disorienting. Beneath its operational precision lies a deeper mechanism -an architecture of control and an illusion of order. The infrastructure of signals and sounds reveals a latent desire to impose meaning upon chaos-a desire that, through artistic intervention, can itself be decoded, inverted, and redefined.

Signage intentionally left in place, the continued use of the airport’s original lighting, and the strategic positioning of the artworks-disrupting the expected flow toward a point of departure-collectively induce a subtle disorientation, prompting a reprogramming of spatial logic and perception.

Even the title all aboard, with its seductive familiarity, operates as a Trojan horse. It adopts the language of inclusion while alluding to a preordained mobility. Its apparent spontaneity conceals deliberate design, making the programmed appear as inner impulse.

The exhibition invites visitors to reconsider their position – not as passengers, but as co-shapers of an existential landscape. What does it mean to be in motion? How do individual and collective histories affect our relationship with space and time? Transition is never neutral; it activates the transcendence of thought, perception, and desire.

This impulse toward exploration is not confined to the earth. Just as ancient explorers sought unknown horizons, the contemporary world turns its gaze toward outer space. The desire for transcendence finds its reflection in cosmic imagination. The airport emerges as a prologue to a take-off, literal or metaphorical – a prelude to a journey that, though not yet begun, implies infinity. It is here that existential vertigo arises: the sudden awareness of the infinite, of how small we are before the vastness of the unknown.

At the edge of duration, a new desire toward travel takes shape: not to end, nor even to begin, but to be prolonged. Continuity appears as a myth nourished by science, code, and the hope of cryonics. The body, once a vehicle of finite endurance, becomes a site of revision – not of rebirth nor escape, but of repetition. A circular idiom of identity, under continuous re-composition. Along this narrative axis, longevity ceases to be an extension of time and becomes an interruption of ending. A life without punctuation reshapes the structure of existence itself.

If death gives contour to life, then what does its suspension promise? A life expanded, or a life diminished? The terminal, both architecturally and biologically, becomes the field of this ongoing metaphysical inquiry. How does each of us experience it – as an unconscious structure, a dream, or a collective trauma?

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Anna Amparioti, Alexandra Athanasiadi, Anna Andarti, Klitsa Antoniou, John Baldessari, Alexandros Vasmoulakis, Robert Cahen, Aikaterini Gegisian, Irini Gonou, Susan Daboll, Maya Deren, Olafur Eliasson, Sofia Zarari, Rosa Zeidan, Eleni Zouni, Michal Heiman, Elia Iliadi, Annita Kalimeri, Vassilis Karakatsanis, Lizzie Calliga, Jenny Marketou, Varvara Mavrakaki, Arianna Economou, Michail Parlamas, Anda Petranaki, Lia Petrou, Lina Pigadioti, Yulia Pinkusevich, Evi Savvaïdi, Ismini Samanidou, Ridley Scott, Dimitra Skandali, Nadia Skordopoulou, Jesse Leroy Smith, Marianna Strapatsaki, Tonoptik, Nikos Tranos, Claire Tsalouchidi-Chatzimina, Theophilos Hadjimichael, Francesca Woodman.