Poka-Yio’s BREAKING at Upper Ankyle explores the Endless cycle of desire and media consumption

From 19 June to 4 July 2026, Upper Ankyle presents BREAKING, a new solo exhibition by Poka-Yio. Through a series of new paintings and a newly commissioned performance, the artist continues his long-standing exploration of the mechanisms of attraction and repulsion that shape contemporary life.

Opening on Friday, 19 June, from 20:00 to 23:00, the exhibition invites audiences into a world where media spectacle, political power, desire, and care collide. The accompanying performance begins at 20:30.

The exhibition takes its title from the familiar “breaking news” ticker that continuously scrolls across television and digital screens. Once reserved for exceptional events, the constant flow of wars, disasters, political crises, and human tragedies has become a permanent feature of everyday life. In BREAKING, Poka-Yio examines how this uninterrupted stream of urgency reshapes our emotional landscape, normalising trauma while transforming catastrophe into a daily object of consumption.

At the centre of the exhibition lies a tension between fear and comfort. Political leaders and mediated images of authority coexist with a maternal machine that endlessly produces chocolate cookies. Initially appearing as symbols of care, affection, and reassurance, the cookies gradually become emblems of excess, revealing how comfort itself can evolve into saturation and pleasure into discomfort.

Moving between the concepts of BREAKING and COOKIE, the exhibition unfolds as a psychological landscape where desire operates not as a path to fulfilment but as an endless cycle of attraction, satisfaction, exhaustion, and rejection. Political figures, intimate red-hued landscapes of longing, and a self-portrait named after an active pharmaceutical substance collectively construct a world in which desire is both irresistible and impossible to satisfy.

Beyond his artistic practice, Poka-Yio is widely known as co-founder and artistic director of Athens Biennale and as Associate Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he directs the experimental studio LAB12. His work consistently investigates the oscillation between attraction and repulsion within what he describes as the Culture of Desire.

BREAKING: Two Men Eating Cookies

Two men, V. and H., are standing in an unidentified official building. They are wearing suits. The suits are dark and well pressed. They are eating cookies. They are discussing. The year is near present.

Since before there were words for standing there have been men like these standing around and eating. This is not new. It predates the cookie.

V. The thing about collateral is that people don’t understand it. Someone has to authorize it. That’s not cynicism.

H. That’s statecraft.

V. Exactly.

V. You want to protect people. We do want to protect people. From a distance. With information. With resolve.

H. Moral clarity.

V. Exactly.

V. holds up his cookie. His hand is very steady. The hands of men like these are always very steady.

V. There’s a whole America in this cookie. A warm kitchen. A mother who woke up early because she loved her children. That’s the social contract. That’s what we’re defending.

H. Totally.

H. reaches for a cookie and takes one. He takes it with the gesture of a man who has always reached for things and always received them.

H. These are really good.

V. What’s in them.

H. Only the best.

They eat. V. looks at his cookie.

V. There are frameworks. There’s doctrine. There’s a hierarch—

H. Have another cookie.

V. takes one more. Two men are standing and eating. Outside people are dying in the specific ways that people die when men like these have authorized it. It predates the cookie. H. reaches for the cookies.

Poka-Yio