“Roadside Shrines and Offerings”: Eugenia Grigoraki’s Photography Exhibition at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center

The Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Eugenia Grigoraki’s photography exhibition, focusing on the small roadside shrines scattered along the country’s roads, a distinctly Greek visual element.

Having studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and Vakalo Art & Design College, and with many years of professional experience in graphic design, Grigoraki has cultivated a gaze particularly sensitive to form, composition, and the aesthetic presence of an image. Her relationship with photography began in the early 1970s, when she lived in Africa for περίπου two years. There, she started systematically photographing her surroundings and experimenting with printing her images in a makeshift darkroom. Since then, photography has become a personal way of observing the world, through which she seeks the beauty of the landscape and the small, unexpected moments of human presence within it.

The series “Roadside Shrines and Offerings” was born almost by chance, during her many road trips across Greece. A small shrine dedicated to Saint George, standing in the middle of nowhere on the way to Mount Falakro in Drama, became the starting point for her attentive observation of these peculiar structures. From that moment on, every shrine she encountered along the road became a reason to stop and take a photograph, documenting the variety, imagination, and often strange morphology of these constructions.

For Greeks, roadside shrines are small sites of faith and memory: they may function as offerings, expressions of gratitude, memorials to human loss, or silent invocations for protection and well-being. At the same time, they possess a strong aesthetic dimension that makes them compelling even to a casual observer, Greek or foreign. These constructions often fall within the realm of folk art; in the past, their form was shaped freely, without rules, by the imagination of their makers and often using leftover materials. Today, however, such practices have largely been replaced by standardized, prefabricated forms.

Grigoraki’s photographs, taken with a simple camera and without digital processing, operate as a subtle yet essential record of an element of the Greek cultural landscape that is gradually changing. Many of the shrines she captured no longer exist. As such, her work also takes on the dimension of visual memory: a retrospective journey through places, routes, and travels, where personal experience meets a collective, deeply rooted folk tradition.

It is worth noting Ileana Tounta’s personal statement on the exhibition:
“A dear friend of mine from years ago, Eugenia, showed me a small publication featuring her photographs from road trips she took across Greece with Stavros, focusing on roadside shrines and offerings. I was struck by the sensitivity with which she connected the subject to the natural environment. From my perspective, her photographs form two distinct bodies of work: one includes the shrines and offerings she chose for their relationship with the landscape, and the other presents the imaginative, peculiar, and almost kitsch constructions that captivated her eye. A few years later, Marilia Fotopoulou, a younger visual artist with studies in photography, presented me with a series of works on the same subject. This coincidence sparked my desire to exhibit their works simultaneously, as I was particularly interested in the meeting of an older amateur photographer and a younger professional photographer through this very distinctive Greek custom. And what better time for these exhibitions than Easter, when Greek traditions and the spring landscape further highlight the presence of these shrines within the environment.”