Zephyros Project Presents “Midday”: An Open Studio Exhibition on Time, Labor, and Contemporary Artistic Practice

Zephyros Project presents the exhibition “Midday” from February 13 to 15, 2026 – an open studio event featuring the artists Panagiotis Kefalas, Nikole Oikonomidou, and Thanos Fountas. The event will take place at Fountas’s studio in the center of Athens.

The project explores the dual nature of midday as a temporal threshold that functions both structurally and disruptively within contemporary perceptions of the division of working time. Time here is not approached as an abstract concept or an implicit reference, but as something “already inscribed in the material.” From this perspective, the lost labor time required for the creation of each artwork is embedded and rendered visible within the works themselves, revealing the duration, intensity, and repetitiveness of the artistic act.

The works of Nikole Oikonomidou, Panagiotis Kefalas, and Thanos Fountas are presented in the space as carriers of different working times and conditions, forming a field of heterochronies in which multiple temporalities coexist and resonate. Midday does not appear as an idyllic pause or a thematic depiction, but as a concept that exposes contemporary conditions of constant productivity, overwork, and continuous availability. Thus, it ceases to function as a universal break and becomes an uncertain, uneven, or even non-existent time. The question is no longer whether midday exists, but who defines it, who has access to it, and who is deprived of it.

Zephyros Project is conceived as a curatorial and artistic research initiative around contemporary artistic production as both trace and product of labor, production, and the expenditure of time. Through modular artistic actions taking place in Thanos Fountas’s studio, the project focuses on the studio as a primary site of artistic and exhibition practice. Artistic creation is approached not as an arbitrary act, but as a process embedded within a system of fragmented time and the division of labor.

Creation requires time, financial resources, and physical energy – energy produced through care and maintenance of the body, directly linking artistic labor to economic survival. Within the current productive regime, artists are often compelled to draw the means for their creative work from external forms of employment, intensifying the interruption and fragmentation of artistic time. Ultimately, Zephyros Project raises questions about how, for whom, and under what conditions art is produced today, highlighting artistic practice as a field of continuous negotiation between creation and survival.

Α few words about the artists

Panagiotis Kefalas is a painter and founding member of the curatorial collective Ammophila. He is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His painting explores the ways in which people relate to – or become alienated within – autonomous or organized historical, social, and political frameworks.

He has presented solo exhibitions including Of Minor Importance (2025), An Ordinary Day: I Thought of Us Lying on the Ground at EIGHT/TO OXTO (2023), …and they told us we would find the way at Salon de Bricolage (2016), and Entropy and Denial at Gallery Genesis (2014). His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including at Misc Athens, the Municipal Gallery of Athens, Zoumboulakis Gallery, and Ueberlinger Kulturschutzgebiet.

Nikole Oikonomidou (b. 1992, New York, USA) lives and works between Athens and New York. She holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design, The New School (New York), and a BFA from the University of Ioannina (2015). Her artistic practice investigates the relationships between home, belonging, and identity, focusing on how personal and collective histories are shaped through migration. Drawing from her family archive – including handwritten notes and photographs – she explores how memory travels across generations and continents.

Her solo exhibitions include Sunday Afternoon (Callirrhoë, Athens, 2024) and Illusion of Home, as a Memory (Callirrhoë, 2023). Selected group exhibitions include presentations at MOMus (Athens), SNFCC and Lincoln Center (New York), Queens College CUNY, Crux Gallery, Deree – The American College of Greece, and venues in Berlin and Thessaloniki.

Thanos Fountas (b. 1995, Athens) is a visual artist based in Athens. He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Ioannina (2017), including an Erasmus exchange at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain, and an MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2018–2020). Since 2023, he has been a PhD candidate at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, focusing on Art History and Theory.

His artistic practice moves between painting and mixed media, exploring the concept of trauma on the painted surface through a reconfiguration of traditional painting processes. His works combine povidone-iodine (PVP-I) – associated with care and sterilization – with the pigment ultramarine, which carries historical and symbolic references linked to lapis lazuli, colonial trade, and contemporary digital imagery. Through this material dialogue, his work addresses themes of care and violence, survival and interdependence, and the relationship between humans, animals, city, and nature.