Yannis Adoniou

Main fountain, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Performing Artists: Mina Tomic, Konstantina Verrou, Despoina Sanida Krezia.

Yannis Adoniou’s choreographic sequence, ‘Perform’ (dance performance, 2020), documents the human body as an archival site that replicates the rhythmic movements of nature. Like the transformation of a chrysalis, the dancers shed their bodily incarnations with each step, rising up, surfacing through and recoiling back into the fountain.

Andreas Angelidakis 

Announcement Board, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Angelidakis explores the way our built environments and material and immaterial cultures are shaped by external forces. Here, ‘Vessel’ (HD video, 8 min, 2016) describes the ancient cynic Diogenes as ‘like an ancient internet user’ who refuses to be tied to any one place. The work builds upon the artist’s previous work, his ‘Unauthorised’ video series presented at Documenta 14, which described how geopolitics and corruption shaped Athens. Projected onto the Flight Announcements Table, Angelidakis asks the viewer to consider the urgency of our current climate and register the redevelopment projects that threaten such sacred spaces.

Art.Drone.Projects

East Terminal, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In ‘Olympic Eagle’ (light drawing, 36 waypoints drone flight, 2020), Dionisis Christofilogiannis and Charalampos Papadopoulos continue their series of light sculptures of familiar cultural symbols in the Attica night sky. Aristotle Onassis’ favorite Boeing airplane, known as the ‘Olympic Eagle’, is projected over the airport through the ephemeral flight of a drone. The result is a monumental sculpture that realigns preconceived dimensions and our perceptions of space. Captured in flight, the airplane becomes a gesture of hope and an ascent through the past, even if recreated only for a moment.

Nikos Charalambidis

Departure Gates, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

First shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale, ‘Your Land was Mine’ (embroidered flag, 2003) pays tribute to the temporary display of Mies Van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s German national pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, which was foundational to the modern movement. Featuring an embroidered geometric plan of the modern architects’ pavilion, ‘Your Land was Mine’ is particularly pertinent in its display at the airport, a place which at this moment is engaged critically with questions of identity and the appropriation of land.

Dionisis Christofilogiannis

Departure Terminal Entrance, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

‘Sleeping Car’ (embroidery installation on a smart car, 2010), made with the artist’s mother’s crochet, verbalizes the kind of basic power that hangs over men. The car, typically a ‘man’s world’ is entirely covered with embroidery, a traditionally female craft. The embroidery installation is an act of protest against contemporary art’s tendency to hold onto old archetypes and customs and an acknowledgment of the art that is hidden behind intensive forms of labor, love, and concentration. Transported and stationed in front of the airport’s former entrance, the memories inscribed in the mother’s embroidery techniques become metaphors for place and collective remembrance.

Martha Dimitropoulou

Duty Free Area, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Dimitropolou’s intricately crafted skull ‘Life’ (pine needles, 2019) is made up of pine needles collected from near the artist’s home. Placed next to a mirrored support, Dimitropoulou’s skull functions as a cogent and familiar memento mori. Whilst reflective surfaces can imitate life after life, the placement of the skull in the shadow of the support is a stark reminder of death. Such humble natural material conflates the skull as a symbol with the natural eventuality that all will perish, particularly potent considering the element of decay inherent in this setting.

Christoforos Doulgeris

Check-In Area, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

The fragment of the total image of ‘MONOLITHOS_PAN_o6_SH’ (pigment print on fabric, 2016), forms part of Doulgeris’ photographic series of interiors of a defunct and sequestered tomato factory belonging to the Nomikos family in Santorini. Unexpectedly finding the industrial equipment preserved under delicate sheets of fabric forty years later, the photographer documented an unmistakable interior-object of history that narrates the story of Greece’s rapid industrialization and the transformation of Santorini in the 1960s. The life-size cloth reproduction of these machines introduces the memorialization of the industrial past to the area behind the former arrivals desk.

Annie Fassea

Departure Hall, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In her performance ‘All that Glitters is Not Gold’, Soprano Annie Fassea presents the scholarly song “Ο Γέρο Μπέης (Old Man Beis)”by the Greek composer and poet Emilios Riadis. “In your carved boxes you hide diamonds and gold,” Riadis writes characteristically. As an interesting dialogue the song, which comments on the futility of luxury and wealth, is performed under a golden steel space frame glistening in the vacant airport. Both the song and the costume choice aim to emulate a period that has already passed, the so-called “golden period” of Greece associated with extraversion, economic prosperity, internationalization, and unbridled capitalism.

Nikomachi Karakostanoglou

Security Ticket Check Point, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

The marble sculptures in Karakostanoglou’s series of ‘Deposits’ (Thasos white marble, 2020) explore the typology and role of ancient deposits found in abundance by present-day archaeologists. Typically found in holes in the ground and subterranean spaces where the ancients “deposited” them, many of these artifacts were placed in these man-made archaeological layers as they were seen as incomplete or lacking perfect proportions. Others were placed there because they were not extraordinary imitations of nature. Part-architecture, part-rejected objects, the three deposits here are ‘excavated’ and placed on the protective shells that transported them in the former security checkpoint area of the Ellinikon airport.

Andreas Kasapis

Customs Office, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In this vacant and derelict office, Kasapis’ ‘Lamp’ (oil on wood panel, 2018) sits atop a former desk next to the newspaper ‘To Vima’ from 1999. The painting is taken from the artist’s series which depicts usable products standing alone on small wooden surfaces. Key throughout the series is the artists’ abstraction of the objects in order to render them functionless. By doing so and especially in the context of the derelict office, Kasapis explores how the abstracted pictorial representation of an object can destabilize notions of what is known and unknown by restoring the function of the object even if only allegorically.

Panagiotis Kefalas

Olympic Airlines Building, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In the work ‘Untitled’ (oil on canvas, 2020) Panagiotis Kefalas selects his imagery from archival material consisting of snapshots of b-movies, documentaries, video clips and commercials. In his practice, the artist focuses on the representation of grouped passive subjects which do not depict actions so much as situations, while raising questions about the urban realities depicted. The painting is placed in the Olympic wing, a room which served as the last informal refugee camp of Athens where families, children and elderly were evacuated in 2017.

Nikos Komiotis

Administrative Office, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Through serial manifestations and blotches of ink, ‘Untitled’ (9 sheets, ink on paper, 2020), invigorates a lightly rendered and pliable human form, a fixture of the artist’s compositions. The work is set in the former offices of an airline company with un-issued boarding passes, forms, seat labels, and a giant world map.

Georgia Kotretsos

Stairs to VIP Deck Main Offices, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

‘Untitled’ (silk carpet, 2020) is a site-specific installation that reveals its own undercurrents over time. On a perpetual ascending and descending journey, the site signals a heartbeat or a natural cycle of history depending on where one stands today. It is a borderline vein, hidden underneath the architectural layers that channeled an entire ‘era’ of Greece up until the present. It is also a magic carpet – a carrier of now-defunct dreams and fantasies of prosperity, abundance and wealth.

Antonis Larios

Departures Hall, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In the tradition of the earliest vanitas portraits of the 1600s, ‘Black Hand, Black Box’ ( c-print, 2020) incorporates a frontal skull recognized by historians as a ‘death’s-head’. The work is a revision of a painting by the French artist Lubin Baugin (16m-1663), altered with the addition of a red flight recorder, and reproduced as a printed copy. The telephone booths and repeating columns of the former Departures Hall become allegorical structures inside a photographic still life.

Pantelis Vitaliotis – Magneto

Arrivals Terminal, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

‘Ductile Bodies’ (Exercise OI, acrylic on canvas, 2020), aims to synthesize, balance and redirect our associations to bodily materiality and sexual difference arising from the enigmatic familiarity of form. Elaborating on the ductile properties of objects as they are elongated, stretched and folded, Exercise 02 aims to oppose the complex stages of design of an art object with its assembled form. Originally hung in the artist’s home like a domestic altarpiece but here re-mounted on the floor of the airport, the work asks: Can a painting carve out domesticity in long vacated space?

Andreas Mallouris

VIP Observation Deck (with Eleni Venardaki wall-mounted ceramics 1967-69), Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

The installation ‘Amendments For This Escape to Uranus’ (2020) consists of four pieces: ‘para/sympathetic twins’, ‘Scent of Lavender for this Bad, Bad Membrane’, the ‘washing basin’, and ‘when left treats the right’, all produced at different moments between 2016-2020. They revolve around the body-subject as a living archive, inherently vulnerable to its own history and mythologies. The work navigates territories of domestic memory, using silicone molding, rubber, soap, essential oils, and metal, suggesting faintly recognizable found objects. The pieces are placed in front of famed Greek ceramicist Elena Venardaki’s wall-mounted blue tiles, which adorned the airport’s VIP observation deck and lounge.

Eva Mitala

Transit Area, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Eva Mitala’s silkscreen print lies flat on the floor of the former Transit Area illuminated by the bright daylight from the large windows on the left. Here, her silkscreen becomes part of the landscape, in subtle dialogue with the off-centre bench standing just behind. Easily overlooked, Mitala’s work is a quiet comment on the power of the everyday to ground oneself amidst the chaos of modern life.

Maria Papadimitriou

Departures Lounge, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Placed in the iconic central lounge of the East Terminal designed by architect Eero Saarinen, ‘House at Weissenhof by Le Corbusier, 1927’ (acrylic on canvas, 2008), and ‘Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928 -1929’ (acrylic on canvas, 2008), to the right, reference iconic buildings of modernism designed by Le Corbusier. Maria Papadimitriou pays tribute to a generation of modern architects who conveyed new visions of space, symmetry, and urbanism and whose influence in Greece culminated in the airport’s Saarinen-designed terminal in 1972. The stunning architectural skeleton of the former lounge where people crowded to see their flight announcements, combined with the structural fragments of Le Corbusier’s modern homes, ask us to reimagine the history and afterlife of modernism.

Ilias Papailiakis

Olympic VIP Lounge, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

In ‘Study of a Monk on a Low Horizon’ (pencil on canvas, 2020), a loosely outlined pencil grid traces the composition’s boundaries. The syntax is sparse, sealed off by vertical and horizontal coordinates. Behind the fractured array of chairs the hieroglyphic monk elicits a moment of reflection in the former members-only Olympic lounge. The work belongs to the artist’s ‘Theoretical Objects’ series, inviting the viewer to consider not only the work itself but also its sparse surroundings.

Poka-Yio

Transit Area, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Poka Yio reads the city as a collection of social formations and types with particular social manners, pretenses, and frustrations. For Poka-Yio, the city is where people jostle each other and express their delusions of grandeur in small and everyday patterns. ‘Shit Totem’ (plaster on styrofoam, 2006), offers up the symbol of shit as a homeopathic method of therapy that can cure social pretenses. Our self-impressions are confronted momentarily ‘in the comical moment one accidentally steps on a pile of shit’, the artist remarks. Under the guise of a venerable art object, ‘Shit Totem’ mocks the structures of power and political investment in its displayed location, the former airport’s transit area, which is transitioning into the city’s largest-ever redevelopment project.

Evi Roumani

Arrivals Terminal, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

‘Mudmouth’ (00:05:36 video, TV monitor, 2020) shows layered images depicting compulsive everyday pleasures as well as moments of relaxation. Recalling the early video movement’s practice-based critique of communication structures, images are placed outside of their original contexts – alterations which allow the artist to pose questions about the visual events that take place. Here, the video still freezes the eye of a reptile and images of plant species before they disappear from view, allowing us to imagine the slow movement and journey of the species at night.

Virginia Russolo

West facing balcons, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

‘Flag/Bandiera’ (leather, animal fur, beeswax, latex on canvas, 2019) is the continuation of Virginia Russolo’s research into animal materials as depositories of energy. The shape of Bandiera is connected to its name, which takes the form of the medieval Venetian flag which would have been attached to the masts of the medieval boats traversing the canals. The piece was conceived to be a mobile marker of an environment where sacred transformations take place.

Adonis Stoantzikis

Acropolis Lounge Entrance, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Hung just above a pile of ceiling debris, ‘Versi’ (oil on canvas, 2020), is part of Stoantzikis’ latest project Heebie-jeebies which deals with conditions of extreme nervousness caused by fear, anxiety and strain which stem from our present social uncertainty and realities. Such themes explored by the artist are heightened within the context of the politicization of the abandoned airport.

Giorgos Tserionis

Olympic Airlines Building, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

The performance piece, ‘The Arrival’ (2020) presents a figure wearing a traditional Greek rug known as a ‘flokati’. The work channels the artist’s feelings of protection and warmth linked to his memories of the flokati at his grandparent’s home which was brought out during the cold winter months. The wild texture of the rug resembles that of an animal skin and the silent performance slowly unfolds to reveal a loving creature that guards the airport’s forgotten grounds.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos

Arrival Gates, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

The work ‘Cross Dissolve Suspended (Andreas 81)’ (video still, BETA video archive from the Greek national media cycle 1981, source ERT) is part of a series of video stills surgically removed from BETA videotapes archiving the massive political rallies and pre-election speeches that took place on Syntagma Square in the 1980s. The cross-dissolve became a staple visual signifier of live political television in Greece and was applied extensively during the rallies’ live coverage, merging the close up on the face and torso of the speaker (in this case party leader Andrea Papandreou from 1981) together with images of massive crowds, often lasting up to 10-15 minutes.

Kostis Velonis

Runway, Former Ellinikon International airport, Athens 2020

Units of bricks and stone masonry are reconfigured in ‘Untitled’ (wood, bricks, found materials, 2020), which sits just in front of ‘Species Speech’ (marble, wood, acrylic, 2015). Velonis, by placing these works within the setting of the airport’s derelict runway, explores the notion of ‘ground sculpture’, an art form which heralds matter itself. Amongst the shrubs which grow out of the concrete of this forgotten material environment, these artworks indicate their material resilience. Here the artist gestures towards matter as the starting point of negotiations involving ideas, narratives and principles that are invested in the base materialism of the objects themselves.