Stepping contained in the Greek pavilion on the 2026 Venice Biennale looks like getting into an S&M membership.
Behind a distressed black curtain, tender objects resemblant of beanbags are dotted throughout a pink neon lit ground, which appears to increase to infinity beneath one’s toes. Pictures of chains wrap round sculptures, themselves fragments of marble columns which have been dismantled and softened after millennia of holding up Greek temples. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Eighties synth-pop anthem Calm down pulses all through the house, whereas pink tubular sculptures are hung with souvenirs: t-shirts adorned with pictures by queer artists from over the many years and the face of Zak Kostopoulos, a 33-year-old Greek-American LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive activist and drag artist often known as Zackie Oh, who was crushed to demise in Athens in 2018.
The pavilion, who goes by the identify of Grecia, can also be conceived as a drag artist. Andreas Angelidakis, the artist and architect behind the dizzying set up, has at all times “handled buildings and objects as characters, emotional beings”, as he places it. On this occasion, Grecia “begins deconstructing herself as a nationwide topic”, says the co-curator of the pavilion, Ioli Kavakou, who organised the exhibitions alongside George Bekirakis. “She realises that being a nationwide topic doesn’t imply following a particular id or a linear narrative that defines ‘Greekness’.” Grecia, then, can also be an “escape room”, because the set up is titled.
The concept of the nationwide pavilion has been on the coronary heart of the Venice Biennale since 1907, when everlasting nationwide buildings started to appear within the Giardini. The Greek pavilion was erected in 1934, in direction of the top of the Second Hellenic Republic and at a second of rising fascism throughout Europe. That yr, Hitler met Mussolini for the primary time, in Venice the place they toured the Biennale collectively.
Greece, in the meantime, entered a interval of political turmoil marked by the collapse of the republic and the next dictatorship. Designed in a neo-Byzantine type, the Greek pavilion’s structure displays a “post-neoclassical symmetrical order” typical of the language utilized in official buildings through the Fascist period.
Its architect M. Papandreou labored carefully along with his Italian colleague Brenno Del Giudice, who was a part of the Italian fascist regime’s official efforts to modernise the Venice Biennale’s grounds. Whereas researching his mission, Angelidakis found that the 2 columns on the entrance to the Greek pavilion are simplified reproductions of pillars contained in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which, the artist factors out, the Greek right-wing has at all times promised to “make Greek once more”.
Present echoes with the “world turning Maga” are to not be overstated, in Angelidakis’s view. As he says, the nationwide pavilions immediately “stand as frozen fascist and/or colonial caves, trapped in a Giardini identified to analyze the outcomes of political decisions, and switch them into artwork”. He provides: “Each pavilion is a mechanism of reality, similar to the mechanisms in Plato’s allegory of the cave, which immediately seems like a phantasmagoria about world Trump-ism.”
