Date: 16.5–27.9.2014
Location: Kunsthalle Athena, Athens
Participating artists: Anastasia Ax, Apostolos Georgiou, Socratis Socratous, and Kostis Velonis
This Is Not My Beautiful House, borrowing its title from the famous Talking Heads lyric, brought together four artists responding to the contemporary Greek—and broader global—condition. Far from invoking 1980s pop nostalgia, the title served as a parable of social and existential alienation, capturing a world shaped by fear, desire, and uncertainty. It evoked contradictory impulses—to go or stay, resist or surrender, hope or give up—and a condition in which things could no longer continue as they once had.
For this exhibition, Anastasia Ax presented Exile, an installation continuously reshaped over the course of the show. Moving from a familiar village to a destruction camp and finally to an archaeological dig, it reflected on how history was understood while it was still unfolding.
Apostolos Georgiou depicted ordinary people in everyday spaces, using abstraction and humour to explore vulnerability, failure, and memory. Influenced by Greece in the 1950s and 1960s, his paintings became psychodramas marked by acidic humour, in which failure was rendered with a peculiar elegance and evoked both personal and collective experience.
Socratis Socratous explored the overlap of politics and art through installations marked by fragility and unease. In Stolen Garden (2014), bronze-cast plants drawn from Athens’s National Garden—including national symbols of Greece and parasitic species—formed a landscape echoing the city during the crisis. The work suggested a violated sense of reality, while the garden itself appeared as both a refuge and a site of vulnerability.
Kostis Velonis combined personal and historical references through sculpture and video, drawing on failed utopias, theatre, and working-class history. His works paired austere forms with fragile, desolate images that reflected the enduring tension between private life and public history.
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