This Artist Digs Deep to Explore Athens’s Complex History

Leslie Camhi
·2 min read
studio with white walls and arched inset bookcases on either side and a sofa with a red patterned throw and lots of pieces of furniture that look like the tops of greek columns
An Artist Digs Deep to Explore Athens’s HistoryCourtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet
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Above: The artist at home in Athens.

“Athens is known as the birthplace of Western civilization, but, as a modern city, it is totally unresolved,” says artist Andreas Angelidakis, speaking via Zoom from his apartment and atelier near Greece’s National Archaeological Museum. A foam chair he designed makes him appear to be seated in the embrace of an Ionic column’s capital. “Paris has a clear identity, its own brand,” he explains, “whereas Athens is not exactly European and not quite Middle Eastern: It’s this in-between, transitional zone.”

That makes it fertile ground for Angelidakis’s artistic explorations. This month his installation “Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity” opened in Paris, transforming the Espace Niemeyer—Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist 1965 headquarters for the French Communist Party—into an imaginary excavation site.

ancient greek statues on a temple
Caryatid statues at the Acropolis. Getty Images

Ancient ruins, in the form of modular soft sculpture, are juxtaposed with figurines and video projections, referencing souvenir shops, Airbnb lodgings, shipping containers, and nightlife. Alternative histories—prompted by the discovery of the remains of a mosque inside the Parthenon, for example, or accounts of the stylite monks, early medieval ascetics who dwelled on top of columns—are threaded throughout the show, as are reflections on the internet’s filtering of contemporary experience.

Born in an Athenian suburb, Angelidakis grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, visiting construction sites with his father, a civil engineer. He trained as an architect in the United States. “But I never actually wanted to design buildings,” he admits, preferring instead to think about them.

portrait of the greek male artist with a specked beard and wearing a black tee shirt and black jacket looking into the camera
Andreas Angelidakis. Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet

His current work was commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, whose curator, Denis Pernet, suggested the Espace Niemeyer as a venue. “It’s perfect,” Angelidakis says, “because Niemeyer’s architecture was attempting to manifest a future that never actually arrived. In my work, archaeology is trying to reassemble a past that could have been radically different—so an ambiguous past meets a future that was never realized.”

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