When: May 23, 2025 | 18:00-22:00 (Opening), Duration: 24 May – 28 June, 2025
Opening hours: Monday- Friday: 15:00- 19:00 Saturdays: 12:00-16:00

Where: ACG Art Gallery

Organized by: Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts,
Deree – The American College of Greece

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

About the exhibition

Recast in the mold of a taxonomic ordering of things, chronology becomes the alibi of time, a way of making use of time without reflecting on it. – Michel de Certeau (1986:216)

History can never be reduced to a simple articulation of how things truly were. Any such attempt at interpretation is doomed to submit history’s complexity to a totalizing, relentless positivism. If history were to be understood as absolute knowledge – if we were ever seduced by this possibility – it would be attainable only after its very end, after the falling of dusk. History is nevertheless living.

Walter Benjamin once defined history as remembrance. Remembrance is not a definite science, nor a settled affair: it intervenes, modifies, and redeems. It turns what presents itself with the semblance of completeness into the resoundingly incomplete, opening new territories and futures still to be charted. It transforms the reified image of the past into a dialectical one, what appears to be a closed-off, non-communicative object, into a process of object-formation: a constellation of memory and experience. In this understanding of history, something is irretrievably lost only insofar as it is not recognized by the present as its own concern (On the Concept of History, 1940). What artists perceive as their own concern from this history produces, and is produced by, their self-understanding as social subjects. A link and a break in time explores what members of the artistic community at The American College of Greece consider worth citing and reflecting on from the college’s history in a non-chronological, non-linear configuration. Drawing on their dual roles as artists and educators, as well as on personal and collective memories, participating artists offer a meditation on the past while alluding to the present and future.

This year marks 150 years since the college’s founding. In 1875, Mary West, a missionary from Boston, opened “The American School for Girls” in a restored mansion in Smyrna, driven by the idea of liberating women from illiteracy. From its relocation to Athens following the catastrophe of Smyrna, to its use as a military hospital during the Greek-Italian war, and its transformation during the German occupation, the college has undergone multiple redefinitions. In 1963, it moved to its current campus on the slopes of Hymettus in Agia Paraskevi; in 2012, the School of Fine and Performing Arts was renamed in honor of artist and benefactor Frances Rich (1910-2007). This exhibition reflects on these transitions, not as milestones in a linear progression, but as layered moments that form a constellation of lived, institutional memory.

Rather than imposing order, Eelco Runia proposes that historical understanding emerges through disruption – turning things upside down, pulling them apart, and “making a mess”. This approach involves self-questioning, where historians grapple with what they bring to the subject. In this framework, creating a mess becomes an invitation to open ourselves to the contingencies of history and its openness to the future – a way of fathoming discontinuity and unforeseeable leaps and bounds. As Runia writes, ‘the march of chronicity is interrupted, and past, present, and future start to play hide and seek’ (Moved by the Past, 2014, xiv). A link and a break in time brings together new works in various media by the faculty of the Visual Arts program at Deree – ACG, mostly created in collaboration with academic peers and students, and presented in dialogue with artworks from the ACG Art Collection and archival material. The exhibition explores the college’s long-lasting educational mission and its ongoing capacity to adapt. It interrogates how the college has redefined its core activities and values, particularly the evolving role of art education, while foregrounding notions of diversity, access, equality, freedom of speech, ecological consciousness, and connection to both the built and natural environments.

The exhibition is conceived as a collaged roadmap, visualizing the shifting field of arts education at the college. Centered on the development of student practices under the mentorship of experienced artists, the exhibition fosters collaboration, co-creation, and mutual learning, offering an alternative to the prevailing emphasis on individualism and competition that characterizes the current educational climate. What do aspiring artists need to learn, and how do faculty members’ practices and experiences shape their growth? How do educational legacies inform current pedagogies, and what values endure in today’s turbulent world?

The gallery becomes a testing ground and a platform for open dialogue, where multiple temporalities and perspectives converge. The creative and critical thinking skills embedded in art and broader educational practice foster a sense of hopeful transformation — our ability to act in the present and shape the future: after all, students have long been at the forefront of change. Through experimental and imaginative propositions, participating artists explore the vital role of art-making in shaping cultural imaginaries in response to entangled climate, political, technological, and humanitarian crises. Under a collaborative framework, this exhibition positions the art school as a responsive learning community that inspires solidarity, shared responsibility, and collective action.

Participating Artists:
Dionisis Christofilogiannis x Elen Demiryan x Christos Dielas x Carolina Gadia x Theodora Hareras x Aristi Kouri x Giorgos Papazoglou x Giannis Sarris x Ainsley Silberhorn x George Theodorakakos x Preston Tsouanatos x Nikos Vagias x Alexandra Yaneva x Zhou Zhiye, Effie Halivopoulou x Nikos Falagas x Tim Ward x Konstantina Chatzouli x Natalia Zara, Zoe Hatziyannaki, Dimitris Ioannou x Evan Katsounis x Katerina Milesi, Giorgos Ioannou, Georgia Kotretsos x Jason Bonas x Maria-Luisa Dollete x Anna Giakoumakatou x Phoebe Kainourgiou x Fani Koulocheri x Phivi Nicolaou x Vaggi Sekifu x Natalia Zara x Zhiye Zhou, Michael Lekakis , Sigrid McCabe, Irini Miga, Jennifer Nelson x performances by student and faculty volunteers, Emer O’ Brien, The Frances Rich Estate, Oliver Steindecker, Takis