Arts @ Deree

Exhibition: Permanent Temporality

Exhibition duration: Saturday 25 April – Friday 8 May, 2026

Opening hours: M-F 15:00-18:00, Saturdays 12:00-16:00, closed May 1st

Where:
ACG Art Gallery – The American College of Greece
6 Gravias Street, 15342 Aghia Paraskevi

The Visual Arts Program of the Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts of Deree – The American College of Greece, is very pleased to present its Senior exhibition 2026 in the ACG Gallery, opening on April 24th at 18:30.

About the exhibition

Students completing the Visual Arts program have spent a full academic year to research and realize a project related to their specific interests as emerging visual artists. Graduating students Anna Giakoumakatou, Maria-Luisa Dollete, Konstantina Chatzouli, Phoebe Kainourgiou, and Natalia Zara present the exhibition Permanent Temporality. Please join us at the opening to see their work and meet the artists.

We are living in a state of Permanent Temporality. As old as the earth and as new as the disruptive technologies that change our world by the millisecond, Permanent Temporality speaks to both an enduring philosophy of impermanence, and to a rupture in the timeline. Constant change characterizes the human condition, but for our graduating students, the accelerated existential threats and destabilization of norms manifest psychically through visual hallucinations, dysmorphia and escapist mechanisms which the artists interrogate and engage with. Their sustained acts to see the world explicitly blend their interior mental filters with memory and its errors, forging a subjective and authentic way forward. The exhibition invites viewers into their daily quest to navigate a disorienting present and make meaning of it.

Exhibition: Permanent Temporality

Exhibition duration: Saturday 25 April – Friday 8 May, 2026

Opening hours: M-F 15:00-18:00, Saturdays 12:00-16:00, closed May 1st

Where:
ACG Art Gallery – The American College of Greece
6 Gravias Street, 15342 Aghia Paraskevi

The Visual Arts Program of the Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts of Deree – The American College of Greece, is very pleased to present its Senior exhibition 2026 in the ACG Gallery, opening on April 24th at 18:30.

About the exhibition

Students completing the Visual Arts program have spent a full academic year to research and realize a project related to their specific interests as emerging visual artists. Graduating students Anna Giakoumakatou, Maria-Luisa Dollete, Konstantina Chatzouli, Phoebe Kainourgiou, and Natalia Zara present the exhibition Permanent Temporality. Please join us at the opening to see their work and meet the artists.

We are living in a state of Permanent Temporality. As old as the earth and as new as the disruptive technologies that change our world by the millisecond, Permanent Temporality speaks to both an enduring philosophy of impermanence, and to a rupture in the timeline. Constant change characterizes the human condition, but for our graduating students, the accelerated existential threats and destabilization of norms manifest psychically through visual hallucinations, dysmorphia and escapist mechanisms which the artists interrogate and engage with. Their sustained acts to see the world explicitly blend their interior mental filters with memory and its errors, forging a subjective and authentic way forward. The exhibition invites viewers into their daily quest to navigate a disorienting present and make meaning of it.

Opening: Tuesday, February 24, 2026 | 18:00-21:00

When: February 25-April 25, 2026

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 15:00-19:00 & Saturday: 12:00-16:00

Closed between: April 4-19 for the Easter break

Where: ACG Plaka Building, 17 Ipitou St, Plaka, Athens

Curated by
ACG Art collection in collaboration with Díla

Co-organized by:
Díla
Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Deree – The American College of Greece
The Demos Center of The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

A new group exhibition brings together artists from diverse cross-cultural backgrounds to explore ideas of dislocation and possibility, alongside expressions of hybridity in relation to place, belonging, and selfhood.

Not Third but Infinite takes its title and conceptual framework from critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space,” expanding his idea of a hybrid, imagined zone between cultures into a vision of infinite re-creation. This expansion evokes the psychological potency of utopia—a state defined by perpetual openness and possibility. Notably, the exhibition includes previously unexhibited notebooks and ephemera from the personal archive of the distinguished Greek-American artist Michael Lekakis (1907–1987). Lekakis’s work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, and is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Greece.

Featuring both established and posthumous artists alongside those at earlier stages of their careers, the exhibition presents poetry, painting, embroidery, works on paper, archival ephemera, and immersive installations. It collectively reflects on what it means not only to leave one’s roots behind, but also to continuously renegotiate versions of the self. These recalibrated identities are often constructed from visual fragments, memories, and sensory impressions tied to specific landscapes and physical touchpoints, which reassemble in unfamiliar yet generative ways. Greek-Egyptian painter Farida El Gazzar, continuing her evolving series of miniature paintings depicting city life, architecture, and foliage, presents scenes drawn from the urban landscapes of Athens and Alexandria, framed within kitsch decorative borders. Greek-Cypriot artist Vassia Adamou Vanezi, who describes her practice as involving “poetic gestures” and “visual poetry or concrete poetry,” engages with the contested terrain of her Cypriot homeland. Through botanicals mounted on handmade paper and layers of typed text rendered illegible through repetition, she enacts processes of confusion, re-creation, and re-meaning.

Of Korean-American origin and raised between Switzerland and Greece, multidisciplinary artist Iliodora Margellos brings her meditative stitch-based practice to her series Securities, presenting embroidered aphorisms such as A Star Is Brighter in the Clear Sky and The Sun Will Always Rise as gestures of reassurance for the untethered self. She also presents two lesser-known installations: a floor-based crochet and mirror sculpture of droplets and puddles, titled Long Quiet River—named after Étienne Chatiliez’s French comedy film “La Vie est un Long Fleuve Tranquille”—and a delicate handwoven mobile, Comforts (Very Knotty) IV, anchored by a textile knot that gestures toward entanglement and the quiet inner harmony one learns to cultivate within the layered complexities of familial identity. Kleitia Kokalari, born in Albania and raised in Athens, contributes paintings of uncanny landscapes suggestive of the subconscious, featuring border waters and a cave-like portal that appears to lead elsewhere. Zigzagging, geometrically carved sculptures by Swedish-born, Athens-based artist Andreas Kargsten punctuate corners and transitional spaces, marking thresholds between the exhibition’s rooms and corridors

Two contributions come from artists associated with Díla, a community offering mentorship to young refugee women pursuing work in the arts, which co-produced Not Third but Infinite. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors encounter a large-scale painting by Elen Demirian, a young Armenian artist currently studying Visual Arts at Deree. Her striking work 499, co-authored with her partner Aram Minassian—also of Armenian origin and now based in France—is densely layered with references to shared cultural memory, including excerpts from prayers, folk songs, and privately coded numerological symbols, together forming an intimate “third space” on the canvas. Further along the corridor, in a room of its own, visitors encounter Chink of Light, a poetry installation by Iran-born writer of Tajik origin Karima Qias, now based in Brussels. Previously installed at Pikionis’ pavilion on Philopappou Hill, the work features calligraphed pages from her handmade book lining the walls, accompanied by a video portrait and a Persian-language poetry audio track.

Text and lyrical language are among the exhibition’s defining elements. Lettering and literary forms appear across media—in collaborative painting, poetry installations, embroidery on paper and cloth, and most prominently in the poems, reflections, and jottings found in Lekakis’s notebooks. Spiritual references to the sky and the stars, with their inherently transnational and borderless qualities, recur throughout the exhibition. In one notebook poem, Lekakis writes:

“What happens to the stars at night?
They fly to Egypt
To crash at the feet of Ra
They pile so high
They slip over the ends of the earth.”

Many of the works seek either to zoom out from the earthly plane in search of broader perspective, or to capture fleeting moments as textures—through words, materials, and gestures—rendering experience tangible even as it slips away. In doing so, they register and commemorate earthly details as both anchors of belonging and points of departure. Despite their diversity of media and individual artistic languages, the works in Not Third but Infinite share an acute awareness of ephemerality and impermanence. Distributed across the ground-floor rooms of the beautifully preserved neoclassical villa of The American College of Greece (ACG) on Ipitou Street, the exhibition unfolds as a collective meditation on dislocation as both rupture and reconstitution. Particularly notable are the archival materials by Lekakis displayed in the main room: personal correspondence, photographs, and notebooks drawn from an archive held by the ACG Art Collection. Presented in traditional library display cases, these informal pages offer intimate insights into the New York–born artist’s life and imaginative world through his distinctive and evocative poetic voice.

Also of special note is a haunting basement installation by Sabri El Charif, a recent graduate of Deree’s Visual Arts Program and a young artist of Egyptian-Levantine origin. His floor-based work Under This Sky pays tribute to the tragedy of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, addressing in particular the mass graves in Gaza as a violent attempt to sever a people from their homeland.

Not Third but Infinite is co-organized by Díla, The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, The Demos Center of The American College of Greece. As a collaborative endeavor, the exhibition reflects the School’s commitment to offer a wide range of artistic activities and promote its students and graduates, The Demos Center’s mission to foster a sense of active citizenship—particularly among younger generations—as well as Díla’s dedication to supporting young refugee women on creative career paths.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Participating artists: Elen Demirian & Aram Minassian, Sabri El Charif, Farida El Gazzar, Andreas Kargsten, Kleitia Kokalari, Michael Lekakis, Iliodora Margellos, Karima Qias, Vassia Adamou Vanezi

Curated by: Ioanna Papapavlou and Díla

Exhibition production: Ana S. González Rueda, Katerina Milesi

Graphic Design: Elen Demirian

Gallery texts: Eliana Klathis, Katerina Merkouri, Katerina Milesi, Eva Ntampanli

Opening: Tuesday, February 24, 2026 | 18:00-21:00

When: February 25-April 25, 2026

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 15:00-19:00 & Saturday: 12:00-16:00

Closed between: April 4-19 for the Easter break

Where: ACG Plaka Building, 17 Ipitou St, Plaka, Athens

Curated by
ACG Art collection in collaboration with Díla

Co-organized by:
Díla
Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Deree – The American College of Greece
The Demos Center of The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

A new group exhibition brings together artists from diverse cross-cultural backgrounds to explore ideas of dislocation and possibility, alongside expressions of hybridity in relation to place, belonging, and selfhood.

Not Third but Infinite takes its title and conceptual framework from critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space,” expanding his idea of a hybrid, imagined zone between cultures into a vision of infinite re-creation. This expansion evokes the psychological potency of utopia—a state defined by perpetual openness and possibility. Notably, the exhibition includes previously unexhibited notebooks and ephemera from the personal archive of the distinguished Greek-American artist Michael Lekakis (1907–1987). Lekakis’s work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, and is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Greece.

Featuring both established and posthumous artists alongside those at earlier stages of their careers, the exhibition presents poetry, painting, embroidery, works on paper, archival ephemera, and immersive installations. It collectively reflects on what it means not only to leave one’s roots behind, but also to continuously renegotiate versions of the self. These recalibrated identities are often constructed from visual fragments, memories, and sensory impressions tied to specific landscapes and physical touchpoints, which reassemble in unfamiliar yet generative ways. Greek-Egyptian painter Farida El Gazzar, continuing her evolving series of miniature paintings depicting city life, architecture, and foliage, presents scenes drawn from the urban landscapes of Athens and Alexandria, framed within kitsch decorative borders. Greek-Cypriot artist Vassia Adamou Vanezi, who describes her practice as involving “poetic gestures” and “visual poetry or concrete poetry,” engages with the contested terrain of her Cypriot homeland. Through botanicals mounted on handmade paper and layers of typed text rendered illegible through repetition, she enacts processes of confusion, re-creation, and re-meaning.

Of Korean-American origin and raised between Switzerland and Greece, multidisciplinary artist Iliodora Margellos brings her meditative stitch-based practice to her series Securities, presenting embroidered aphorisms such as A Star Is Brighter in the Clear Sky and The Sun Will Always Rise as gestures of reassurance for the untethered self. She also presents two lesser-known installations: a floor-based crochet and mirror sculpture of droplets and puddles, titled Long Quiet River—named after Étienne Chatiliez’s French comedy film “La Vie est un Long Fleuve Tranquille”—and a delicate handwoven mobile, Comforts (Very Knotty) IV, anchored by a textile knot that gestures toward entanglement and the quiet inner harmony one learns to cultivate within the layered complexities of familial identity. Kleitia Kokalari, born in Albania and raised in Athens, contributes paintings of uncanny landscapes suggestive of the subconscious, featuring border waters and a cave-like portal that appears to lead elsewhere. Zigzagging, geometrically carved sculptures by Swedish-born, Athens-based artist Andreas Kargsten punctuate corners and transitional spaces, marking thresholds between the exhibition’s rooms and corridors

Two contributions come from artists associated with Díla, a community offering mentorship to young refugee women pursuing work in the arts, which co-produced Not Third but Infinite. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors encounter a large-scale painting by Elen Demirian, a young Armenian artist currently studying Visual Arts at Deree. Her striking work 499, co-authored with her partner Aram Minassian—also of Armenian origin and now based in France—is densely layered with references to shared cultural memory, including excerpts from prayers, folk songs, and privately coded numerological symbols, together forming an intimate “third space” on the canvas. Further along the corridor, in a room of its own, visitors encounter Chink of Light, a poetry installation by Iran-born writer of Tajik origin Karima Qias, now based in Brussels. Previously installed at Pikionis’ pavilion on Philopappou Hill, the work features calligraphed pages from her handmade book lining the walls, accompanied by a video portrait and a Persian-language poetry audio track.

Text and lyrical language are among the exhibition’s defining elements. Lettering and literary forms appear across media—in collaborative painting, poetry installations, embroidery on paper and cloth, and most prominently in the poems, reflections, and jottings found in Lekakis’s notebooks. Spiritual references to the sky and the stars, with their inherently transnational and borderless qualities, recur throughout the exhibition. In one notebook poem, Lekakis writes:

“What happens to the stars at night?
They fly to Egypt
To crash at the feet of Ra
They pile so high
They slip over the ends of the earth.”

Many of the works seek either to zoom out from the earthly plane in search of broader perspective, or to capture fleeting moments as textures—through words, materials, and gestures—rendering experience tangible even as it slips away. In doing so, they register and commemorate earthly details as both anchors of belonging and points of departure. Despite their diversity of media and individual artistic languages, the works in Not Third but Infinite share an acute awareness of ephemerality and impermanence. Distributed across the ground-floor rooms of the beautifully preserved neoclassical villa of The American College of Greece (ACG) on Ipitou Street, the exhibition unfolds as a collective meditation on dislocation as both rupture and reconstitution. Particularly notable are the archival materials by Lekakis displayed in the main room: personal correspondence, photographs, and notebooks drawn from an archive held by the ACG Art Collection. Presented in traditional library display cases, these informal pages offer intimate insights into the New York–born artist’s life and imaginative world through his distinctive and evocative poetic voice.

Also of special note is a haunting basement installation by Sabri El Charif, a recent graduate of Deree’s Visual Arts Program and a young artist of Egyptian-Levantine origin. His floor-based work Under This Sky pays tribute to the tragedy of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, addressing in particular the mass graves in Gaza as a violent attempt to sever a people from their homeland.

Not Third but Infinite is co-organized by Díla, The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, The Demos Center of The American College of Greece. As a collaborative endeavor, the exhibition reflects the School’s commitment to offer a wide range of artistic activities and promote its students and graduates, The Demos Center’s mission to foster a sense of active citizenship—particularly among younger generations—as well as Díla’s dedication to supporting young refugee women on creative career paths.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Participating artists: Elen Demirian & Aram Minassian, Sabri El Charif, Farida El Gazzar, Andreas Kargsten, Kleitia Kokalari, Michael Lekakis, Iliodora Margellos, Karima Qias, Vassia Adamou Vanezi

Curated by: Ioanna Papapavlou and Díla

Exhibition production: Ana S. González Rueda, Katerina Milesi

Graphic Design: Elen Demirian

Gallery texts: Eliana Klathis, Katerina Merkouri, Katerina Milesi, Eva Ntampanli

Opening: Tuesday, February 24, 2026 | 18:00-21:00

When: February 25-April 25, 2026

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 15:00-19:00 & Saturday: 12:00-16:00

Closed between: April 4-19 for the Easter break

Where: ACG Plaka Building, 17 Ipitou St, Plaka, Athens

Curated by
ACG Art collection in collaboration with Díla

Co-organized by:
Díla
Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Deree – The American College of Greece
The Demos Center of The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

A new group exhibition brings together artists from diverse cross-cultural backgrounds to explore ideas of dislocation and possibility, alongside expressions of hybridity in relation to place, belonging, and selfhood.

Not Third but Infinite takes its title and conceptual framework from critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space,” expanding his idea of a hybrid, imagined zone between cultures into a vision of infinite re-creation. This expansion evokes the psychological potency of utopia—a state defined by perpetual openness and possibility. Notably, the exhibition includes previously unexhibited notebooks and ephemera from the personal archive of the distinguished Greek-American artist Michael Lekakis (1907–1987). Lekakis’s work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, and is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Greece.

Featuring both established and posthumous artists alongside those at earlier stages of their careers, the exhibition presents poetry, painting, embroidery, works on paper, archival ephemera, and immersive installations. It collectively reflects on what it means not only to leave one’s roots behind, but also to continuously renegotiate versions of the self. These recalibrated identities are often constructed from visual fragments, memories, and sensory impressions tied to specific landscapes and physical touchpoints, which reassemble in unfamiliar yet generative ways. Greek-Egyptian painter Farida El Gazzar, continuing her evolving series of miniature paintings depicting city life, architecture, and foliage, presents scenes drawn from the urban landscapes of Athens and Alexandria, framed within kitsch decorative borders. Greek-Cypriot artist Vassia Adamou Vanezi, who describes her practice as involving “poetic gestures” and “visual poetry or concrete poetry,” engages with the contested terrain of her Cypriot homeland. Through botanicals mounted on handmade paper and layers of typed text rendered illegible through repetition, she enacts processes of confusion, re-creation, and re-meaning.

Of Korean-American origin and raised between Switzerland and Greece, multidisciplinary artist Iliodora Margellos brings her meditative stitch-based practice to her series Securities, presenting embroidered aphorisms such as A Star Is Brighter in the Clear Sky and The Sun Will Always Rise as gestures of reassurance for the untethered self. She also presents two lesser-known installations: a floor-based crochet and mirror sculpture of droplets and puddles, titled Long Quiet River—named after Étienne Chatiliez’s French comedy film “La Vie est un Long Fleuve Tranquille”—and a delicate handwoven mobile, Comforts (Very Knotty) IV, anchored by a textile knot that gestures toward entanglement and the quiet inner harmony one learns to cultivate within the layered complexities of familial identity. Kleitia Kokalari, born in Albania and raised in Athens, contributes paintings of uncanny landscapes suggestive of the subconscious, featuring border waters and a cave-like portal that appears to lead elsewhere. Zigzagging, geometrically carved sculptures by Swedish-born, Athens-based artist Andreas Kargsten punctuate corners and transitional spaces, marking thresholds between the exhibition’s rooms and corridors

Two contributions come from artists associated with Díla, a community offering mentorship to young refugee women pursuing work in the arts, which co-produced Not Third but Infinite. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors encounter a large-scale painting by Elen Demirian, a young Armenian artist currently studying Visual Arts at Deree. Her striking work 499, co-authored with her partner Aram Minassian—also of Armenian origin and now based in France—is densely layered with references to shared cultural memory, including excerpts from prayers, folk songs, and privately coded numerological symbols, together forming an intimate “third space” on the canvas. Further along the corridor, in a room of its own, visitors encounter Chink of Light, a poetry installation by Iran-born writer of Tajik origin Karima Qias, now based in Brussels. Previously installed at Pikionis’ pavilion on Philopappou Hill, the work features calligraphed pages from her handmade book lining the walls, accompanied by a video portrait and a Persian-language poetry audio track.

Text and lyrical language are among the exhibition’s defining elements. Lettering and literary forms appear across media—in collaborative painting, poetry installations, embroidery on paper and cloth, and most prominently in the poems, reflections, and jottings found in Lekakis’s notebooks. Spiritual references to the sky and the stars, with their inherently transnational and borderless qualities, recur throughout the exhibition. In one notebook poem, Lekakis writes:

“What happens to the stars at night?
They fly to Egypt
To crash at the feet of Ra
They pile so high
They slip over the ends of the earth.”

Many of the works seek either to zoom out from the earthly plane in search of broader perspective, or to capture fleeting moments as textures—through words, materials, and gestures—rendering experience tangible even as it slips away. In doing so, they register and commemorate earthly details as both anchors of belonging and points of departure. Despite their diversity of media and individual artistic languages, the works in Not Third but Infinite share an acute awareness of ephemerality and impermanence. Distributed across the ground-floor rooms of the beautifully preserved neoclassical villa of The American College of Greece (ACG) on Ipitou Street, the exhibition unfolds as a collective meditation on dislocation as both rupture and reconstitution. Particularly notable are the archival materials by Lekakis displayed in the main room: personal correspondence, photographs, and notebooks drawn from an archive held by the ACG Art Collection. Presented in traditional library display cases, these informal pages offer intimate insights into the New York–born artist’s life and imaginative world through his distinctive and evocative poetic voice.

Also of special note is a haunting basement installation by Sabri El Charif, a recent graduate of Deree’s Visual Arts Program and a young artist of Egyptian-Levantine origin. His floor-based work Under This Sky pays tribute to the tragedy of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, addressing in particular the mass graves in Gaza as a violent attempt to sever a people from their homeland.

Not Third but Infinite is co-organized by Díla, The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, The Demos Center of The American College of Greece. As a collaborative endeavor, the exhibition reflects the School’s commitment to offer a wide range of artistic activities and promote its students and graduates, The Demos Center’s mission to foster a sense of active citizenship—particularly among younger generations—as well as Díla’s dedication to supporting young refugee women on creative career paths.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Participating artists: Elen Demirian & Aram Minassian, Sabri El Charif, Farida El Gazzar, Andreas Kargsten, Kleitia Kokalari, Michael Lekakis, Iliodora Margellos, Karima Qias, Vassia Adamou Vanezi

Curated by: Ioanna Papapavlou and Díla

Exhibition production: Ana S. González Rueda, Katerina Milesi

Graphic Design: Elen Demirian

Gallery texts: Eliana Klathis, Katerina Merkouri, Katerina Milesi, Eva Ntampanli

The Heart in Music and Medicine

When:
Friday, February 13, 2026 | 13:30 – 15:30
Where:
ACG Events Hall, DC, Ag. Paraskevi Campus
Organized by:
Dr Tatiana Papageorgiou, Associate Professor, Deree Music Department, FRSAHSS,
The American College of Greece
Supported by:
The Frances Riches School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece
In collaboration with:
The Biomedical Sciences Program, Department of Science and Mathematics, and the Department of Psychology – School of Sciences and Technology, and the ACG Health & Wellness Center

About the event

On the occasion of the World Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Day, which symbolically coincides with Valentine’s Day, ACG will host a special interdisciplinary event of lectures and live music performances, titled “The Heart in Music and Medicine”. The event, which is organized by Associate Professor of Music Tatiana Papageorgiou and supported by the Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, features distinguished guest speakers from different disciplines to celebrate the enduring relationship between music, medicine, psychology and the biomedical sciences.

We are happy to announce that Minister of Health Adonis Georgiadis will be able to attend in order to share his insights on the topic with Deree students, faculty and guests.

Interventional cardiologist, Dr. Spyros Papaioannou (Director of Cardiology Clinic at the Athens Naval Hospital, Director of the Hellenic Society of Athletic Cardiology, and member of the European and American Cardiology Societies), will speak on congenital heart defects and sudden cardiac death in young people and athletes, stressing the significance of prevention and proper treatment.

Dr. Paraskevi Papadopoulou, ACG Professor of Biomedical Sciences & Environmental Studies, a senior collaborator of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) network, will present important findings from the recent GBD cardiovascular study she has participated in as co-author, ‘Global, Regional, and National Burden of Cardiovascular Diseases and Risk Factors in 204 Countries and Territories’ (1990-2023), published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Dr. Ion Beratis, ACG Associate Professor of Psychology and Scientific Associate of the First Department of Neurology at ‘Aeginitio’ University Hospital, a clinical center of excellence for neurological diseases, will speak on the relationship between music and mental health and the bidirectional brain-heart connection.

Dr. Tatiana Papageorgiou, ACG Associate Professor of Music and active performing musician, will share research findings about the effects of music and rhythm on heart rate, using musical examples, while referring to the development of music therapy as a formal health-care profession today.

Ms. Sophie Themelis, Executive Coordinator for Wellness at the ACG Health & Wellness Center, Pilates Instructor, and a passionate advocate for wellbeing and sustainability, dedicated to integrating eco-conscious practices into health and wellness initiatives, will share techniques of meditation with music, as a tool for improving emotional regulation and physical health.

The lectures will be interspersed with live music performances of iconic songs about the heart, presented by talented young artists from the Deree Music Program of the American College of Greece.

Join us for this unique interdisciplinary event featuring a series of insightful lectures and performances that bridge the realms of cardiology, biomedical research, psychology and music, while celebrating the heart – both as a vital organ for human life and wellbeing, and as a universal symbol of emotion and connection.

A Certificate of Attendance will be issued to student participants in recognition of their participation and engagement in this extracurricular event.

Speakers

The event is free and open to the public.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Pause, Fragment, Fold

Curated by Dr. Giorgos Kontis
Coordinated with Jennifer Nelson

Opening: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 | 18:00 – 21:00

Exhibition duration: 10 December, 2025 – 31 January, 2026

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 15.00-19.00 Saturdays: 12.00-16.00

Closed between 22 December and 6 January

Where:
ACG Plaka Building, 17B Ipitou St, Plaka, Athens

Organized by:
The Visual Arts program at the Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
Deree – The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Pause, Fragment, Fold presents the outcome of a collaborative process between students from the Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The American College of Greece, the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences at the University of Ioannina, and the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. Through a series of workshops, the students examined authorship, collective work, and dialogic artistic practice while also engaging with the ACG Art Collection. The exhibition foregrounds the fragment as a conceptual locus for rethinking form, narrative, and the conditions under which meaning emerges.

Engaging with the Kantian notion of schematism—the process through which a schema (form, shape) enables a concept to become sensible—the exhibition probes the conventional understanding that the schema follows the concept, serving not as its representation but as its vehicle. Pause, Fragment, Fold proposes an inversion of this trajectory: What if form were to precede concept? What if a schema were to arise first, not as a product of thought but as an open entity awaiting association, narrative, or conceptual articulation? Within this reframed logic, the fragment functions as a remnant or trace—seemingly empty, yet resonant with latent meaning. It is a shard of suspended stories, a part that gestures toward a possible whole without ever fully resolving into it. The fragment remains paused: incomplete but not inert, provisional yet charged with the potential to host new narratives and new conceptual formulations.

The exhibition further draws on Deleuze’s notion of the fold, positioning the fragment not as a discrete or isolated piece but as a point of continuous inflection. Here, the fold marks a moment within an ongoing development of form, where part and whole are not fixed oppositions but states that twist into and out of one another. A fold embodies both pause and movement—a holding pattern on the threshold of transformation.

Through works that test these conceptual thresholds, Pause, Fragment, Fold invites critical reflection on how meaning is produced, deferred, or reconstituted within artistic practice. By foregrounding the fragment as both vessel and rupture, the exhibition opens a space in which to reconsider the temporal and material conditions that shape creative processes today.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Participating artists:
Maria Adamidou, Konstantina Chatzouli, Evi Chondri, Elen Demirian, Nefeli Dimou, Maria-Louisa Dollete, Anna Giakoumakatou, Margarita Giannakopoulou, Xenia Giannoulatou, Theodoros Gkolas, Foivi Kainourgiou, Aristi Kouri, Anna Livieratou, Martha Marinou, Katerina Milesi, , Kostas Papapetros, Ioannis Sarris, Konstantina Sidera, Georgios Theodorakakos, Aggeliki Tsantila, Christina Tsaprailis, Veronica Vergou, Natalia Zara, L2 & L3 Winchester School of Art Fine Art Students (Painting, Sculpture & Printmaking), and selected works from the ACG Art Collection.

Exhibition Production:
Ana S. González Rueda, Katerina Milesi

Graphic Design:
Katerina Milesi

Visual Arts assistant:
Ioannis Sarris

Pause, Fragment, Fold

Curated by Dr. Giorgos Kontis
Coordinated with Jennifer Nelson

Opening: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 | 18:00 – 21:00

Exhibition duration: 10 December, 2025 – 31 January, 2026

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 15.00-19.00 Saturdays: 12.00-16.00

Closed between 22 December and 6 January

Where:
ACG Plaka Building, 17B Ipitou St, Plaka, Athens

Organized by:
The Visual Arts program at the Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
Deree – The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Pause, Fragment, Fold presents the outcome of a collaborative process between students from the Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The American College of Greece, the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences at the University of Ioannina, and the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. Through a series of workshops, the students examined authorship, collective work, and dialogic artistic practice while also engaging with the ACG Art Collection. The exhibition foregrounds the fragment as a conceptual locus for rethinking form, narrative, and the conditions under which meaning emerges.

Engaging with the Kantian notion of schematism—the process through which a schema (form, shape) enables a concept to become sensible—the exhibition probes the conventional understanding that the schema follows the concept, serving not as its representation but as its vehicle. Pause, Fragment, Fold proposes an inversion of this trajectory: What if form were to precede concept? What if a schema were to arise first, not as a product of thought but as an open entity awaiting association, narrative, or conceptual articulation? Within this reframed logic, the fragment functions as a remnant or trace—seemingly empty, yet resonant with latent meaning. It is a shard of suspended stories, a part that gestures toward a possible whole without ever fully resolving into it. The fragment remains paused: incomplete but not inert, provisional yet charged with the potential to host new narratives and new conceptual formulations.

The exhibition further draws on Deleuze’s notion of the fold, positioning the fragment not as a discrete or isolated piece but as a point of continuous inflection. Here, the fold marks a moment within an ongoing development of form, where part and whole are not fixed oppositions but states that twist into and out of one another. A fold embodies both pause and movement—a holding pattern on the threshold of transformation.

Through works that test these conceptual thresholds, Pause, Fragment, Fold invites critical reflection on how meaning is produced, deferred, or reconstituted within artistic practice. By foregrounding the fragment as both vessel and rupture, the exhibition opens a space in which to reconsider the temporal and material conditions that shape creative processes today.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

For further clarifications, please contact [email protected]

Participating artists:
Maria Adamidou, Konstantina Chatzouli, Evi Chondri, Elen Demirian, Nefeli Dimou, Maria-Louisa Dollete, Anna Giakoumakatou, Margarita Giannakopoulou, Xenia Giannoulatou, Theodoros Gkolas, Foivi Kainourgiou, Aristi Kouri, Anna Livieratou, Martha Marinou, Katerina Milesi, , Kostas Papapetros, Ioannis Sarris, Konstantina Sidera, Georgios Theodorakakos, Aggeliki Tsantila, Christina Tsaprailis, Veronica Vergou, Natalia Zara, L2 & L3 Winchester School of Art Fine Art Students (Painting, Sculpture & Printmaking), and selected works from the ACG Art Collection.

Exhibition Production:
Ana S. González Rueda, Katerina Milesi

Graphic Design:
Katerina Milesi

Visual Arts assistant:
Ioannis Sarris

Exhibition duration: Monday 14 July- Thursday 31 July  | Monday 1 September- Saturday 27 September

Opening hours: Monday- Friday, 15:00-19:00, Saturday, 12:00-18:00

Where:
17 Ipitou St., Plaka, Athens, 105 57

Curated by
Dr. Tamara Chalabi

Organized by:
The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece
And
The Demos Center,
The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Clay and textile—two of humanity’s most ancient and eloquent materials—serve as profound witnesses to human experience. Through impression, weave, and mark, these materials preserve intimate traces of touch and intention, creating permanent records of gesture across time. This exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and their diasporas who harness these materials’ inherent capacity for memory and testimony.

The relationship between clay and textile is deeply entwined in human cultural memory. From the impressed patterns on ancient vessels to the encoded narratives in traditional weaving, these materials have long served as repositories of cultural knowledge and technical innovation. This is most poetically embodied in the Sleeping Lady of Malta—a Neolithic clay figurine who’s carefully rendered drapery speaks to humanity’s enduring impulse to document both form and fabric.

The artists presented here extend this legacy, transforming these ancient mediums into contemporary testimonies of identity, displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation.

The selected works, including several new commissions, demonstrate diverse approaches to material testimony:

Paolo Colombo’s commissioned works for ITERARTE embrace the Chamba Rumal tradition—a 17th-century embroidery technique once practiced by Himalayan royal women—where silk threads transform muslin into intricate narratives. His signature visual language of lines, dots, and squares, originally inspired by Byzantine and Classical mosaics, finds new resonance through thread. The embroidered works extend his meditative practice into textile form, where each stitch echoes the precise geometry of his compositions while engaging with living craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Iliodora Margellos engages deeply with embroidery’s dual heritage as domestic craft and tool of resistance. Her meticulously stitched works, developed over months of patient labor, break free from traditional grid structures to create emotional landscapes that reveal themselves differently from afar and in intimate proximity. Analepsis (After the Mares) exemplifies this approach, while “Hope, a Field of Poppies”—created in collaboration with INAASH through ITERARTE—connects her practice to Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, acknowledging embroidery’s ongoing role as a portable medium of cultural preservation and resistance. Each stitch in her work becomes a meditation on nature’s forms and a testament to embroidery’s enduring power as both personal expression and political witness.

Majd Abdel Hamid in newly commissioned and existing work reuses works on fabric and embroidery, to underline the multifaceted dimensions of use, inviting the viewer to join him in rethinking notions of memory, trauma and psychological nuances as an ongoing archive of existence. His work transforms materials into records of human experience, challenging conventional approaches to documentation.

The ceramic works of Elif Uras and Tancredi di Carcaci investigate how traditional forms carry contemporary cultural tensions. Working between New York and Iznik—the historic center of Ottoman ceramic production—Uras creates wheel-thrown plate paintings that bridge ceramics and textile patterns, underlining female labor and class through traditional techniques and contemporary sensibility. Di Carcaci employs the ancient practice of spolia—the repurposing of architectural fragments—as a metaphor for our shifting relationship with the sacred, examining how contemporary forms of idolatry emerge from the ruins of religious imagery.

Francesco Simeti’s deeply layered works draw on social, philosophical, and environmental discourses, particularly exploring water’s dual nature through site-specific digital collages and textile installations. Through layered imagery that incorporates historical and contemporary sources, his works map the transformation of natural landscapes, using fabric’s inherent mutability to reflect on ecological shifts and human intervention.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Hale Ekinci transforms domestic textiles into repositories of immigrant memory, merging Middle Eastern and Western traditions through a distinctive process of repurposing family photographs. In her newly commissioned Under One Roof (2025) installation and earlier works like Travel Pillow Necklace (2023) and Apron (2022), she obscures faces with French knots and overlays traditional Middle Eastern patterns with contemporary Western symbols. Influenced by Turkish Oya—meaningful lace edgings on headscarves traditionally used by women for non-verbal communication—the piece features exaggerated, colourful crochet edges resembling paragraphs or letters, encoding messages in their own right.

Afsoon’s ceramic vessels navigate between function and storytelling, drawing on her transcultural journey from Iran through California to London Fools and Devils (2025) transforms traditional Persian vessels into contemporary narratives. Each piece merges cultural symbols with talisman-like elements, reimagining an ancient tale of innocence and temptation through the lens of diasporic identity.

Nuveen Barwari’s work materializes the complexities of Kurdish-American identity through textile interventions. In Cola and Chiya, she pairs references to Kurdish mountains with Coca-Cola imagery, creating a charged dialogue between traditional and contemporary cultural symbols. Her architectural window installations, constructed from four traditional Kurdish dresses representing Kurdistan’s regions, transform intimate garments into monumental structures that speak to both fragmentation and preservation of cultural heritage across borders.

Through these diverse approaches, clay and textile emerge not merely as artistic media but as active participants in the preservation and transformation of cultural memory. Each work serves as both witness and testimony, speaking to the enduring power of materials to carry forward human stories across time and geography.

Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.

About Tamara Chalabi

Exhibition duration: Monday 14 July- Thursday 31 July  | Monday 1 September- Saturday 27 September

Opening hours: Monday- Friday, 15:00-19:00, Saturday, 12:00-18:00

Where:
17 Ipitou St., Plaka, Athens, 105 57

Curated by
Dr. Tamara Chalabi

Organized by:
The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece
And
The Demos Center,
The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Clay and textile—two of humanity’s most ancient and eloquent materials—serve as profound witnesses to human experience. Through impression, weave, and mark, these materials preserve intimate traces of touch and intention, creating permanent records of gesture across time. This exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and their diasporas who harness these materials’ inherent capacity for memory and testimony.

The relationship between clay and textile is deeply entwined in human cultural memory. From the impressed patterns on ancient vessels to the encoded narratives in traditional weaving, these materials have long served as repositories of cultural knowledge and technical innovation. This is most poetically embodied in the Sleeping Lady of Malta—a Neolithic clay figurine who’s carefully rendered drapery speaks to humanity’s enduring impulse to document both form and fabric.

The artists presented here extend this legacy, transforming these ancient mediums into contemporary testimonies of identity, displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation.

The selected works, including several new commissions, demonstrate diverse approaches to material testimony:

Paolo Colombo’s commissioned works for ITERARTE embrace the Chamba Rumal tradition—a 17th-century embroidery technique once practiced by Himalayan royal women—where silk threads transform muslin into intricate narratives. His signature visual language of lines, dots, and squares, originally inspired by Byzantine and Classical mosaics, finds new resonance through thread. The embroidered works extend his meditative practice into textile form, where each stitch echoes the precise geometry of his compositions while engaging with living craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Iliodora Margellos engages deeply with embroidery’s dual heritage as domestic craft and tool of resistance. Her meticulously stitched works, developed over months of patient labor, break free from traditional grid structures to create emotional landscapes that reveal themselves differently from afar and in intimate proximity. Analepsis (After the Mares) exemplifies this approach, while “Hope, a Field of Poppies”—created in collaboration with INAASH through ITERARTE—connects her practice to Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, acknowledging embroidery’s ongoing role as a portable medium of cultural preservation and resistance. Each stitch in her work becomes a meditation on nature’s forms and a testament to embroidery’s enduring power as both personal expression and political witness.

Majd Abdel Hamid in newly commissioned and existing work reuses works on fabric and embroidery, to underline the multifaceted dimensions of use, inviting the viewer to join him in rethinking notions of memory, trauma and psychological nuances as an ongoing archive of existence. His work transforms materials into records of human experience, challenging conventional approaches to documentation.

The ceramic works of Elif Uras and Tancredi di Carcaci investigate how traditional forms carry contemporary cultural tensions. Working between New York and Iznik—the historic center of Ottoman ceramic production—Uras creates wheel-thrown plate paintings that bridge ceramics and textile patterns, underlining female labor and class through traditional techniques and contemporary sensibility. Di Carcaci employs the ancient practice of spolia—the repurposing of architectural fragments—as a metaphor for our shifting relationship with the sacred, examining how contemporary forms of idolatry emerge from the ruins of religious imagery.

Francesco Simeti’s deeply layered works draw on social, philosophical, and environmental discourses, particularly exploring water’s dual nature through site-specific digital collages and textile installations. Through layered imagery that incorporates historical and contemporary sources, his works map the transformation of natural landscapes, using fabric’s inherent mutability to reflect on ecological shifts and human intervention.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Hale Ekinci transforms domestic textiles into repositories of immigrant memory, merging Middle Eastern and Western traditions through a distinctive process of repurposing family photographs. In her newly commissioned Under One Roof (2025) installation and earlier works like Travel Pillow Necklace (2023) and Apron (2022), she obscures faces with French knots and overlays traditional Middle Eastern patterns with contemporary Western symbols. Influenced by Turkish Oya—meaningful lace edgings on headscarves traditionally used by women for non-verbal communication—the piece features exaggerated, colourful crochet edges resembling paragraphs or letters, encoding messages in their own right.

Afsoon’s ceramic vessels navigate between function and storytelling, drawing on her transcultural journey from Iran through California to London Fools and Devils (2025) transforms traditional Persian vessels into contemporary narratives. Each piece merges cultural symbols with talisman-like elements, reimagining an ancient tale of innocence and temptation through the lens of diasporic identity.

Nuveen Barwari’s work materializes the complexities of Kurdish-American identity through textile interventions. In Cola and Chiya, she pairs references to Kurdish mountains with Coca-Cola imagery, creating a charged dialogue between traditional and contemporary cultural symbols. Her architectural window installations, constructed from four traditional Kurdish dresses representing Kurdistan’s regions, transform intimate garments into monumental structures that speak to both fragmentation and preservation of cultural heritage across borders.

Through these diverse approaches, clay and textile emerge not merely as artistic media but as active participants in the preservation and transformation of cultural memory. Each work serves as both witness and testimony, speaking to the enduring power of materials to carry forward human stories across time and geography.

Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.

About Tamara Chalabi

Exhibition duration: Monday 14 July- Thursday 31 July  | Monday 1 September- Saturday 27 September

Opening hours: Monday- Friday, 15:00-19:00, Saturday, 12:00-18:00

Where:
17 Ipitou St., Plaka, Athens, 105 57

Curated by
Dr. Tamara Chalabi

Organized by:
The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece
And
The Demos Center,
The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Clay and textile—two of humanity’s most ancient and eloquent materials—serve as profound witnesses to human experience. Through impression, weave, and mark, these materials preserve intimate traces of touch and intention, creating permanent records of gesture across time. This exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and their diasporas who harness these materials’ inherent capacity for memory and testimony.

The relationship between clay and textile is deeply entwined in human cultural memory. From the impressed patterns on ancient vessels to the encoded narratives in traditional weaving, these materials have long served as repositories of cultural knowledge and technical innovation. This is most poetically embodied in the Sleeping Lady of Malta—a Neolithic clay figurine who’s carefully rendered drapery speaks to humanity’s enduring impulse to document both form and fabric.

The artists presented here extend this legacy, transforming these ancient mediums into contemporary testimonies of identity, displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation.

The selected works, including several new commissions, demonstrate diverse approaches to material testimony:

Paolo Colombo’s commissioned works for ITERARTE embrace the Chamba Rumal tradition—a 17th-century embroidery technique once practiced by Himalayan royal women—where silk threads transform muslin into intricate narratives. His signature visual language of lines, dots, and squares, originally inspired by Byzantine and Classical mosaics, finds new resonance through thread. The embroidered works extend his meditative practice into textile form, where each stitch echoes the precise geometry of his compositions while engaging with living craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Iliodora Margellos engages deeply with embroidery’s dual heritage as domestic craft and tool of resistance. Her meticulously stitched works, developed over months of patient labor, break free from traditional grid structures to create emotional landscapes that reveal themselves differently from afar and in intimate proximity. Analepsis (After the Mares) exemplifies this approach, while “Hope, a Field of Poppies”—created in collaboration with INAASH through ITERARTE—connects her practice to Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, acknowledging embroidery’s ongoing role as a portable medium of cultural preservation and resistance. Each stitch in her work becomes a meditation on nature’s forms and a testament to embroidery’s enduring power as both personal expression and political witness.

Majd Abdel Hamid in newly commissioned and existing work reuses works on fabric and embroidery, to underline the multifaceted dimensions of use, inviting the viewer to join him in rethinking notions of memory, trauma and psychological nuances as an ongoing archive of existence. His work transforms materials into records of human experience, challenging conventional approaches to documentation.

The ceramic works of Elif Uras and Tancredi di Carcaci investigate how traditional forms carry contemporary cultural tensions. Working between New York and Iznik—the historic center of Ottoman ceramic production—Uras creates wheel-thrown plate paintings that bridge ceramics and textile patterns, underlining female labor and class through traditional techniques and contemporary sensibility. Di Carcaci employs the ancient practice of spolia—the repurposing of architectural fragments—as a metaphor for our shifting relationship with the sacred, examining how contemporary forms of idolatry emerge from the ruins of religious imagery.

Francesco Simeti’s deeply layered works draw on social, philosophical, and environmental discourses, particularly exploring water’s dual nature through site-specific digital collages and textile installations. Through layered imagery that incorporates historical and contemporary sources, his works map the transformation of natural landscapes, using fabric’s inherent mutability to reflect on ecological shifts and human intervention.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Hale Ekinci transforms domestic textiles into repositories of immigrant memory, merging Middle Eastern and Western traditions through a distinctive process of repurposing family photographs. In her newly commissioned Under One Roof (2025) installation and earlier works like Travel Pillow Necklace (2023) and Apron (2022), she obscures faces with French knots and overlays traditional Middle Eastern patterns with contemporary Western symbols. Influenced by Turkish Oya—meaningful lace edgings on headscarves traditionally used by women for non-verbal communication—the piece features exaggerated, colourful crochet edges resembling paragraphs or letters, encoding messages in their own right.

Afsoon’s ceramic vessels navigate between function and storytelling, drawing on her transcultural journey from Iran through California to London Fools and Devils (2025) transforms traditional Persian vessels into contemporary narratives. Each piece merges cultural symbols with talisman-like elements, reimagining an ancient tale of innocence and temptation through the lens of diasporic identity.

Nuveen Barwari’s work materializes the complexities of Kurdish-American identity through textile interventions. In Cola and Chiya, she pairs references to Kurdish mountains with Coca-Cola imagery, creating a charged dialogue between traditional and contemporary cultural symbols. Her architectural window installations, constructed from four traditional Kurdish dresses representing Kurdistan’s regions, transform intimate garments into monumental structures that speak to both fragmentation and preservation of cultural heritage across borders.

Through these diverse approaches, clay and textile emerge not merely as artistic media but as active participants in the preservation and transformation of cultural memory. Each work serves as both witness and testimony, speaking to the enduring power of materials to carry forward human stories across time and geography.

Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.

About Tamara Chalabi

Exhibition duration: Monday 14 July- Thursday 31 July  | Monday 1 September- Saturday 27 September

Opening hours: Monday- Friday, 15:00-19:00, Saturday, 12:00-18:00

Where:
17 Ipitou St., Plaka, Athens, 105 57

Curated by
Dr. Tamara Chalabi

Organized by:
The Frances Rich School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
The American College of Greece
And
The Demos Center,
The American College of Greece

About the exhibition

Clay and textile—two of humanity’s most ancient and eloquent materials—serve as profound witnesses to human experience. Through impression, weave, and mark, these materials preserve intimate traces of touch and intention, creating permanent records of gesture across time. This exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and their diasporas who harness these materials’ inherent capacity for memory and testimony.

The relationship between clay and textile is deeply entwined in human cultural memory. From the impressed patterns on ancient vessels to the encoded narratives in traditional weaving, these materials have long served as repositories of cultural knowledge and technical innovation. This is most poetically embodied in the Sleeping Lady of Malta—a Neolithic clay figurine who’s carefully rendered drapery speaks to humanity’s enduring impulse to document both form and fabric.

The artists presented here extend this legacy, transforming these ancient mediums into contemporary testimonies of identity, displacement, belonging, and cultural preservation.

The selected works, including several new commissions, demonstrate diverse approaches to material testimony:

Paolo Colombo’s commissioned works for ITERARTE embrace the Chamba Rumal tradition—a 17th-century embroidery technique once practiced by Himalayan royal women—where silk threads transform muslin into intricate narratives. His signature visual language of lines, dots, and squares, originally inspired by Byzantine and Classical mosaics, finds new resonance through thread. The embroidered works extend his meditative practice into textile form, where each stitch echoes the precise geometry of his compositions while engaging with living craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Iliodora Margellos engages deeply with embroidery’s dual heritage as domestic craft and tool of resistance. Her meticulously stitched works, developed over months of patient labor, break free from traditional grid structures to create emotional landscapes that reveal themselves differently from afar and in intimate proximity. Analepsis (After the Mares) exemplifies this approach, while “Hope, a Field of Poppies”—created in collaboration with INAASH through ITERARTE—connects her practice to Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, acknowledging embroidery’s ongoing role as a portable medium of cultural preservation and resistance. Each stitch in her work becomes a meditation on nature’s forms and a testament to embroidery’s enduring power as both personal expression and political witness.

Majd Abdel Hamid in newly commissioned and existing work reuses works on fabric and embroidery, to underline the multifaceted dimensions of use, inviting the viewer to join him in rethinking notions of memory, trauma and psychological nuances as an ongoing archive of existence. His work transforms materials into records of human experience, challenging conventional approaches to documentation.

The ceramic works of Elif Uras and Tancredi di Carcaci investigate how traditional forms carry contemporary cultural tensions. Working between New York and Iznik—the historic center of Ottoman ceramic production—Uras creates wheel-thrown plate paintings that bridge ceramics and textile patterns, underlining female labor and class through traditional techniques and contemporary sensibility. Di Carcaci employs the ancient practice of spolia—the repurposing of architectural fragments—as a metaphor for our shifting relationship with the sacred, examining how contemporary forms of idolatry emerge from the ruins of religious imagery.

Francesco Simeti’s deeply layered works draw on social, philosophical, and environmental discourses, particularly exploring water’s dual nature through site-specific digital collages and textile installations. Through layered imagery that incorporates historical and contemporary sources, his works map the transformation of natural landscapes, using fabric’s inherent mutability to reflect on ecological shifts and human intervention.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Through a dynamic fusion of sequins, gouache, and graphite, Lydia Delikoura’s works explore the bonds between humans, creatures, and landscape. She creates harmonious spaces where shimmering elements—both natural and synthetic—interweave with themes of sisterhood and impossible love, drawing inspiration from classical mythology. This investigation extends into her ITERARTE collaborations, where paintings are transformed into functional objects like stools, challenging conventional distinctions between fine art and design while preserving traces of material evolution.

Hale Ekinci transforms domestic textiles into repositories of immigrant memory, merging Middle Eastern and Western traditions through a distinctive process of repurposing family photographs. In her newly commissioned Under One Roof (2025) installation and earlier works like Travel Pillow Necklace (2023) and Apron (2022), she obscures faces with French knots and overlays traditional Middle Eastern patterns with contemporary Western symbols. Influenced by Turkish Oya—meaningful lace edgings on headscarves traditionally used by women for non-verbal communication—the piece features exaggerated, colourful crochet edges resembling paragraphs or letters, encoding messages in their own right.

Afsoon’s ceramic vessels navigate between function and storytelling, drawing on her transcultural journey from Iran through California to London Fools and Devils (2025) transforms traditional Persian vessels into contemporary narratives. Each piece merges cultural symbols with talisman-like elements, reimagining an ancient tale of innocence and temptation through the lens of diasporic identity.

Nuveen Barwari’s work materializes the complexities of Kurdish-American identity through textile interventions. In Cola and Chiya, she pairs references to Kurdish mountains with Coca-Cola imagery, creating a charged dialogue between traditional and contemporary cultural symbols. Her architectural window installations, constructed from four traditional Kurdish dresses representing Kurdistan’s regions, transform intimate garments into monumental structures that speak to both fragmentation and preservation of cultural heritage across borders.

Through these diverse approaches, clay and textile emerge not merely as artistic media but as active participants in the preservation and transformation of cultural memory. Each work serves as both witness and testimony, speaking to the enduring power of materials to carry forward human stories across time and geography.

Participating artists: Afsoon, Nuveen Barwari, Tancredi di Carcaci, Paolo Colombo, Lydia Delikoura, Hale Ekinci, Majd Abdel Hamid, Iliodora Margellos, Francesco Simeti, Elif Uras.

About Tamara Chalabi

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