First Postcard from the Athenians

[imomus]

I don't think I was expecting much of "Destroy Athens", the city's first art biennial. But I actually thought it -- and the ReMap stuff going on around it -- was terrific. There was some great Scandinavian video art. My favourite piece (by a British-sounding artist whose name I couldn't find) was a video history of an eccentric, hand-built Greek house with an authoritative-sounding narrative based on the hunches of a spirit medium. Offsite, I also liked the shabby-funky office building occupied by Peres Projects and the Edinburgh artists' show Young Athenians (Edinburgh is "the Athens of the North"). And it was fun to find Pablo de la Barra kipping on the ground in his gallery kitchen, having a siesta.



The main biennial show at the Gasi (an abandoned gas works as impressive, with its guages and pipes and occasional gassy smell, as the art itself) made a nicer story, Hisae and I found, if you traversed it backwards. The curators linked the various buildings by means of blackened wood corridors which led you from local to global and from optimistic to rather grim. So we did the journey backwards, entering at the grim, global end and ending at the local beginning (which had a big room of Chris Marker videos made in collaboration with a group of Greek artists).

When a guard approached to reprimand me for going the wrong way, I said "We're destroying the Athens curators' narrative!"

"All right then," she said, and waved me on.