Pedion, meeting place 

 

 

The Pedion Areos Park has been a public gathering place for promenade and pleasure since the 19th century. In the course of its existence, it has experienced periods of prosperity but also of severe decline, especially during the years of the deep economic crisis (2008-2018). The public health crisis of the last three years has brought the park back to the forefront. In a metropolis where the life and the activities of its inhabitants were for many months “paused” due to the imposed confinement, the park was for thousands of citizens the only “escape to freedom.” The pandemic has transformed it into the center of the daily lives of many and different people. In a way, it became a symbol of freedom, culturalism, public good, dialogue and communication.

 

The exhibition Pedion is proposed as a place of communication and contemplation, which aims to make visible, through a rich and varied artistic expression, aspects and pursuits of the everyday life in crisis, an individual experience that is raised to a collective consciousness. It could be defined as the study of the dialectical relationship between the private and the collective, between art and society, between the spectator and the work of art, between people.

 

The exhibition is an attempt, a field-place of coexistence and exchange of different people’s stories through the prism of art. Beyond the park, the exhibition continues at the site of the “Shedia” street paper, the “shedia home” at Kolokotronis Street in the center of the city, as one of the main goals of the paper is to raise awareness and mobilize our citizens on critical issues of homelessness, poverty and social exclusion.

 

The exhibition seeks to record the history of the present, to highlight once again the importance of culture and of the people of the art community to society, to emphasize how art plays a key role in the endless interpretive process of reality and the world in general.

 

Artists: Antonis Antoniou (Cyprus), Antonis Vathis (Greece), Νίκος Iavazzo (Italy), Paolo Incarnato (Italy), Andreas Kalli (Cyprus), Babis Karalis (Greece), Eleni Lyra (Greece), Eleanna Martinou (Greece), Cornelia Mittendorfer (Austria), Efsevia Mihailidou (Greece), Frini Mouzakitou (Greece), Dimitra Papagianni (Greece), Andreas Savva (Cyprus), Dimitris Skourogiannis (Greece), Filippos Tsitsopoulos (Greece), Gioula Chatzigeorgiou (Cyprus)

 

Curated by: Niki Papaspirou and Stratis Pantazis


Exhibition view at Pedion Park, Athens.