This Artist Digs Deep to Explore Athens’s Complex History

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.

Caryatid statues at the Acropolis.

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.

Andreas Angelidakis.

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.”