Olga Migliaressi - Phoca
Bang Bang

Soft opening: Saturday 20 June 2026, 11-7 pm
also open Sunday 21 June, 11-4 pm
Exhibition preview: Thursday 25 June 2026, 7-9 pm

The Breeder is pleased to present BANG BANG, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

BANG BANG explores the moment when play turns serious, spectacle becomes consequence, and innocence collapses into impact. Borrowing its title from the song “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”, the exhibition moves from the sound of childhood games and comic-book onomatopoeia into the harsher register of heartbreak, violence, and war. It reflects on proximity as a condition of contemporary life: the unsettling coexistence of radically different realities unfolding at the same time.

At its core, the exhibition considers parallel worlds that exist simultaneously—one in which war is consumed as image, spectacle, or fiction, and another in which it is lived as irreversible reality. Across a constellation of works, Migliaressi-Phoca traces the fragile membrane between these states, and how easily it can collapse.

Spanning the facade and the two main floors of The Breeder, the exhibition unfolds as a sequence of visual ruptures. Humor, irony, and the seductive language of popular culture operate as entry points into questions of violence, consumerism, apathy, freedom, and collective memory. Familiar symbols, logos, slogans, lyrics, and abbreviations are subtly altered, causing meaning to flicker, shift, and destabilize.

On the corner of the building’s facade, The Breeder Skin, HELL functions as both beacon and omen. As light shifts from one glow to another, the familiar logic of branding mutates: SELL collapses into HELL. Positioned above the entrance, the sign operates like a false sun— radiant, seductive, omnipresent—welcoming visitors while immediately establishing the exhibition’s tension, where the familiar slips into the disturbing.

Inside the gallery, two large-scale mirror works, WAR – GIVEASHIT and ZOO – GIVEASHIT, dominate the space. By transforming the ‘Givenchy’ logo into the imperative GIVEASHIT, the works invert the language of luxury into a demand for awareness. What first appears as branding and self-recognition gradually reveals layered realities beneath the surface: war unfolding elsewhere, and a society shaped by spectacle, observation, and social pressure.

In WAR, the word emerges only from a distance, exposing how attention is often absorbed by the self while larger realities remain obscured. In ZOO, society is framed as a space of display and containment, where entertainment, control, and spectatorship blur. Cracks across the mirrored surfaces register both the pressures of contemporary life and the impulse to break through them. The viewer becomes embedded within the works—simultaneously image and reflection—caught between observing and participating.

The neon works in Migliaressi-Phoca’s practice function as signals in the dark. Their red light recalls warning systems but also warmth: embers, pulse, persistence. Moving between urgency and tenderness, they suggest both alarm and fragile hope.

Suspended beneath the mezzanine, IT’S JUST A KISS AWAY reworks a lyric from The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter into a proposition suspended between threat and intimacy. Detached from its original context, the phrase suggests that peace may be as near as a gesture of closeness—if compassion replaces aggression.

Nearby, BLOOD MOON (03.03.2026) / MY LOVE IS YOUR LOVE IS forms a circular red neon taking its title by the March 2026 lunar eclipse, which coincided with the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Written in the artist’s hand, the phrase loops without end, oscillating between cosmic event and personal declaration, and holding a fragile insistence on connection amid instability.

In KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON / GIVEASHIT – WHAT’S GOING ON, layered fly-posted

iterations of the wartime slogan KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON—originally produced to reassure British citizens during the Second World War—shift between propaganda and contemporary advertising. Through repetition and erosion, the phrase loses authority, becoming an empty reassurance. Against this softened field, engraved scenes of war emerge on mirrored surfaces, interrupting calm with lived reality. The work exposes the instability of language as comfort, distraction, or anesthetic, placing the viewer between resilience and complacency.

FIRST TIMES reflects on uneven temporalities and the unequal distribution of futures. Scratched into blue glass, phrases such as THE FIRST KISS evoke anticipation, memory, and imagined beginnings. The work quietly reflects on the privilege of a future that can be anticipated, and the absence of that possibility for those whose lives are interrupted before such moments can occur.

A continuous sound piece, BANG BANG, runs throughout the exhibition like a persistent pressure. Transforming the familiar Netflix opening sound into a sequence of percussive impacts, it shifts from recognition to unease. What once signaled comfort becomes indistinguishable from bombardment. Moving across the space without a fixed location, the work mirrors how media infiltrates everyday life, collapsing the distance between mediated violence and lived experience.

In the basement, visitors encounter FUCK WARS, a mirrored brass plaque whose blunt statement functions as a threshold. The viewer’s reflection is absorbed into its refusal, turning presence into part of the declaration itself. By adopting the language of both cinematic spectacle and architectural signage, the work collapses fiction and reality.

Beyond it, BLOWING IN THE WIND unfolds as a golden landscape of endurance and fragility. Comprising seven mirrored works depicting palm trees bending in wind currents, the installation draws loosely from Bob Dylan’s reflection on war and peace. Suspended between movement and stillness, the palms register both vulnerability and resilience—shaped by pressure, yet remaining upright.

BANG BANG moves through the architecture of The Breeder as a sequence of thresholds— between play and peril, recognition and rupture, innocence and awareness. It invites viewers to remain within these unstable transitions, where meaning flickers and shifts.

Throughout the exhibition, the visual language of popular culture—its immediacy, seduction, and familiarity—is neither rejected nor celebrated, but destabilized. By altering what is already known, Migliaressi-Phoca exposes the fragile boundary between image and reality, consumption and consequence, spectatorship and responsibility.

The exhibition does not resolve these tensions. It holds them in suspension. Like its title, it begins lightly, but its echo persists, asking how close “far away” has always been.

Olga Migliaressi-Phoca (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens. Through text, sculpture, installation, and public interventions, she explores the tensions between popular culture, consumerism, identity, and collective desire. She received her MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons School of Design in 2009. Prior to that, she completed Foundation Studies in Art & Design at Central Saint Martins and obtained a BFA in Fashion Photography from London College of Fashion. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She is represented by The Breeder, Athens.

Selected solo exhibitions include: DIRTY DANCING, Rettberg Gallery, Munich | RISKY BUSINESS, The BREEDER, Athens | KEEP WALKING, Haus N, Athens | Perpetual Endangered Tempo, P.E.T. Projects, Athens | Sin City, Dio Horia Contemporary Art Platform, Mykonos.

Selected group exhibitions include BEYOND SURFACE at Bergson Gallery, Munich | 5-7-5, Athens | Prizing Eccentric Talents III at P.E.T. Projects, Athens | Opus MAGNUM at Britta Rettberg, Munich | This Current Between Us at the Old Steam-Electric Power Station of Neo Faliro, Athens | P.T.S.D. in Athens | Highlight: Gramercy at National Arts Club, New York | Dancing Goddesses at Dio Horia, Mykonos | Cultural Memories at the Archaeological Museum of Milos | It Looks Like Up To Me at Eleni Koroneou Gallery | The Diary of a Seamstress at Antonopoulou Gallery | and The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum.