Panos Profitis
Fragments and Futures: Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Worlds

Official opening: Saturday, August 1, 2026, 19.30

Fragments and Futures brings together contemporary artists whose work engages with the visual languages, material remains, and mythic narratives of classical archaeology. Through painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media, these artists reconsider how ancient forms and artefacts continue to shape our cultural imagination. The exhibition asks: What does it mean to “unearth” the past today? How do contemporary artists reinterpret the ruins and relics of antiquity in light of present-day questions about identity, heritage, and historical narrative? Rather than treating classical archaeology as a fixed canon of beauty and order, the exhibition foregrounds it as a site of active interpretation—one marked by absence, reconstruction, and the politics of preservation. Artists in Fragments and Futures approach antiquity as both a material archive and a metaphorical field: a repository of fragments that invite speculation, reanimation, and critique.

At the core of Fragments and Futures lies a fascination with the fragment — the ways in which the incomplete and the enigmatic become sites of imagination. Contemporary artists engaging with the classical past often approach ruins not as symbols of loss, but as evidence of endurance, transformation and reinterpretation.

Their works reframe the act of reconstruction, revealing how every attempt to restore the ancient world is also an act of storytelling. By embracing erosion, absence, and partiality, these artists suggest that what survives from antiquity is not only material but conceptual: an ongoing dialogue between what has crumbled and what we choose to rebuild.

Curated by: 
Katerina Gregos, ioLi Tzanetaki

Artists
Rosella Biscotti, Navine G. Dossos, Alexis Fidetzis, Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, Hadjithomas & Joreige, Natalia Manta, Chris Marker, Petros Moris, Panos Profitis, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker with Ghislain Cloquet, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achilleos, Lucia Tallová, Maarten Vanden Eynde