‘ZOOMORPHISMS’ is an exhibition of contemporary art interwoven with historical artifacts, exploring what contemporary thought has termed the “discomfort of the species.”

The point of departure lies in traditional zoomorphic ceramics from the Greek world—objects that awaken pagan memories and premodern beliefs. A utilitarian jug shaped with animal features escapes its functional purpose, assuming another role within the experience of the everyday. A similar disturbance occurs within the human subject itself, as animal intensities infiltrate the body, undoing the limits of the human. It is a disturbance of opening—one that poetically gestures toward another self, another field of experience and pleasure.

This scene of experience is an unveiling, a scene of revelation that discloses the forms themselves. A passage of forms into the destiny of their own material enactment, without closure. The presence of a form is recognized through these transformations, within its past and future inscriptions. Form thus becomes a field of ruptures and metamorphoses—the very dialectical tension of its historic duration. At the same time, this formal excitation bears a mythical and archaic origin, sustaining its disruptive potential. Here we encounter its monstrous manifestations, where the mythical pours the magma of the Real onto the relief of our refined aesthetic sensibilities.

Zoomorphic expressions carry a proto-sensory character: they trace both an archaic destiny and a horizon of poetic illuminations. In this tension, language falters, and the eyes open to the cryptic presence of the Other. The Other is not image, nor speech—it is a shadow of the visible, the muteness of its form. At this summit, art may be recognized as the echo of a mythical energy—one that reveals forms by rendering them transparent.

The works in the exhibition each annotate, in their unique language, aspects of a scene that stretches from mythical antiquity through the medieval imaginary, the nocturnal intensities of Romanticism, and into the dark folds of our modernity.

In Dimitris Ameladiotis’ The Cosmos According to Paul Valley, bones of other animals and birds emerge and interlock from a seashell—an ossified assemblage that displays its alterity as a poetic unity. Giorgos Tserionis’ installation Nails exposes the sharp environment of the animal realm on a scale that seems to extend into infinity.

In Fools without the Ship by Panos Sklavenitis, photographic stills from a performance parade a procession of zoomorphic “fools” drawn from mythology, literature, and history—references ranging from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Again, the night returns.

A similarly Walpurgian atmosphere is traced in the paintings of Dimitris Fragkakis, where a Dionysian dance unfolds in the misty light of an apocalyptic moment—where everything is revealed and concealed at once. Echoes of the uncanny also haunt the paintings of Aliki Palaska, in which figures from old photographs are displaced into a revelatory field, parodying their static presence.

And the figure in Maro Michalakakou’s Guilt #2—from where does it come? What does it signify? What hybrid faintly appears within it, and in what mythical dimension does it dwell? What life does its subject assume? The identities that surface here are identities that continually divert and displace their own subjects.

Dimitris Getsis’ Sphinx—half-animal, half-human—is a mythical riddle, another revelatory presence. Konstantinos Ladianos’ Centaur is likewise a liminal creature, resurrected from the mythic ages.

In Christos Delidimos’ Look at Yourself, a human mask bears the fur of an animal—both a repulsive and conciliatory image, the hair taken from the artist’s own pet. In Antonis Michailidis’ Expectations, the ritual African mask unfolds the range of a mythical thought within the coordinates of a disenchanted present.

Giorgos Papafigos’ New Body II constructs a dysmorphic hybrid using the aesthetics of medical technology—a techno-fantasmatic organism claiming the privilege of its own singular manifestation. A similar residue of the bio-technological appears in Konstantinos Lianos’ work, a disinherited relic attesting to its dual origin—its biogenetic availability.

The exhibition also features a selection of traditional zoomorphic jugs from the collection of Apostolis Artinos, highlighting the anthropological and aesthetic continuities that inform the show.

Opening: Thursday, October 23 | 19:00

Curator: Apostolis Artinos

Artists: Dimitris Ameladiotis, Dimitris Gketsis, Christos Delidimos, Konstantinos Ladianos, Konstantinos Lianos, Maro Michalakakos, Antonis Michaelides, Aliki Palaska, Giorgos Papafigos, Panos Sklavenitis, Giorgos Tserionis, Dimitris Fragkakis

Duration: 23.10 – 2.11.2025

Opening Hours: Monday to Sunday | 17:00 – 21:00

Venue: T.A.F / The Art Foundation, Normanou 5, Monastiraki