June’s picks – best exhibitions in Athens
In this month’s exhibitions in Athens, time feels less like a sequence and more like a layered surface. Images, materials, and narratives do not sit neatly in the past or the present, but continue to surface, overlap, and reassemble in unexpected ways.
What connects these shows is a shared attention to what remains: fragments of memory, traces of history, and forms of imagination that refuse to settle into a single context. Whether through myth, archive, sound, or historical objects, each exhibition works with material that is already charged—things that carry a previous life and continue to resonate in the present.
Enjoy this month’s selection in Athens, and if you would like to experience the exhibitions more closely, feel free to reach out for a guided tour with our team.
See you in the city.
Shani Werner & the AAT Team
‘Dancing with Serpents’, solo show by Luke Edward Hall at The Breeder
Myth, folklore, and memory come together in Luke Edward Hall’s new exhibition at The Breeder, creating a world where ancient stories feel surprisingly close to everyday experience.
Across a series of paintings, figures move through landscapes suspended between reality and imagination. Forests, coastlines, and open fields become spaces where identities shift and different narratives overlap. Rather than treating mythology as something fixed or distant, Hall approaches it as a living language, allowing characters, symbols, and atmospheres from different traditions to coexist and transform one another.
What emerges is less a collection of stories than a particular mood—one shaped by wonder, intimacy, and a sense that the boundary between the familiar and the mythical may be thinner than it first appears.
Dates: 23 May – 16 June 2026
Venue: The Breeder, Athens More info
‘Riot on Mars’, solo show by Eirene Efstathiou at Eleni Koroneou Gallery
Eirene Efstathiou’s new exhibition brings together fragments from many different worlds. News photographs, images of outer space, traces of public unrest, and personal observations appear side by side, creating a visual landscape where the intimate and the political constantly intersect.
Built from an archive the artist has assembled over many years, the works move between earthly concerns and cosmic perspectives. Questions of care, belonging, environmental uncertainty, and collective action emerge throughout the exhibition, but rarely in a direct or illustrative way. Instead, images accumulate, repeat, and transform, allowing unexpected connections to surface between seemingly distant subjects.
What makes the exhibition particularly compelling is its sense of simultaneity. Personal memories, historical events, and speculative futures coexist within the same visual field, suggesting a world that is fragmented yet deeply interconnected. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, Riot on Mars invites viewers to navigate a shifting constellation of images where meaning remains open, unstable, and continually in motion.
Dates: 21 May – 18 July 2026
Venue: Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
More info
‘‘Irruption of Antiquity’, solo exhibition by Aleksandra Waliszewska at Benaki Museum of Greek Culture
This exhibition brings contemporary painting into direct dialogue with the Benaki Museum’s historical collections, placing Aleksandra Waliszewska’s works alongside objects from Neolithic, Classical, Byzantine, and modern Greek contexts. Rather than treating these materials as separate historical layers, the exhibition creates a shared field where different visual languages come into close contact and begin to affect one another.
Within this proximity, antiquity is not presented as a stable or distant past, but as something that repeatedly surfaces in the present—unstable, charged, and difficult to contain. Waliszewska’s paintings intensify this sense of return, where mythological figures, symbols, and archaic visual motifs appear less as references than as active presences that disrupt linear time.
The exhibition unfolds as a continuous negotiation between epochs, where meaning emerges through tension rather than resolution. Past and present are not reconciled, but held together in a shifting space where historical categories begin to blur.
Dates: 03 June – 27 September 2026
Venue: Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, Athens
More info
And one extra recommendation ‘COLUMBIA – Die Ruinen von Athen’, solo exhibition by Panos Charalambous at CITRONNE Gallery Athens
This exhibition takes a historic recording factory in Athens as a point of departure, treating it less as a site of industrial memory and more as a structure through which sound, image, and loss continue to resonate. The former Columbia records building becomes a framework for thinking about what remains after disappearance—how cultural and sonic traces persist beyond their physical collapse.
Charalambous works through a language of fragments: vinyl records, objects, and architectural gestures are assembled into shifting constellations where sound is never fully contained but suggested through material presence. Memory here is not narrated, but embedded in surfaces—scratches, imprints, and residues that accumulate over time.
Across the exhibition, listening becomes a spatial experience. Installations unfold like stations of attention, where sound, image, and object overlap without hierarchy. What emerges is a landscape built from remnants, where ruin is not an endpoint but a condition of ongoing reactivation.
Dates: 29 April – 29 June 2026
Venue: CITRONNE Gallery – Athens
More info
You Might Also Like:
