Curator: Denys Zacharopoulos

In November 2018, the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias in Athens, Greece, is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition of the Greek-German artist Christina Dimitriadis.

The exhibition, entitled Island Hoping, will present the artist’s new photographic project. Island Hoping – an optimistic wordplay on the notion of “island hopping” – explores images and myths of the Mediterranean, a geographical entity, but above all an imagined reality, in which the appreciation of beauty and a collective spirit is deeply ingrained. The Mediterranean is sometimes described as a cultural space, but in fact its historical and political reality has always been more complex.

In the aesthetically structured photographs, islands and skerries emerge from the sea in a cloudy landscape. Due to their morphology and ruggedness, the rocky shores of the Aegean islands evoke ambiguous emotions that lie between optimism, hope, and uncertainty. Christina Dimitriadis’s aesthetic approach transforms the landscape from hospitable to barren.

The series’ starting point was a black-and-white photograph of Helgoland, an island in the North Sea with a particular political and geographical history. It is also the birthplace of the maternal side of the Dimitriadis family and the beginning of a continuous biography of migration. Past and future, individual and collective flow together, making Island Hoping a hybrid of North and South.

The first segment of Island Hoping is on view until December 2018 at Badisches Landesmuseum Schloss Karlsruhe for the New Annual Studio Solo Exhibition under the auspices of the museum’s World Culture / Global Culture 2018 exhibition.

The exhibition at the Athens Municipality Arts Center opens on 9 November, 2018, and runs to 3 February 2019. With the support of NEON.