Exhibition Guide

ENTRANCE

The journey begins by Ionna Barré
French Textile Designer designed a guiding system through the exhibition.

1ST ROOM

1 My Grandmothers Wedding – Series by Marina Provatidou
What is light after all, is it inside us, is it in everyday life, in people’s daily relationships? I will talk about the inspirational light that my grandmother gave me by transmitting to me the Pontian tradition, customs and traditions.
The reference to my grandmother’s wish has deep roots, and it concerns all these people who are looking for their identity somewhere in the Pontus or in Asia Minor and it is essentially an attempt to unite my own broken pieces of history. The Turks chased my great-grandfather and great grandmother from Pontus. They went through many adventures until they met each other in Russia.
My great-grandmother was chased and escaped the genocide of the Turks. She arrived in Russia and asked other refugees on the street if they had seen her family somewhere. An American boat rescued her whole family from Trabzon, but she never found out where they were. My great-grandfather left Pontus with the Soviet troops. He met my great grandmother Lemona in Novorossiysk, where they worked hard in the kolkhozes. My grandmother, Chrysoula, was also born in Russia. Due to the Stalinist persecutions, the family was forced to leave for Thessaloniki. Thus, in 1940 the war finds them in Thessaloniki. To be saved they leave for the villages of Pieria.
The conditions under which they lived were dramatic, the war, the Occupation, the famine, it was as if they were being followed wherever they went. They gathered sheaves from the already harvested fields of the locals to survive. In Sfendami, Pieria, grandmother Chrysoula met and loved my grandfather Kostas, also a refugee. They got married when they were very young. They had no money for the wedding dress and were still wearing the refugee clothes.
Their wedding photo was a photomontage where the only real element was their faces. The photographer of that time used to immortalize the wedding couple in the same photographic matrix, changing the faces of the groom and the bride each time. So their wedding photo seemed terribly paradoxical to me, two familiar faces in mismatched bodies.
The years passed and my grandmother Chrysoula lived and kept as a talisman a wish and a unique dream, to become a bride with a new wedding dress and official guests.

2 Travelling Clouds by Mariëlle van den Bergh
Of all the things in the world, clouds are a phenomenon that is usually overlooked. They are hardly noticed and taken for granted. But, now that climate change is speeding up at an alarming rate and after the recent flooding of rivers in the Netherlands and its neighbouring countries, people have started to cast worrying glances at the sky. Over the last couple of years the same people were worried about a lack of water. No clouds were to be seen in the skies for a long time.
Besides being weather messengers, clouds are so much more. As a small child I used to lay on my back on the tiled roof of a shed, reading the ever-changing clouds above me. I could see strange, frightful animals, or funny faces. Heaven was never dull. Whenever there were clouds, their shapes changed at a rapid rate. 
So clouds are among the largest moving objects in our world. Their shapes  are never repeated. At the moment you take a photo to catch the image, the cloud doesn’t exist in this shape and already is something of the past.
I do not know if there are people in this world who have never seen clouds? The vast majority of people, wherever they live, must know clouds from their own experience. 
Clouds are overwhelming. But no cloud is the same as another. A cloud will not happen again. Each cloud is unique and always on the move. Clouds are the great travellers on earth. Better: above the earth.

3 by Ioannis Anastasiou
Truth of sickness.

4 by Ingrid Simons
Droomland – Series
Droomland 1, 6, 5 and 3 (from left to right)
Following the theme “Small Odysseys” I found an English copy of “The voyages of Odysseus” of Homer (translated by E.V. Rieu) from “Penguin 60s Classics” (1995) in my own book collection.
As a result of this re-discovery, this installation of toyobo prints was created. The start of the journey; the longing for the unknown. The trials and challenges along the way and finally reaching calm waters and home port. The last image is quite similar to the first image of the installation. Life is the journey with its trials. The power of nature is the challenge in this journey.The weather in the fjord is extreme and unpredictable, just like a trip at sea and the trip of Odysseus. Man is insignificant and nature is great. A theme that is intertwined with my work.

LIVING ROOM

5 by Bea van der Heijden
Series Inner Journey.
My contribution to ‘Small Odysseys’ contains a number of works from the series ‘Inner Journey’, in various solar printing techniques, on fabric and paper. Discovering the, for me, new photo techniques was already a Small Odyssey in itself, but also a journey into the past and inwards. By combining photos and slides from my childhood and zooming in on portraits and clothing, a new series of work was created around the theme of identity. The photos evoke memories and feelings of recognizable moments of that time, some very much alive and others re-exploring, often with a high degree of vulnerability. The different techniques and layers strengthen the emotions and memories. 

6 by Bart Elfrink
Evangelis youth (from left to right)
Dimitra
Dimitra youth
Dimitroula
Dimitroula youth
Evangelis
This little village, where we have a house since 22 years, feels like home. The young people go to the city and the old stay behind. When they die, nobody fills the houses, except during summertime. During winter the village is getting more and more empty year by year. By painting them they stay in our minds. They stay in our hearts. They still have their place in the village. I started painting them back in 2008 and am still working on this project. Untill now 44 portraits in the seize 80×100 cm. of the villagers are ready. I got to know them and love them. Their hospitality.
Their kindness.

7 by Lara Vrettou
Warehouse 1
Leaf
Warehouse2
Armathia
Travel, a dominant element of human existence,
is a testimony to one’s perpetual  search. The path carries ideas, thoughts, and traded goods. Tobacco growing reached Europe in the 16th century and spread to new lands. The imprint of the tobacco industry in the Greek economy in the period of 1900 to 1950 was profound. It launched great historical developments and highlighted social struggles. One of the main exports of Greece to the Netherlands is tobacco. The geography of a small Odyssey, a conceptual map that connects places, creates  bridges and recollects cultural memory.

8 by Jordie Rovers
Marga sends a postcard (from left to right)
Many greetings
I have had a good day at work
I will never do it again
Do I get earrings?
Am I dying?
Dear sister
Marga’s life is determined by structure, coercion, control and repetition, as she holds the record being the oldest one alive with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome in the Netherlands. With a photographic memory and an extremely high pain threshold, every day is ruled by completing her compulsive checklist. Her family’s life is largely dominated by her special disability. As she gets older, the compulsion increases and this requires more and more care from her loved ones. In six cards to her sister you are introduced to a turbulent odyssey of a life where going on a holiday is impossible and a supermarket visit feels like a world trip.

BILLARD ROOM

 9 by Cholongounis D. Giannis
The small bitter Odyssey of Paul
When Paul Pavloudes arrived home, he was not transformed by the goddess Athena into a beggar – like Odysseus – with the desire to take back the world that was stolen from him. There were no suitors, no Penelope.  
Waiting for him were his brother, his nephews, military and political authorities and the entire village. His parents didn’t make it. They had already passed away with the unbearable and heavy burden of expectation, waiting and hope. There was no Athena to comfort Penelope.
He loved the sea. He worked on the ships. He did not complete his voyages and his wanderings at sea. They were interrupted by the obligation to fulfill his military service.
He joined the infantry and as a sergeant he arrived in the ELDYK in Cyprus on 19 July 1974. Then Paul’s adventure begins on the island of Aphrodite.
From August 16, 1974, for decades, his name was on the long list of missing persons of the Cyprus tragedy.
In Pavlos’ case, the role of Telemachus, who was investigating the fate of his father, was taken over by international organizations and committees of missing persons.Athena helped Odysseus in every way possible. For Paul she was sparing. Crews for technical works, digging in the village of Kioneli, Cyprus, stumbled upon a mass grave with bones. Paul’s were identified after DNA testing on February 2, 2018.There was not a patient struggle for survival, decades of wandering and adventurous repatriation as there was for Odysseus. Nor Poseidon, angrily blocking the hero’s return to Ithaca. The difficulties of the return journey were undertaken and handled by the military and political authorities of Cyprus and Greece.
After 45 years of wandering in the unknown, like another mythical warrior-hero, he arrived on the 14th of December 2019 in Agios Nikolaos, the village where he was born and raised. (…)

10 by Argiris Liapopoulos
Incomplete Odyssey
Yedi Kule, Heptapyrgion, Place of memory and sacrifice, The fortress of Heptapyrgion (Yedi Kule) situated on the north-eastern corner of the Acropolis of Thessaloniki in Greece. Around 1890, the fortress was converted into a prison by the Turks. Housing women’s, men’s and military prison, new buildings were built. The prison remained open until 1989.
In addition to criminal prisoners, thousands will be imprisoned, tortured and executed for their political views in the prison of Yedi Kule, one of the harshest prisons in the country during the dictatorship of Metaxas, the German Nazi occupation, the Greek civil war and the Dictatorship of the colonels.
Thousands of people will not manage to return home, to their homeland. They will die by execution or torture. They will never find their Ithaca.

11 by Kees de Kort
I think I hear my children crying  (on window wall on the right)
Connected (on window wall on the left)
Here, there (wallpaper wall top)
Here, there (wallpaper wall bottom)
When I travel, home is never far away. I even see, hear, smell or feel things that couldn’t be there or that are not really happening but for a short moment put me back home. That is what these works are about.

12 by Anastasia Tsetoulidou
Kirki (right top), Lefkothea (middle), Argos (bottom)
Peneope (left top), Odysseus (middle), Poseidon (bottom)
On the occasion of a myth that teaches, creates role models and promotes values, we create our own little Odyssey. 
A myth which, guided by the poet’s imagination, on the one hand interprets the world and on the other deepens the ethos of its heroes. Homer’s epic describes a society with values, justice, virtue, respect for the divine. Homer delves into existential issues concerning life, death, the soul. It projects the model of the hero that is recorded into the consciousness of Greeks with his flaws and virtues. A hero who fights for his ideals, transcends himself and elevates man. Through symbolic trials and personal sacrifices he seeks to get rid of the decay of mortality and tries to conquer what the human soul seeks, immortality. This is the reward of a good fight, of a virtuous life.

13 by Piet den Blanken
Migrants in Pagani Prison on Lesvos
Afghan refugee Khorany Abdulhabib drowned while crossing from Turkey to Greece.
Patrol of the Greek coast guard between Greece and Turkey.
Migrants land on the coast.
Moria reception camp 1
Moria reception camp 2

LARGE EXHIBITION SPACE

14 by Stefania Patrikiou
Patrikiou – Series
The specific project follows the evolutionary progress/ journey of various  geographical locations over time. Every space, public or private, is  transformed, destroyed or reused, changing its structural characteristics.  We come across man-made ancient and modern spaces created for work,  leisure, transport and storage of products. All these spaces accomplish their functional role, depending on the needs of the people who live and act in them. If we could personalize each space / place, with its memories,  rotations and evolutionary past, we would also notice a “Little Odyssey” it  presumably experiences, almost always left abandoned in the end.  At the same time, all these spaces are “boxed” in larger frames, which depict theater stages of another era, with spectators watching the abandoned spaces. The confluence of the present and the past could perhaps seek  future solutions. Let us ponder over the mistakes and progress we have  made in the past, thinking about the future. The virtual boxing technique is deliberately used in artworks, aiming at a  conceptual metaphor with its use in the ancient Greek literature, and, in  particular, in Homer’s epics. In narratives, boxing is the integration of a new  narrative sequence into the basic narrative . More specifically, in many  literary narrative texts, we find a main story or main narrative, supplemented with minor stories embedded in the main narrative.

15 by Rogier Walrecht
Cosmonaut with saxophone in the Swiss mountains
The solar system has such an enormous spatiality that it is hardly comprehensible for a human being. If you reduce this space to the size of a room, it acquires a scale to which the viewer can relate. The man who finds the cosmonaut within himself. The spectator in relation to a solar system of which humanity and its earth are part.

16 by Thanassis Raptis
Untitled
Uprooting from our place is one of the classic sources of misery that goes back to the beginnings of human history, when human began to choose a place to settle in, earning a living from agriculture and animal husbandry.This fate follows human to this day and, in fact, lingers while the situation keeps deteriorating, as wars, ecological disaster and genocides around the world continue to drive people out of their homes and get them on the road to experience their own, personal ‘Odyssey’.Over time, human used to experience the misery of his fellow human by participating in their pain as if it were their own pain. Thus the uprooted drew comfort from their fellow human beings who sympathized with them.However, it was not rare for the foreigner to be treated with suspicion and hostility, but also, in some cases, with cruelty and practical violence. And so, the human race has wandered through the centuries.I came across many such small Odysseys in 2016 in the muddy refugee camp in Eidomeni, on the northern border of Greece, precisely in the days when the EU unannouncedly launched the closure of its borders to the rest of Europe and forced these people to experience their confinement in this unwelcoming place.

17 by Efthimis Mouratidis
Odysseys of the soul
“We make our greatest trip with our soul” said Kazantzakis, and this is what I try to portray with this work. Its abstract character and vagueness allows the mind to travel and depict an alternative quest for the Ithaca within us: A different Ithaca — dark and unrecognisable — but at the same time distinct and somewhat familiar. 

18 by Kostas Koumlis 
Untitled

19 by Vasilis Karkatselis
Untitled

20 by Giorgos Pallis 
Demon 1 (top to bottom)
Meditation
Demon 2

21 by Elena Giannadaki 
Τοπío I, Τοπío II, Τοπío III  (top)
The subjects that affect and inspire me are based on topics of plasticity, texture and transparency. Investigation between light and shadow, shapes and patterns. The works I present for the exhibition Small Odysseys Οδύσσειες, refer to the reconstruction of images, isolating pieces from “constructed” architectural interventions that I encounter in my wandering in cities, resulting in the creation of new images that define new landscapes. The visual perception, after  deconstructing the image, influenced by aesthetic criteria and the imagination that invents new stories, are the first points of impulsion to photograph these subjects.

22 by Esther Kokmeijer
Greenland – Antarctica I 

23 by Ioannis Monogyios
I am Ulysses, I am Cyclop(bottom). 
There is an odyssey that happens inside of us.  In my work we see a human figure in  the foreground . In the background,  there is Ulysses offering a bowl full of wine to the Cyclop (the same figure as  in front, placed upside down, having  a cyclopic eye- or third  eye)  trying to drug him and to defeat him. I am Ulysses but I have also become a Cyclop. I have a single eyed point of view of myself and the world. I Ulysses must overcome my single eye, and turn it into a third eye of  knowledge.
This is my Ithaca….. 

24 by Helma Veugen 
My Peel Odyssey – 3 of 5 of a series
This artwork is about a personal journey. (…) 2 photos as a starting point for my Odyssey work of art. The first photo taken in 1940 by my father, the second photo taken in 2021 by my daughter. (…) 2 photos as a starting point for my Odyssey work of art. The first photo taken in 1940 by my father, the second photo taken in 2021 by my daughter.

25 by Anouk Bax 
Cyclops – Series
A series of cyclopes stare at you, with their soft facial expressions they can easily alter, like a twirl of smoke. Unlike the marble statue of the famous one-eyed giant Polyphemus’ head known in Greek art history, these look very different.
Anouk Bax makes drawings, mostly portraits. Intrigued by the way Polyphemus was represented in the past, the rhythm of stone-carvings that portray him, his rugged, animalistic power, she drew numerous studies with crayon and ink.
She read about the cyclops in the epic poem of Homers Odyssey and focused on this ninth book in which Odysseus and his men are held captive by Polyphemus. Odysseus devises an escape plan in which he, identifying himself as “Nobody,” intoxicates the giant with wine and blinds him with a wooden stake. The Odyssey is sometimes seen as a symbol for freeing the soul from the ego, but in this trial Odysseus is still learning and finds his own giant-ego reflected in Polyphemus. 

26 by Marinos Tsagkarakis 
Untitled

27 by Roman Zuev 
All those we could have foreseen
“Human’s greatest odyssey is life. In life we travel in a vessel that is our bodies. This body floats in it’s own odyssey, it gets tired, it gets hurt, it blossoms, it ages and slowly reaches its destination. This journey is described through the wear and tear of the body and focuses on it’s individual elements.”

28 by Ioannis Belimpasakis
From series: On Resistence II

29 by Gery Bouw
Untitled

30 by Paul Legeland
Leftovers (left to right)
Mountain of Memories
Wall of Memories

31 by Lisetteh
handlines (left)
one (middle)
david’s walk (bottom)
The main walk, a trip to something, sometime, someplace, a life. In these works, I’ve collected images belonging to a story, a person, a life. The main walk. Hand Lines of my mother’s damaged hand are the landscape in the surroundings where my brothers and I try to climb our way through the obstacles in the grey hairs of my father. I am still climbing.David is walking his path in a sea of restless eyes that could have been the heaven in the sky of his most favorite surroundings, but should have been there, to keep an eye. Groups of people walking in the same direction, endlessly, different people but they look like one. Where are they heading? They are alone, walking the main walk, the growing group makes them one. These etchings are part of a series “Small Odyssey, the main walk” I am working on.

32 by by Stelios Dexis & Myrto Vounatsou
metadata dexi (top)
metadata aristero (bottom)
The work “Metadata II” refers to an information network that captures dystopias, vaguely placed in space-time, emphasizing what TS Eliot states that “the present time and the past time, are perhaps the two main present times for the future. Seeing an image that was designed thousands of years ago, we make a journey into the past, but automatically the past exists in the present and in the future. Everything that could have happened and what has happened shows an end that is always present.” In this way the nature of the event is emphasized as accomplished and irreversible. It is repeated and recorded in human history in the eternal. Desert images that look as if the viewer is looking through a lens are composed of graphic elements that refer to anti-tank barriers. They are the monuments-traces of a collapsing civilization. Signs of a social body that is sick in its contradictions revealing the Odyssey of a culture that acrobats on the verge of destruction and rebirth.

33 by Caroline Koenders
Silence Series
Silence 2, Silence 6, Silence 5 (from left to right)
As a visual artist, silence is the source from which I work. For six months a year I live and work in a small Greek village, the other half on a remote farm on the German border. In Greece it is the crickets and cicadas, in Germany the rustling of the walnut trees that give sound to the silence. With the occasional owl or the clattering of the storks nesting next to us.
The photos I have taken are of my own hands in which I hold a perfectly round stone. The stone is white, polished round by the eternal movement of the sea. Picked up on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. My hands are rough, working hands, with black nails, the hands of a graphic artist, marked by time. In another photo my hand is holding a round black stone, painted black with the blackest black. The light is sucked in, making it look more like a cavity.
I combined these photos with a photo of an egg, the most perfect shape, and a symbol for the origin of life.
All images refer to the little Odyssey of my life, the search for the perfect form, the silence, the black and the white, in which nothing is what it seems.

 HALLWAY

34 by Giannis Stamenitis
Untitled