Art Futures Fellow 2025: PASHIAS 

Fellowship by Art Futures - Serendipidity in Action

Residency at Space for International Cooperation [SiC]

Visual artist PASHIAS has been selected as the Art Futures Fellow 2025 - Serendipity in Action, hosted by Space for International Cooperation [SiC] in Athens. In his residency, PASHIAS investigates the intricate connections between mythology and cultural narratives, in relation to contemporary social urgencies, focused on the human body as a catalyst for change and a vessel for understanding our world’s present state. PASHIAS approaches the extensive ‘wealth’ of anthropocentric images, actions, objects and devices embedded in antiquity, as the predecessor of performance art and its diverse formulations encountered nowadays.

His residency period began as artistic research into archaeological sites, museums, archives and educational institutions, souvenir shops and commercial representations of culture, interacting with local archeologists, curators, academics, art practitioners, craftspeople and shop owners. By studying specific artefacts and narratives, as framed within museological settings and as located in public consciousness, PASHIAS reconfigures the human body according to its hybrid, fluid and subversive parameters, into the primary vessel of knowledge concentration, withstanding, breaking and continuously transforming. Through an amalgamation of performance, artwork installation, means of documentation and community-based exchanges, PASHIAS invites the public into an open space of dialogue, centered around our necessity for empathy and togetherness.

Art Futures - Serendipity in Action is an international non-profit organisation based in Amsterdam - Netherlands, supporting and initiating activities with an unconditional belief in the value of the arts, culture and education - www.artfutures.nl

Space for International Cooperation [SiC] is an independent non-profit project-space in Athens - Greece, embracing otherness and diversity as catalysts for positive change, advocating for collaboration across all boundaries and disciplines - www.sic-athens.com

Oops! I broke the sun

Exhibition by visual artist PASHIAS

Opening: 29th of March, Saturday, 19:00, Space for International Cooperation [SiC] - Nileos 6, 11851, Thiseio, Athens

Duration: 29th of March - 19th of April 2025, Wednesday to Saturday, 15:00 - 19:00 and by appointment via email at contact@pashias.art or via phone at 6933198804

"Oops! I broke the sun": a spherical volume as the belly, side handles as arms, a narrow neck and a mouth. The connection between the human and the clay bodies transcends visual parameters and imagery, equating the body and the amphora with vessels carrying, safekeeping and spilling substances, materialities, experiences, notions and values. The transformative interaction between artist and amphora develops through a series of identifications and exchanges, revealing the materiality and corporeality, not only of the ‘aesthetic objects’, but more broadly of the historical time and heritage they contain. It is hybridity, of performance art, of the multidisciplinary and participatory installations by PASHIAS, that allows such relations of sublimation and condensation to develop. Yet, the precondition for consolidating this hybridity, as a constitutive condition of cultural production, is an iconoclastic disposition towards all kinds of regularities and monotheisms.

The sun - king, at the centre of this exhibition, signifies and reveals identities. The ambivalent vessel of abundance and light that gives form to everything by coloring it with its rays, can prove harmful to anything that does not keep a safe distance or stares at it directly. The blue of the Mediterranean, the orange evening echo and the yellow sphere playing hide and seek are fragments of the broken light. For visual artist PASHIAS, the shattering of the icons and vessels representing normativities is not only a necessary symbolic act, but also the precondition for the release of crystallized forms, energies and substances that do not fit into established social forms.   

The exhibition "Oops! I broke the sun" is part of the joint artist residency programme of organization Art Futures - Serendipity in Action based in Amsterdam and Space for International Cooperation [SiC], selecting PASHIAS as their Art Futures Fellow 2025, offering a platform for the artist to further develop his long-standing study of historical artefacts and narratives as instruments for understanding the contemporary human condition. The research of PASHIAS has been presented at Musée des Augustins for the “Festival Ιnternational d'Art de Toulouse” (2014), the archeological collection of George & Nefeli Giabra Pierides at Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation (2017), the Christophoros Savva artwork collection at State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art (2018), the Michalis Michaeledes artwork collection at A. G. Leventis Gallery (2020), the historical Larnaca Archives - Phivos Stavrides Foundation (2021) and the archaeological collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum - Cambridge (2024).

Curatorial Advisor & Texts: Georgios Papadopoulos

Sunsets made in Thiseio: Exhibition Text

By Georgios Papadopoulos

The sun rises and sets. Metaphorically. Literally. Game over? We know that the world is not moving in the right direction (hello?). Not at all. But we keep going, until the sound of impact is heard, bringing us (?) back to reality.

The breaking of ceramic vessels is not a gesture of destruction, but rather one that is done ritually in a performance that symbolizes transition, rebirth and transformation. In classical antiquity, the Greeks broke amphorae at funerals to accompany the deceased into the next life - the breaking marks a rupture - a crack in the continuum of existence that paved the way for the unknown road to Acheron or perhaps a deserted beach: ‘Life is a beach’. This is what the artist is trying to remind us with "Oops! I broke the sun" and he is (very) serious, bringing us back to the inexorable simplicity of existence. Sun, sea, body, fragments, materialities, colors and three towels.

PASHIAS is not trying to return to the tired truism that the use of symbols is a practice of revealing a lost deeper meaning and a springboard for critique; this is obviously the case. "Oops! I broke the sun" is not a metaphor, nor a gesture that carries another ultimate or higher meaning, but an environment that invites you back to reality. The use of archetypal symbols, especially when it is done without grandeur but with humor, allows for ironic distance from our daily problems, from social imperatives, from the insecurity and greed of our own ego. I wonder if we will be able to return to Marcel Duchamp's revelation that when there is no solution, there is probably no problem? Playfulness is just such a reminder, a moment of radical irresponsibility that will allow us to reconnect and renegotiate our relationship with materiality and meaning.

Everyday life is based on a constant process of appropriation and disenchantment - whether it is about archetypes and symbols, scientific discoveries or tragic events. The everyday is a huge container into which everything will somehow fit, stripping them of their mystical depth to turn them into accessible, entertaining and marketable objects. The sun, a divine entity in ancient cultures, now becomes a cheerful emoji or a corporate logo. Using such simplifications, the entertainment and tourism industries are stripping symbols of their original power, turning them into objects of mass and easy consumption with a short expiration date, alienating us in the process. Alienation is, unfortunately, also a condition for our survival. We know that there is something beyond the everyday, but we can only continue to survive by ignoring it. 

The perpetual breaking of the amphorae and the return to the nature of light, water and earth is not just a reminder. Through bodily identification, PASHIAS challenges our over-familiarity with objects, reconnecting us with them on a visceral and instinctual level. By elevating the everyday through ritual, physicality revitalizes what has been desecrated - restoring a sense of wonder, tension and ambiguity to symbols that have been reduced to a decorative or spectacular function.

In PASHIAS' works, fragmentation liberates meanings, releasing archetypes that escape the banality of popular culture and return to mystery and enchantment. Breaking the amphorae is a potent gesture that redeems us from the boredom and the dumbness of consumption, or is it just a break from the constant flow of advertising.  Let's spread out our towels, lie down and sunbathe. Sunscreen is not needed; the sun has begun to shred behind the clouds that crown the horizon of capitalist realism.

Mythology is the predecessor of performance art: Interview of PASHIAS by journalist Panagiotis Koustas

Kathimerini Newspaper, 20/03/25 - Read Article (GR)

The international Cypriot artist PASHIAS introduces himself to us in first person, just before the opening of his new exhibition in Athens.

I started getting into visual arts, since my 2nd year of primary school. My mother probably saw that my mind was spinning differently than other kids and took me to art classes. She was a fashion designer - I lost her two years ago. She studied in London and then opened her own shop, in Nicosia. I’m 37 years old.

I got my Fine Art degree from Goldsmiths University. I was studying there, during the aftermath of the Young British Artists, and my professors really wanted me to be the one student doing performance art. I did want to be present in my works and I used my body to do so, but only in video. I couldn't perform live in front of an audience at the time. I did for the first time right after my degree.

If I have an artist that inspires me? Come on, you say her name. Marina Abramović. It was an honor and a pleasure to collaborate with her in 2016, during her tribute exhibition at the Benaki Museum (referring to the "As One" program, featuring long-durational performances by emerging artists selected by the priestess of performance art herself).

One of her works I first came in contact with, as a student, was "Rhythm 0" (A six-hour action that took place in 1974, during which Abramović stood still, whilst the audience was invited to do whatever they wanted to her with one of the seventy-two objects she had placed on a table, including a gun and a bullet). Personally, I would like to think that the gun didn't work. But that's of no significance. Performance art moves between reality and artifice. The idea is enough to complete the work conceptually.

I did my master's degree at Saint Martins and I chose to do my internship in Athens, I always wanted to be here. I then presented several video performances at the art space Vryssaki, in Thiseio as well. One of them was my thesis, a choreographed action to Anna Vissi's "Tavli", a heavy-handed lyrical testament.

Finally, I stayed in Athens for five years, during the crisis era, from 2011 to 2016. At that time, abroad, there was a huge interest in art being made in Greece. Even though I'm Cypriot, to foreign curators I was one of the marketable Greek artists in demand. I worked almost exclusively abroad. Every month I was in a different country. Overseas, I was paid fairly well. The only time I got paid in Greece over the years, was for my participation in "As One". When I realized that the art profession in Greece was seen as a hobby, I left.

The work I presented in "As One" was a milestone to my career. I had attached four strands of fishing line to two parallel walls, stretched horizontally under each other. Naked from the waist up, for eighteen hours, I pushed them forward with my stomach and then I walked backwards, so that the audience could witness the marks, the 'writing' of the threads on my abdomen. I jokingly called this “a method of creating visual abs”. My reference was the Cycladic figurines, with parallel lines on their stomach.

Performance is paid for, mainly through commissions given to artists. There are, of course, residencies, as well as the educational aspect of our practice - many artists, including myself, teach. Another way of 'capitalizing' performance is through the tangible outcomes of live action. Personally, I make performances that, once presented live, can be 'converted' into souvenirs or utilitarian objects, as diverse formulations of my work. However, I appreciate the tangible visual record of my performances, not so much in order to sell, but because I feel the need to ground them into the historical canon. It helps me to anchor the presence of my ideas and images, to give them roots.

Other ways of 'capitalizing' a performance? You can sell its script, although a performance artwork doesn't necessarily have a script, you could simply determine the guidelines and circumstances under which you expect it to be repeated. You can even sell it as a manifesto. Abramović, in addition to being an exceptional visual artist, is also a very good businesswoman. She knows how to market an idea - love, death, separation, feed our intrinsic need for coexistence - all of these are notions her works deal with.

The art product is brandable, it's marketable and contains identity, specifically when it comes to performance art and anthropocentric works. In my art, I'm in the center. That's why since 2017, after my collaboration with Abramović, I started writing my name as PASHIAS, all capitalized, in Latin characters. Call it a stage name, like a drag queen's name.

The live performance “Ω3” is another milestone in my practice. I presented it in 2023 in Eleftherias Square, the most central square in Cyprus, connecting the old and new city of Nicosia. It's a square designed by famed architect Zaha Hadid. It was recently completed (opened to the public in June 2021) and has been received by Cypriots as foreign, as alien. It features Hadid's characteristic futuristic shapes.

This particular square is inhabited, mainly, by 'foreigners’ and immigrants. In this square, I've brought a foreign body, a body that feels unfamiliar. That of a hybrid being, half man and half fish. For an hour or so, I crawled on the ground, my feet trapped in a mermaid's tail, until I found my natural element, water - I ended up submerged in Hadid's marble fountain. This particular action was commissioned by the Nicosia International Festival on the occasion of Pride Day.

For many years, I've engaged, and continue to be engaged, with the gendered body in relation to food, consumption and sports. Lately, I have focused on the body - exhibit relation. I'm drawn to archaeological artefacts, myths and narratives from the past, as vessels or as means to better understand the contemporary human condition. For me, the predecessor of performance art is Greek mythology.

I started working with amphorae in 2017, in my solo exhibition "Temple-boy". Initially, I made collages, two-dimensional, as visual parallelisms between the form of the human body and that of the vessel. They have the same properties. They store and protect notions, values, images, experiences, materialities through the passage of time. I then made 1:10 scale models of my body coming out of clay pots, using 3-D scanning and 3-D printing processes. Based on a photograph of my grandmother with a jug on her shoulder, I made a video work transferring amphorae from shoulder to shoulder - in Cypriot dialect, the jug is called a ‘kuza’.

Last January, in the Cyprus antiquities wing of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, I presented, after studying its archaeological collection, the performance "KUZA". It was commissioned by the High Commission of Cyprus in London. Whilst the collection's curator, Anastasia Christophilopoulou, was giving a tour, for about an hour, I slowly wandered around the displays with my head covered in a half-broken amphora. I was interrupting, filling in or giving an alternative version of the information she was giving to the viewers. My clothing, the final image, were heavily influenced by Hussein Chalayan's work. Because he's a master at what he does, not just because he's Cypriot.

I’ve never made ceramics myself, I use ready-mades and break them. The one I had on my head at the Fitzwilliam Museum, I bought from a plant shop in Cyprus. Do you know what it means to send, even through fully coordinated processes, a contemporary pot that looks like an ancient broken one, to a museum in Britain? It's a whole other performance project.

Now, I'm in Athens as I've been selected Art Futures Fellow 2025 by Art Futures - Serendipity in Action, a cultural organization based in Amsterdam. The project I am working on, as part of my artistic residency at SiC, is entitled "Oops! I broke the sun". It's an exhibition that unfolds over two floors and its vitrine.

I don't just go to museums for research. I also explore the touristic and lifestyle renditions of culture. My work has humor, lightness and an entertaining disposition. I want to make artworks that are accessible for people to ‘enter’, hence the pop morphology, the basic, catchy colors employed.

KALIMÉRA, KALIMÉRA

Performance action by visual artist PASHIAS at Herakleidon Museum, followed by the closing of exhibition “Oops! I broke the sun” at Space for International Cooperation [SiC]

Performance action: Holy Saturday, 19th of April, 11:00 AM, Herakleidon Museum, Herakleidon 16, 11851, Thiseio - Athens

Exhibition closing: Holy Saturday, 19th of April, 11:30 AM - 3:30 PM, Space for International Cooperation [SiC], Nileos 6, 11851, Thiseio - Athens

On Holy Saturday, 19th of April, before the celebration of sunrise service welcoming the dawn of Easter Sunday, visual artist PASHIAS invites the public at 11 o’clock in the morning to join his performance action “KALIMÉRA, KALIMÉRA”. In collaboration with the Herakleidon Museum in Thiseio, PASHIAS will take over the neoclassical building’s façade, appearing onto its balcony with an amphora on his shoulder. In his long-standing research of historical artefacts and narratives as tools for understanding our present social conditions, PASHIAS parallels the clay body with the human body, visually and conceptually, as universal vessels carrying, safekeeping and spilling materialities, notions, images and values. Every Holy Saturday at 11 o’clock in the morning, the islanders οf Corfu go out onto their balconies to throw away the ‘old’ and welcome the ‘new’, repeating the ritual breaking of pottery, as connected to ancient Greek and later Venetian customs of purification. This shattering gesture results into deafening noises exorcising all evil, and into heaps of clay fragments to take away for good luck throughout the year.

PASHIAS tells us ‘kaliméra’, good morning, expanding this ceremonial act into the unending circle of light and darkness, of life, death and rebirth, through the release of materiality from its defined shape, the release of water into a shared cleansing experience. This live action is the last chapter of exhibition “Oops! I broke the sun”, inviting audience members to its closing, at Space for International Cooperation [SiC], next to the Herakleidon Museum, from 11:30 AM until 3:30 PM. The exhibition is part of the joint artist residency programme of organization Art Futures - Serendipity in Action based in Amsterdam and [SiC], selecting PASHIAS as their Art Futures Fellow 2025. In his Athens residency, the artist visited archeological sites, museums, archives and educational institutions, souvenir shops and touristic representations of culture, interacting with archeologists, curators, academics and craftspeople. PASHIAS created an amalgamation of performance, installation, documentation means and community-based exchanges, opening up space for dialogue, empathy and togetherness.

Coordination: Vasiliki Papakosta, Georgios Papadopoulos