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