November – December 2024

DESMOS: A Dinner Study is a project by the A-DASH platform, curated by Christina Petkopoulou. It explores themes of closeness, sharing, and empowerment within the artistic community through the study and the reenactment of historical gatherings organized by the Desmos gallery, known in Greek art history as the “Desmos’ Mondays.” The group show hosted at EIGHT/TO OXTΩ, Critical Institute for Arts and Politics (8 Polytechniou St., Athens), featured artistic and curatorial work shared at a series of thematic dinners, along with archival material.

Since spring 2024, A-DASH has been organizing a series of dinners at the independent exhibition space Work In Progress Studios in central Athens. These were five simple pasta dinners, each with a different curated group of guest artists and curators, held in five unique temporal and spatial settings. The gatherings prioritized relationships and practice, resulting in five distinct actions, whose traces formed the material for this group exhibition. 

DESMOS: A Dinner Study exhibition served as a contemporary curatorial interpretation of the historical “Desmos’ Mondays,” a series of events organized by the Desmos gallery starting in 1972. During this time, gallery founders Epi Protonotariou and Manos Pavlidis hosted gatherings where they offered pasta to artists in a private setting within the gallery, accompanied by avant-garde music selected by contemporary composers. This exhibition reflected on the relationships, bold choices, and unconventional practices that historically shaped artistic communities. It considered environments of care, safe spaces, and settings that support and empower the artistic community, fostering critical internal relationships essential to creativity. The focus was on practice and sharing, beyond the art market’s competitive pressures and production demands. Artists and theorists presented artworks, installations, notes, texts, archival material, and performances inspired by the thematic dinners, attempting to identify conditions that foster connection and empowerment within the creative community, both in the past and present times.

My participation in the last dinner under the theme of “The distribution of food” was a kind of game in which I tried to recreate a food memory of all the participants of the evening. This action, which involved each participant sharing a personal story around food, while eating what I prepared, acted as a starting point, a kind of introduction for each one of us to the rest of the group. 

Just like how humans bonded around a fire, I looked at the table being the space where sharing food helps us build human relations, a basis for friendships, new connections and meaningful conversations.

Participating:

Nadja Aryropoulou, Eloise Fornieles, Ioanna Gerakidi, Panos Giannikopoulos, Marina Velisioti, Nikolas Ventourakis, Olga Vlassi, Sylvia Sachini, Christina Kotsilelou, Dimitra Kondylatou, Konstantinos Kotsis, Kosmas Nikolaou, Rena Papaspyrou, Phantom Investigations (Ino Varvariti, Giannis Delagrammatikas), Theo Prodromidis, Nana Seferli, Stefania Strouza, Mare Spanoudaki, Marianna Stefanitsi, Stamatis Schizakis, Christoforos Marinos, Myrto Xanthopoulou, Zoe Hatziyannaki, Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, Konstantinos Hatzinikolaou, Vera Chotzoglou, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas, Kostas Tzimoulis)

Images by Zoe Hatziyiannaki