Sacred or Monsters

Exhibition by Petros Moris, Marina Xenofontos, Niki Danai Chania

Curated by Ioanna Gerakidi

Opening

Thursday, September 25, 2025, 18:00-21:00

The group exhibition Sacred or Monsters, through a composition of sculptures, video performances, inscriptions, and sound archives, longs to explore the multifaceted meanings and connotations of identity as a malleable or mutable structure carrying the possibility to undemonize every Other, stripping away its semiotic weight as dangerous, dirty, or abnormal. Post-human entities, mythical creatures, ever-transforming beings, and exhausted yet resilient psyches and bodies coexist, shaping a narrative completed through its fragmentation—an uncanny chronicle that at times frightens, dazzles, disorients, while simultaneously illuminating, informing, and empowering.

The exhibition aims to reintroduce the self beyond its immovable and fixed entity and, along, to think of history as a fluid, an often temporal or paradoxical system. How can we reframe monstrosity, a construct that often generates, imposes and perpetuates psychosocial and geopolitical hierarchies? How can we turn it into a tool for dismantling power structures, authoritative gazes and identity norms? 

The works exhibited, emerge from what remains unspeakable, subterranean, disguised; they arise from and with malformed bodies, they grow into divine species, they speak of myths and imperceptible gestures. The cavernous, the secret, the transcendent—that which is often perceived as chthonic, foreign, or undesirable—are the main vehicles through which the artists renegotiate conflicting structures and erratic behaviors we humans enact daily.

The exhibition first seeks to recognize and then affirm these constant yet spasmodic clashes. Starting from the building’s depths, situated in a seemingly inaccessible portal, Petros Moris’ marble diptych sculpture titled Entropy as Hardship / Entropy as Kinship explores the entropy as a condition that legitimizes both disintegration and recomposition, confronting them as mechanisms for reevaluating the anarchic, or the opposing. By using an aesthetically idiolectic scheme, a language borrowing elements from both tectonic geologies and the urban landscape, Moris’ sculptural installation introduces a series of persistently mutant questions around a tongue-less, willfully incomprehensible vocabulary. In his work, the oracle, in its duality, encourages us, audiences, to query our contact with the visible or intelligible, to be initiated into that which consciously chooses the covert, to find in the unknown a haptic form of resistance.

The monstrous, now seen as a parable, gains new meaning—it becomes perceivable through its potential, its manifested reservation, or its sanctity. Marina Xenofontos’ sculptural installation, through the video performances Pinocchio, 2008-2009/2025, To Egon Schiele, 2008-2009/2025 and Am I a puppet, 2008-2009/2025 which interact asynchronously, seeks to reinforce this absurd resilience, investigating the idea of an other that dwells within the self. By transforming her own identity, the artist look with, rehearses, and performs each gesture as an encased imitation; her props and postures enact the stubbornly odd. Through prosthetic extensions that alter her face, through threads that determine her movements, and through gestures instigating the body’s appearance, the works long to exist as allegories uttering desires, emancipations, imperatives, transpositions. The puppet steps to the stage, only to deforming herself, to claim her agency, to expand her limits.

Tainted and sacred, the ideal is profane, the marginal’s the focal point of a narrative that both belongs to and eludes otherness. Doves in the Kitchen, the sculptural, echoing constellation of Niki Danai Chania, which is placed on the Foundation’s rooftop, brings together the exhibition’s narrative. Her work assembles personal diaries with stories where demons carry freedom, grave offerings accompany another kind of birth, reflections attest vulnerability. By encountering a material like metal—capable of freezing or heating based on its surroundings—and by re-evaluating the semantics of gold as a material tied to the emblematic or pompous, the artist negotiates the relationship between the unholy and the blessed, the fabled and the real, the unwanted and the cherished.

How can the monstrous, no longer confined to a narrative associated with the abject, the repulsive, the external, or the menacious, serve as an example, a motive, or a medium for the disassembly and reshaping of a collective identity, a resilient body, a reality grounded in imaginative possibilities? How can our actions, interactions, and decisions be informed by those of mythical, unnoticed, peripheral, or just other beings—validating an ongoing dialogue between the past and the future, bridging the dispersed and the complete?

The exhibition Sacred or Monsters wishes to exist as a series of hypotheses and inquiries—voiced by what is deemed inferior yet took the place of the prominent; by what was unspeakable but found space to exist; by bodies which grew bigger in order to be freed.

Artists: Petros Moris, Marina Xenofontos, Niki Danai Chania

Curator: Ioanna Gerakidi

Artistic Director: Marina Miliou Theocharakis

Exhibition Coordinator: Nefeli Siafaka

Communication: Marina Kampouroglou, Christina Oikonomou 

Duration: September 25–November 27, 2025

Opening hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 13:00 – 17:00

Admission: Free

PARALLEL EVENTS PROGRAM:

Dialogues on the exhibition – Open discussion with the artists and curator

October 2

Thursday, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Studio visit with the artist Niki Danai Chania

October 9

Thursday, 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Studio visit with the artist Petros Moris

October 30

Thursday, 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Studio visit with the artist Marina Xenofontos

November 6

Thursday, 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Guided tour of the exhibition Sacred or Monsters from the curator Ioanna Gerakidi

November 20

Thursday, 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF ARTISTS

Petros Moris

Petros Moris (b. 1986, Lamia) is an artist based in Athens. He has presented solo exhibitions in galleries and art spaces including Radio Athènes (Athens), TAVROS (Athens), Galeria Duarte Sequiera (Braga), Project Native Informant (London), Point Centre for Contemporary Art (Nicosia), Duve Berlin (Berlin), and the Cyprus Embassy (Athens). He has participated in international group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial (Liverpool 2025), the Athens Biennale (FOKAS, Athens 2021), The Last Museum (KW, Berlin 2021), the Singapore Biennale (National Gallery, Singapore 2019), the 4rth New Museum Triennial (New Museum, New York 2018) and The Equilibrists (DESTE X New Museum at the Benaki Museum, Athens 2016). He has been nominated for the DESTE Prize 2015 and has been awarded the ARTWORKS 2018 Fellowship, the Onassis Foundation Scholarship (2017-19), the Delfina Foundation Residency (2020 & 2022) and the Cité Internationale des Arts residency (2025). He has been part of the art collective KERNEL, the online curatorial collaboration SIM, the curatorial project Radical Reading and runs the publication project AM Reading Club.

Marina Xenofontos

Marina Xenofontos (b. 1988, Limassol, Cyprus) is an artist living and working between Athens and Limassol. Her practice engages with cultural memory, collective narratives, and the politics of display, often navigating the thresholds between public and private space. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2018–2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Overnight Coup Plan at Mint, Stockholm (2025); Things We Lost at Kunstverein Ganterhaus, Vienna (2025); Eternal Returns at Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2025); View from Somewhere Near at Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); and In Practice at SculptureCenter, New York (2023). Her work has also featured in group exhibitions such as Same Day, the 15th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius; The Cynics Republic at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and We can only begin to notice at NiMAC, Nicosia. In 2023, she presented Public Domain at Camden Art Centre in London, following her receipt of the Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze in 2022.

Niki Danai Chania

Niki Danai Chania is an Amsterdam-based multi-disciplinary artist and creative director, co-founder of ESTO Association practice and space. Her fiction-based practice merges textual and visual narratives, especially sculpture, to explore social and psychological themes. Drawing on personal experiences, mythology and dreams, Chania’s work reimagines enduring socio-political issues, using symbolism to connect ancient and contemporary struggles, bridging reality and fiction, darkness and beauty while addressing the recurring human condition. 

She has showed her work in spaces like Onassis Foundation (Athens), Delvis Unlimited (Milan), Basia Embiricos Gallery (Paris), The Blender Gallery (Athens), Centrum (Berlin), Backhaus (Vorspiel-Transmediale ( Berlin), KEIV Gallery (Athens), Cultural Foundation of Tinos and attended residencies like EKWC-European Ceramic WorkCentre (The Netherlands). She is currently a fellow of Onassis Air, the artistic research program of Onassis Foundation.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE CURATOR

Ioanna Gerakidi

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator, and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, and psychoanalytical studies. Poetry and other diaristic and archival schemes are often embedded in her practice.

She has curated exhibitions and public programs at and for: Athens Municipal Center, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), 2023 Eleusis, Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), Athens Biennale, State of Concept (Athens), Haus N (Athens), Cypher Athens, and Hot Wheels Athens/London, among others. Her words have been presented at Kunstverein Amsterdam (Holland), Stroom den Hague (Holland), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Germany), Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (Lithuania), the Montez Press Radio (UK), Carlos/Ishikawa (UK), Hangar (Spain), and Transmissions 2021 (UK). In addition, her work has been included in several international platforms, publications, and magazines, including Collecteurs (online), Biennale Interstellaire des espaces d’art de Genève (BIG, Geneva), the online research program Schemas of Uncertainty, the catalog of the Greek Pavilion under the title Xiromero for Venice Biennale 2024, The Glenkeen Variations of Crespo Foundation, Artnews, Athinorama (Greece) and more.

In 2018, she published the book “In the Current of the Situation” which she co-authored with Danae Io. She has lectured or led workshops and talks for Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Piet Zwart Institute, Design Academy Eindhoven, Athens School of Fine Arts, and more, and has been a mentor for fellowship programs such as theOnassis Air Residency, and ARTWORKS by SNF. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). Projects of hers have been awarded or funded by: Mondriaan Fonds, Outset, and NEON, among others. Past, funded residencies include: Rupert’s Residency (Lithuania), Saha Residency (Turkey), G&A Mamidakis, and NEON Curatorial Exchange Program 2015.

In 2023, she worked as the artistic director for opbo studio, curating a series of solo shows by Janis Rafa, Lito Kattou, AnnaMaria Pinaka, and Anastasia Valsamaki. She is the founder of CHEAT CODE, a platform dedicated to alternative knowledge production and artistic development.

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