ALWAYS THE SUN

What does it mean to live under a particular light?

RIGA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE presents Always the Sun, an exhibition curated by Marina Fokidis. On view from October 2, 2026, to January 10, 2027, it brings together a constellation of 27 Greek artists whose practices are shaped by the interplay of geography, light, climate, and cultural legacy. It is the first large-scale presentation of contemporary Greek art in the Baltic region. Drawing inspiration from the song by The Stranglers, the exhibition approaches the sun not as a motif, but as a medium of thought, perception, and lived experience. It explores how the brightness, heat, and exposure of the Mediterranean have influenced aesthetic languages and fostered strategies of survival, intimacy, and adaptation.

The curator Marina Fokidis emphasizes: “The sun. Not the picturesque Mediterranean sun of tourist brochures, nor the luminous ideal inherited from modernist painting, but the sun as both a metaphor and a lived reality: a force that regulates daily rhythms, shapes public space, and influences the ways people meet, rest, work, and inhabit their cities. What does it mean to live under a particular light? How might weather influence artistic production as profoundly as history, politics, or language?”

For Riga, a northern city where sunlight is often fleeting, this exhibition offers an encounter with a southern sensibility: not exotic, but grounded, material, and spiritual. It imagines a solar dialogue between North and South, Baltic and Mediterranean, as a conversation rather than an opposition. It proposes light not only as a symbol, but also as a form of knowledge. In ancient Greek thought, light illuminated truth, but the southern sun, unlike the colder light of the Northern Enlightenment, is contradictory. It dazzles, reveals, and blinds. It asks us not to observe from a distance, but to feel, inhabit, and listen.

On October 1 at 18:30, Dream Coat, a performance by Nefeli Papadimouli, will mark the exhibition’s opening.

The exhibition features works by Andreas Angelidakis, Bill Balaskas, Panos Charalambous, Dimitra Charamandas, Christina Dimitriadis, Anastasia Douka, Apostolos Georgiou, Marina Gioti, Maria Hassabi, Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Panos Koutrouboussis, Aliki Paliou, Malvina Panagiotidi, Nefeli Papadimouli, Eftihis Patsourakis, Angelo Plessas, Theo Prodromidis, Panos Profitis, Georgia Sagri, Serapis Maritime, Socratis Socratous, Stefania Strouza, Iris Touliatou, Panos Tsagaris, Jannis Varelas, Kostis Velonis, Paky Vlassopoulou.

https://makslastelpa.riga.lv/en/exhibitions/always-the-sun/

Photo credits: Kostis Velonis. The Gravity of the Sun

Wood, metal, acrylic, oil, 130 x 110 x 29 cm
2023–2024
Courtesy of The Breeder and the artist

Indestructible ( broken)

Indestructible (broken), 2020 

Marble, wood, stones 

199

#Destefoundation, #gravity #masonry#petrification  #sculpture #kostisvelonis #hydra #hydraslaughterhouse,# exhibition #199 

 

Socle du monde

Piero Manzoni, Socle du monde (base of the world), 1961

Iron, bronze

82 x 100 x 100 cm

Hyperion Has Stumbled

Hyperion Has Stumbled (detail), 2018 

When you daydream while walking—and, with your eyes set on the sky, you find that evidently you are not Hyperion, celebrated by Hölderlin in his writings, who lingers above earth—it is easy to stumble. Yet the daydreamer’s clash with reality is from another perspective a creative or even an insightful encounter, and one of the ideal media that causes people to fall over obstacles is sculpture. In this lecture, I will argue for a conceptual shift from the celebrated dexterity of the hand to the despised clumsiness of the leg. I will share samples of my work that stick to and never leave the ground. These works confirm the close dependency of sculpture on an onerous and yet surprisingly generative reality.

Location: Scheide Caldwell House
Title: Hyperion Has Stumbled
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow)
Respondent: Mitra Abbaspour, (Princeton University Art Museum)
Time: 1:30 p.m.

December 7 at Princeton University

A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay

One does not have to look up to the sky as a jay-walker in order to stumble. Sometimes, all it takes is to be in a gallery, enjoying the artwork, until you bump into a sculpture. This was at least the view of one of the most important thinkers and painters of American abstract art, Barnett Newman, who had said that “sculpture is what you bump into [i.e. by accident] when you back up to see a painting.” And yet our contact with sculpture’s blatant materiality--accidental as it may be--also prepare us to accept the aggravating conditions of a life in a constant struggle with its own imperfections and defects. 

Location: Hamilton 616
Title: A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay 
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Princeton University)
Respondent: Rebekah Rutkoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Time: 6:00-7:15pm

November 14 at Columbia University

Circus Aedificare

Circus Aedificare is a construction machine that pours a free and unorganized matter around it. The ritual spilling of matter accumulates to the point of constituting an enclosure around it, made of a pure and anarchic accumulation. This absence of constructive economy has for counterpart to obtain an architecture which is exchanged with the field of Painting or Sculpture. In the idea of synthesis of arts, this building succeeded to move the painting dripping method in the field of Architecture. By withdrawing from construction knowledge, it is the density of the material itself that gives shape to the building and its natural distribution.

http://www.marcleschelier.com/circus-aedificare  

State of Suspense

State of Suspense, 2017 

Wood, acrylic, felt, oil 
10 x 5 x 4 cm