Geppetto’s Test Rocket

Geppetto’s Test Rocket, 2026
Chalk paint, silver leaf and acrylic on wood
180 cm high

A handmade rocket caught somewhere between invention and failure.

Within Technologies of Peace, it imagines transition as an unfinished technology: fragile, improvised, and still being tested.

Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989–2026), IMMA.

Curated with @marycremin @anniefletca @Johanne.Mullan @georgiesthompson

#TechnologiesOfPeace #IMMA #KostisVelonis #Sculpture

Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989–2026)

 A Machine That Dreams the Sky,  2025

Wood, metal, acrylic paint
132 × 98 × 45 cm

In post-conflict countries, the journey towards lasting peace involves a multifaceted approach that extends beyond political, economic, and security measures. Artistic practice and cultural experience play a pivotal role in healing societies, fostering reconciliation, and building a shared sense of identity and community.   
The exhibition Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989–2026) aims to explore the concept of peace, the tools of peace and how they are deployed through an artistic lens. The exhibition will focus specifically on the period between 1990s to the present day, and through the lens of artistic practices will draw parallels between Ireland’s complex political history with those of our European counterparts that have had similar trajectories in transitioning from post-conflict into democratic states of peace and stability.
Within peace and conflict research, the study of peace has received far less scholarly attention than the study of war and violence. Moreover, among the studies that pay particular attention to peace, a negative peace conception, which equates peace with the absence of direct violence between formerly warring parties, has generally dominated. Consequently, peace itself is under conceptualised. 
The period from 1989 to the present day has been marked by significant political and social changes in Ireland, particularly in the context of the conflict in the North of Ireland and the subsequent peace process. This project seeks to reflect on these changes through the lens of artistic practice and cultural expression, situating Ireland’s experience within a broader international context. By examining how free expression, identity management, and cultural practices have evolved in post-conflict societies, this project will offer insights into the role of art in peacebuilding and democratic development.
The IMMA Collection will form a central part of the exhibition with key works from Frances Hegarty, Willie Doherty, Cathy Wilkes, Alastair MacLennan and Sandra Johnston. The Dwell Here residency programme at IMMA will also provide a focus with artists such as Amanda Dunsmore.  Curated by Mary Cremin, IMMA Head of Programming, and Johanne Mullan, IMMA Collection Curator. 
Participating artists: Marina Abramović, Ileana Arnaoutou, Nika Autor, Aleksandar Battista Ilić in collaboration with Ivana Keser and Tomislav Gotovac, Ursla Burke, Alán Carrasco, Jasmina Cibic, Lana Čmajčanin, Fábio Colaço, Phil Collins, Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, Amanda Dunsmore, Petros Efstathiadis, Andrea Geyer, Igor Grubić,  Đejmi Hadrović, Petrit Halilaj, Anthony Haughey, Frances Hegarty, Saskia Holmkvist, Sanja Iveković, Sandra Johnston, Dragana Jurišić, Šejla Kamerić, Barbara Knežević, Siniša Labrović, Nicolas Lambouris, Latent Community, Manolis D. Lemos,  Glenn Loughran, Alastair MacLennan, Goshka Macuga, Petra Matić, Emily McFarland, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Petros Moris, Locky Morris, Alban Muja, Mairéad McClean, William McKeown, Vlad Nancă, Eleni Odysseos, Claudia Pagès Rabal, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Karol Radziszewski, María Ruido, Edita Schubert, Paul Seawright, Driton Selmani, Indrė Šerpytytė, Slavs and Tatars, Mladen Stilinović, Bojan Stojčić, Anne Tallentrie, Kostis Velonis, Vangelis Vlahos, Cathy Wilkes, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor.

Hermes /Apollo

 

Hermes (Column on the Move) 2025

Wood, gesso

Hermes Encounters Apollo (Monument to Movement) 2025

Wood, hardboard, chalk paint

Apollo lays down grids, boundaries, and monuments—he founds cities, maps territories, and calls it civilization. Hermes slips through the cracks, carrying messages, inventing detours, refusing to stay still. Their meeting is a reminder that politics is always torn between the urge to stabilize and the need to flow, between walls and pathways, between control and freedom.

Ο Απόλλωνας χαράζει πλέγματα, όρια και μνημεία, ιδρυει πόλεις, χαρτογραφεί τόπους. Ο Ερμής γλιστρά μέσα από τις χαραμάδες, μεταφέρει μηνύματα, εφευρίσκει παρακάμψεις και δεν μένει ποτέ ακίνητος. Η συνάντησή τους θυμίζει ότι η πολιτική είναι πάντα διχασμένη: ανάμεσα στην ανάγκη για σταθερότητα και στην ανάγκη για ροή, ανάμεσα σε τοίχους και μονοπάτια, ανάμεσα στον έλεγχο και την ελευθερία

Apollo #Hermes #Sculpture #politics #spacepolitics #expansion #boundaries #freedom #movement #mobility #communication #mythologies #planets #SolarAssembly #debate #SpatialPolitics #Architecture #kostisvelonis #vagabondsculptures

@ninettogallery  @artathina  

 

Moon Landing

Moon Landing, 2024

Wood, chalk paint

140 χ 118 χ 15 cm

@athensconservatoire @trikasdimitris #tatlinsdream

#spaceage #sculpture #rocket #puppetry #toy #moonlanding #moon# frame #monitor #TV #scene #stage #vagabondsculptures #kostisvelonis #athensconservatoire

The Moon is no longer sky, it is screen, stage

The sculptural installation Moon Landing inscribes itself within a regime of image and memory defined by the so-called Space Age: the period stretching from the launch of Sputnik to the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon.

The black surface with the central opening functions as a frame, recalling the bulky television screens of the 1960s that broadcast Armstrong’s “small step” on a global scale. The white form housed within the opening remains ambiguous: rocket, dwelling, puppet, or children’s toy. This ambiguity connects the work with puppetry and the theatricality of the model; the Moon here does not appear as the distant Other, but as a miniature stage inhabited by the handmade and the playful.

As a construction, it seeks to render a meta-representation of spectacle and to function as a commentary on how the televised image transformed the Moon into a desire incorporated into everyday life. Beyond a technological event, the “flight” is enriched as a scenic installation, reminding us that the utopia of space is at once a playful puppet theatre and a mass television event.

The starting point of Moon Landing concerns the utopia of outer space, which unfolds within systems of children’s design. The intensive use of design accelerated the collapse of distinctions between children’s imagination and adult projections, while at the same time contributing to the displacement of collective imagination: the Moon, once a mythological mirror of human desire, was transformed into the backdrop of a televisual experience.

Here, the Moon is not sky, but screen. And space is not only a site of physical expansion, but a realm where imagination, technology, and spectacle are entangled in a shared, ambivalent utopia.

Apollo Engine

Apollo Engine, 2025

Wood, acrylic paint, 200 cm (height)

Space as a machine of power

#ApolloEngine #Sculpture #Architecture#Apollo #engine #Ἀπόλλων #SpatialPolitics #Power #Structures #Territoriality #Colonies #SolarAssembly #kostisvelonis

The Fabric of the Sky

  

The Fabric of the Sky, 2025

Wool embroidery, loom weaving

700 cm x 500 cm

On November 7, 1492, a meteorite fell in Ensisheim, a small town in Alsace, making

headlines of its time and even inspiring Dürer.

He created a double-sided oil painting: on the back, the meteor’s fall; on the front, Saint

Jerome in the desert.The tapestry began its journey at the Rizareios School in

Monodendri, Epirus, and reached The Ilisian (formerly Hilton).It’s a free interpretation of

Saint Jerome’s solitude — the thoughtful saint studying the sky, surrounded by rocks, a

lion, and a quiet mystery for the viewer: What detail reveals the fall of the meteorite?

For those who look upward, beyond the fabric of the world.

Ζήσιμος Λορεντζάτος, Αλφαβητάρι Haiku

Ζήσιμος Λορεντζάτος, Αλφαβητάρι Haiku, 1969 

“5-7-5” Curated by @artflyernet 
On view: June 6 – July 18, 2025

#haiku #GeorgeSeferis #ζησιμοςλορεντζατος#painting #kostisvelonis

glimpse

outside
It was a long time ago –
An enclosure, on heath land, an outcrop in the heather and gorse;
A circle of rusted railings, decrepit, close to collapse, ominous –
We ran wildly round this broken construction,
revelling in its anonymity and ambiguity,
but aware of the notice boards fixed to the railings, eroded into blank facades, but emanating warnings, and threats of danger,

It was our discovery, and it would be our place;

We squeezed into the empty space, enclosed by these disintegrated posts;
we hurled ourselves around the inside perimeter –
stumbling on the coarse grass tussocks,
landowners of somewhere unknown to the rest of the world,
blissful, ecstatic and full of excited fear of what this place might be,
this dissolving steel ring syncopating earth and sky…

inside
the staircase splits into two, left and the right –
on the left, a door into the long, narrow attic,
a small window, a horizontal half moon, at the far end;
this dark space seems detached from the rest of the house;
the water tanks gurgle, the pipes groan and grumble;
on a grey blanket, shells, stones, dried plants are laid out in rows;
a secret museum has found its place…
it’s high up, remote,
an adventure where the tops of trees are framed by the half moon window,
and the life below is miniature.

upstairs
one staircase looks at another –
above, air;
so much empty, gaping, intangible space;
out of reach,
but that is where the adventure is,
to climb into the empty space, to look up, hoping for the sky;
to sense the weight and light and time of empty space
intruded upon by the reach and stretch of unnameable things –
plaster, cement, colour, clumsy, elegant, surprise, hang, lean, stretch…
the excitement of perilous moments, the sentient fear of vertigo…

and here, these big shapes, anthropomorphic, stare and wait,
dumb, curvaceous, still, biding time…

 Phyllida Barlow, 2020