Saturday 29 March, OPENING of PASHIAS our artist in residence 2025

Visual artist PASHIAS is our Art Futures Fellow 2025 - Serendipity in Action artist in residence at [SiC] Space for International Cooperation Athens in February - April 2025.

Welcome to join us: Saturday 29th March, 7pm opening of "Oops!, I broke the sun" by PASHIAS.

On show: Saturday 29th March – Saturday 19th April 2025
Open: Wednesday to Saturday, 3 pm - 7 pm
Artist talk: Sunday 30 March, at 5pm, on site as well online: RSVP
Where: [SiC] Nileos 6, 11851, Thiseio, Athens
Curatorial Advisor: Georgios Papadopoulos

“In my art, then, I am at the center. That's why since 2017, after my collaboration with Abramovich, I started writing my name as PASHIAS, all in capital letters, with Latin characters. Say it and stage name, like that of drag queens.”
– read the full article in which the international Cypriot artist PASHIAS introduces himself in Η Καθημερινή (Kathimerini) on the occasion of his new exhibition at [SiC] online:
"The ancestor of performance art is mythology"

"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 Art Futures - Serendipity in Action Amsterdam and [SiC] Space for International Cooperation Athens 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).

follow this link to the article "The ancestor of performance art is mythology" in leading Greek Newspaper 'Kathimerini' about PASHIAS art practice and his exhibition "Oops!, I broke the sun":
https://www.kathimerini.gr/k/k-magazine/563522104/o-progonos-tis-performans-art-einai-i-mythologia/

During his residency, PASHIAS investigated the intricate connections between Greece’s mythology and cultural narratives, in relation to contemporary social urgencies, focused on the human body as a catalyst for change and a vessel for understanding our world’s present state.

PASHIAS approaches the extensive ‘wealth’ of anthropocentric images, actions, objects, narratives and devices embedded in Greek antiquity, as the predecessor of performance art and its diverse formulations encountered nowadays.

His residency period at [SiC] in February - April 2025 started as an artistic research into archaeological sites, museums, archives and educational institutions, souvenir shops and commercial representations of culture, interacting with craftspeople and practitioners currently active in Greece, using techniques and materialities existing since antiquity. By studying specific artefacts and narratives, framed within museological settings, located in our public consciousness, PASHIAS reconfigures the human body according to its hybrid, queer and subversive parameters, into the primary vessel of knowledge concentration, safekeeping and transformation.

Through an amalgamation of live performance, artwork installation, means of documentation and community-based exchanges, PASHIAS invites cultural practitioners, academics and the public into an open space of dialogue, centred around our necessity for empathy and solidarity.

www.pashias.art
Instagram: @pashias