What does it mean to “unearth” the past today? This summer’s exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion asks us to reconsider how we look at, and live alongside, antiquity. Bringing together painting, sculpture, installation, performance and digital media, Fragments and Futures explores how the visual languages, material remains and mythic narratives of classical archaeology continue to shape the cultural imagination.
The exhibition also marks Katerina Gregos’s tenth anniversary as curator of the Schwarz Foundation’s Visual Arts Programme, working in collaboration with ioLi Tzanetaki. Its setting could hardly be more appropriate. Samos was once a rich and powerful city-state, while the ancient city of Pythagoreion and the Heraion, the sanctuary of Hera, now form a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here, archaeology is not an abstract discipline but a daily presence.
Set at the harbour’s edge and washed in Aegean light, the Art Space provides a striking backdrop. Gregos explained that the exhibition acts as a bridge between archaeology and contemporary art. Its artists reinterpret myths through present-day perspectives, examining colonial histories, gender, identity, ecology and our growing dependence on technology. In doing so, they pull archaeology away from the public perception of something remote or dusty and show how strongly it continues to influence museums, politics and ideas of beauty.
Left: Petros Moris, Future Bestiary Series (Sphinx VI), 2022. The sculpture originates from photogrammetric 3D scans of ancient funerary artifacts, in this case, a sphinx from Athens’ historic Kerameikos cemetery.
Right: Panos Profitis, The Herald, 2023. This piece was cast in aluminum and industrial oxidized metal, grounding it in a contemporary industrial reality, far from the idealised nature of ancient Hellenistic sculptures.
The surviving remains of the Heraion, the Archaeological Museum of Pythagorion and the wider ancient landscape are, by definition, incomplete. Yet that incompleteness is precisely what gives the exhibition its energy. Every reconstruction is also a form of storytelling, shaped by what survives, what is absent and who is doing the interpreting. Fragments and Futures asks us to consider how inherited ideas, particularly those shaped by colonial and Western readings of antiquity, have conditioned the way we understand beauty, civilisation and cultural value.
The works do not treat antiquity as a fixed inheritance. Instead, it becomes an active field through which ecological, technological and political ideas can be examined and rearranged. Ancient craft also meets contemporary technique: marble, clay and pigment sit alongside scanning, projection and 3D printing, highlighting both the continuity of human curiosity and the changing definitions of authenticity and originality.
This is particularly clear in Petros Moris’s Future Bestiary series. His sculptures reimagine archaeological finds and mythological creatures, including the Sphinx, which has long been interpreted through a narrow cultural lens. Moris transforms these references into tectonic forms that connect ancient memory with the mythical, social and technological structures of the future.
Installation views of Fragments and Futures: Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Worlds at Art Space Pythagorion in Samos, Greece.
Courtesy of The Schwarz Foundation. Photos © Christos Mouchas.
An international group of artists and collectives broadens that conversation, moving between bodies, ruins, archives, film and speculative objects. Across the exhibition, familiar figures and forms are unsettled, allowing overlooked voices and alternative histories to enter the frame. The museum itself also becomes a subject: not a neutral container, but an institution whose classifications, displays and narratives carry their own ideological weight.
Supporting this ambitious project is the Schwarz Foundation. Far from feeling like a remote cultural institution, it comes across as a close-knit group of knowledgeable people, each given room to shine while working towards a shared purpose. Its commitment is not only to the exhibition, but to making the Art Space a meaningful part of life on Samos.
The art mediators have worked closely with the curators and artists, receiving detailed briefings on the works and the ideas behind them. Their knowledge makes an evening visit especially rewarding, when they can guide visitors through the exhibition and offer the kind of context that cannot be gathered from wall texts alone.
At the edge of Pythagorion Harbour, locals and holidaymakers are equally welcome to step inside, look closely and stay awhile. Fragments and Futures does not present the ancient world as something finished. It shows it as a living source of questions, open to challenge, revision and new possibilities.
Fragments and Futures: Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Worlds
3 July-30 September 2026
Art Space Pythagorion, Pythagorion Port, 83103 Samos, Greece
More information, HERE.
Author: Rebecca Dickson
Exhibition curated by Katerina Gregos and ioLi Tzanetaki
Participating artists: Rossella Biscotti; Navine G. Dossos; Alexis Fidetzis; Yiannis Hadjiaslanis; Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige; Natalia Manta; Petros Moris; Panos Profitis; Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, with Ghislain Cloquet; Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achilleos; Lucia Tallová; Maarten Vanden Eynde.
Other unmissable exhibitions this summer recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include Metamorphoses, Ovid and the Arts, at Villa Borghese, Rome; Jacques Henri Lartigue: A Life in Colour, at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes; and Ed van der Elsken: Up Close at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
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