Artist queers national pavilion

Andreas Angelidakis is turning Greece’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale into an “Escape Room” that treats the national pavilion itself as the subject. (observer.com) The project opens with the 61st International Art Exhibition on May 9, 2026, and runs through November 22 in Venice’s Giardini. Greece selected Angelidakis in July 2025, with Giorgos Bekirakis as curator and the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki managing the presentation. (labiennale.org) (iefimerida.gr) Angelidakis and the pavilion’s organizers describe the installation as a present-day version of Plato’s cave: a walk-in environment about illusion, image-making and political myth. The official project site says it links those ideas to “post-truth,” nationalism and propaganda. (escapegrecia.com) (daysofart.gr) The argument starts with the building. Angelidakis told Observer he is treating the Greek Pavilion, built in 1934, as “a being with consciousness,” and using its architecture and origin story as material for the work. (observer.com) That 1934 date is central to the project’s politics. Greek-pavilion materials tie the building’s debut to the same year the Greek and Austrian pavilions opened, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Venice, and Nazi Germany intensified persecution of homosexuals. (daysofart.gr) Angelidakis’s intervention also targets the Biennale’s format, where countries still present themselves through separate national pavilions in the Giardini. He said those buildings were designed to express the politics of the governments that built them, and the Greek presentation calls them “Frozen Fascist and/or Colonial Caves.” (daysofart.gr) Observer framed that approach as “queering” the pavilion by refusing a fixed, official version of Greek identity. Bekirakis said the show treats “GRECIA” as a “queer” body and assembles fragments of nationality rather than a single state-approved story. (observer.com) (daysofart.gr) That lands inside a Biennale that will proceed in 2026 under the title *In Minor Keys*, following the curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh. In that setting, Greece’s contribution is not a survey of national achievement so much as a staged argument with the building, the archive and the idea of the nation on display. (labiennale.org) (observer.com)