Andreas Angelidakis’s apartment is in flux as the Athens-based artist explores, through his home environment, his next international show. Maquettes are being considered, juxtapositions judged and details fixed. The place is a whirlpool of ideas and experimentation, prototypes and aftermaths: somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis in the provocations that spin out, informed by keepsakes, memories and losses, the personal and political. The chaos is ruled over by an elderly Pomeranian called Lupo, little tongue lolling.
Angelidakis is representing Greece at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens next month. Frustrated, he’s just sacked his production team (one suspects this is part of the architect-turned-artist’s charmingly madcap process and they will be back on board within hours). There’s a treadmill topped with a pink-feathered shop-dummy head he’s considering fashioning into a camp police car alongside glitzy police riot shields and glass-sided display fridges holding multi-limbed torsos rather than the usual energy drinks. His show, Escape Room, will be an intensely layered exploration of the digital and the real.
Using the allegory of Plato’s cave, where life is experienced at a remove in a shadow world, as a lens to explore notions of truth, memory and identity, the installation within the Greek Pavilion set in the Giardini gardens of Venice and curated by George Bekirakis includes a 21-metre-long infinite bathroom-mirror selfie. The work muses on the 1934 building itself, a nationalist project with Byzantine design hints built during the last time the continent was mired in the threat of Fascism, and the show reflects historical tensions in Greece between its pre-independence Ottoman heritage and the subsequent pull of Western Europe – à la France versus à la Turque. There’s also an element of a souvenir shop. It sounds insane but there’s canny intelligence and subversive humour at play: ‘I’m trying,’ he says, ‘to approach the spirit of Greece in an ambiguous way.’
Queer, anti-establishment and as comfortable referencing classical philosophy as Rupaul’s Drag Race, Angelidakis describes himself as an ‘unauthorised citizen’, riffing on the national penchant for unauthorised construction. He has had his apartment ten years, purchased rapidly following a family drama but carefully selected for its big 1970s windows and the high ceilings that characterise homes from before 1980s changes to the building regulations. He knocked one bedroom out completely and fused other spaces into one long living area with a raised end like a stage in place of the dining room. The frieze has been mirrored and the frames to the balcony doors anodised in gold (‘that craftsmanship still exists in Greece’) but much of the rest of it has evolved slowly. He’s steadily covering the tiles of one bathroom with iridescent silver stickers; a ‘gender-bending’ bedside table in his fabric-wrapped bedroom combines a shelf made from a power tool stand with a diadem lighting sconce.
A semi-permanent fixture is the signature large pouffes printed with Ionic columns that previously featured in his Temple of Zeus project and are currently ensembled with bolsters, rugs and throws into a free-form lounging zone. ‘Just now it looks like a gay disco at six in the morning,’ he observes. ‘The house was entirely different three years ago and it changes with every project.’
Doesn’t he need clear space to think? No. ‘It is the accumulation that inspires. Having things around.’ Everything is material – life, loves, family, history. He denies that he is a hoarder: ‘Everything is potentially going to be something.’ He digs out some old pamphlets of the archaeological finds in the Agora of Athens, detailing images of birds and coins. Their old-school graphics inspire and appear in his shows and a zine he produces called Sissy under the fictitious name CCAA – the Centre for the Casual Appropriation of Antiquity (in some issues, the Casual is sometimes substituted for a ruder C-word).
The graphics for his Venice show also explore historical typology used when Istanbul was Constantinople and culturally more Greek – which is sometimes still appropriated by the Greek Far Right. Here, however, it is matched with imagery inspired by the cover art of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1984 album Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. A gay Guernica he calls it, referencing Picasso’s anti-war magnum opus. A version of ‘Relax’ will form part of the soundtrack to his installation.
‘I stage ruins,’ says Angelidakis. His apartment suggests as much – archaeological and artistic strata. ‘I leave parts unfinished. It is very Greek.’
The Venice Biennale runs from Saturday 9 May–Sunday 22 November 2026. For more information, visit labiennale.org
