Stepping inside the Greek pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale feels like entering an S&M club.
Behind a distressed black curtain, soft objects resemblant of beanbags are dotted across a red neon lit floor, which seems to extend to infinity beneath one's feet. Images of chains wrap around sculptures, themselves fragments of marble columns which have been dismantled and softened after millennia of holding up Greek temples. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1980s synth-pop anthem Relax pulses throughout the space, while pink tubular sculptures are hung with souvenirs: t-shirts adorned with images by queer artists from over the decades and the face of Zak Kostopoulos, a 33-year-old Greek-American LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive activist and drag artist known as Zackie Oh, who was beaten to death in Athens in 2018.
The pavilion, who goes by the name of Grecia, is also conceived as a drag artist. Andreas Angelidakis, the artist and architect behind the dizzying installation, has always “treated buildings and objects as characters, emotional beings”, as he puts it. In this instance, Grecia “starts deconstructing herself as a national subject”, says the co-curator of the pavilion, Ioli Kavakou, who organised the exhibitions alongside George Bekirakis. “She realises that being a national subject doesn’t mean following a specific identity or a linear narrative that defines ‘Greekness’.” Grecia, then, is also an “escape room”, as the installation is titled.
The idea of the national pavilion has been at the heart of the Venice Biennale since 1907, when permanent national buildings began to appear in the Giardini. The Greek pavilion was erected in 1934, towards the end of the Second Hellenic Republic and at a moment of rising fascism across Europe. That year, Hitler met Mussolini for the first time, in Venice where they toured the Biennale together.
Greece, meanwhile, entered a period of political turmoil marked by the collapse of the republic and the subsequent dictatorship. Designed in a neo-Byzantine style, the Greek pavilion’s architecture reflects a “post-neoclassical symmetrical order” typical of the language used in official buildings during the Fascist era.
Its architect M. Papandreou worked closely with his Italian colleague Brenno Del Giudice, who was part of the Italian fascist regime’s official efforts to modernise the Venice Biennale’s grounds. While researching his project, Angelidakis discovered that the two columns at the entrance to the Greek pavilion are simplified reproductions of pillars inside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which, the artist points out, the Greek right-wing has always promised to “make Greek again”.
Current echoes with the “world turning Maga” are not to be overstated, in Angelidakis’s view. As he says, the national pavilions today “stand as frozen fascist and/or colonial caves, trapped in a Giardini known to investigate the results of political choices, and turn them into art”. He adds: “Every pavilion is a mechanism of truth, just like the mechanisms in Plato’s allegory of the cave, which today sounds like a phantasmagoria about global Trump-ism.”
