Chiderah Bosah (NI) contributes two female portraits in pale purple hues that allude to the daily struggles and resilience of the Nigerian youth. Interpreting the stereotype of “the strong black woman”, Bosah either directs Sonia‘s gaze right towards the onlooker, challenging them with her strength, or he averts Daisy‘s gaze by portraying her tender and more vulnerable side. Despite the darker composition of colours, a light shines from within his subjects, who are inspired by his friends and acquaintances.

Ebenezer Nana Bruce (GH) also focuses on female portraiture with two stirkingly bright-coloured works. The subjects emerge from the monochromatic fat background with thick strokes of paint. The titles of his works Yellow Shawl and Petals Blouse allude to the unmediated realness of the woman behind her appearance and fashion choices, and thus beyond religious beliefs, social status or personal taste.

Fashion is also pivotal in Kwaku Yaro‘s (GH) work, who resorts to upcycling and repurposing materials including mats, jutsacks, plastic containers and bags. His subjects, members of his community in Labadi, Accra, are dressed in a westernized manner, infuenced by the social media and the popular culture. Yaro calls into question the practices of fast fashion that lead to mass waste in West African countries, and insinuates the exploitation and exportation of the local natural resources through global trading routes.

Meanwhile, Courage Hunke‘s (GH) portraits draw from one of the obscurest facets of the Ghanaian society: witch camps. Hunke aims to create awareness around the oppressing practice of pronouncing any deviation from the societal norm, any form of resistance, and any expression of mental health disorder as witchcraft. Women and some children are disproportionately affected by this superstition and are ostracized from society in concentration camps that function as “safe spaces” for them.

Cédric Kouamé (CI) in his ongoing project Gifted Mold collects and recomposes vintage photographs in order to materialize the passing of time by superposing layers of history in post-independence Abidjan. His premise is that no matter the degree of distortion of the photographic material, the image still conveys a sensation by implying the personal story of its subject.

Photography also plays a distinctive role in Dessislava Terzieva‘s (BU/USA) art practice that combines collages, sculptures and installations. The series in the show brings together colourful second-hand scarfs and images from the immediate surroundings in her bulgarian hometown. She draws from the tension between the pleasant and the repulsive, the established and the precarious. Terzieva celebrates the aging of materials, the decay of public infrastructure, as well as the improvisational practices within a balkan household that stem from scarcity, leading personal narratives towards abstraction and the re-contextualization of material cultures.

Adonis Volanakis (GR) presents a sculpture in the form of a wooden suitcase which speaks to the mobility of contemporary nomads. The repetition of the phrase “I am in the box” creates a spiral, parallel to the Phaistos disc, which provokes a feeling of the utmost seclusion. Whether it refers to personal belongings or memories and subconscious narratives, the contents of the suitcase remain hidden from sight. It is these scarce contents that the nomad carries from place to place that will remind them of who they are, wherever they are.

Language is also prominent in Nicole Economides‘ (GR/USA) paintings which explore the in-between spaces of her dual citizenship. State of being refers to the painterly tradition of romanticism and suggest that identity stems from not quite belonging neither here nor there, from being neither an insider nor an outsider. Meanwhile, Apollo touches on the appropriation of Greek mythologies by western modern painters and serves as an act of reclaiming her ancestral history. On the bottom of the work, the polaroid of Apollo’s protome from the Met points out the access to transnational histories in universal museums and the ambiguous motives of the agents in the preservation and “safeguarding” of cultural heritage.

The linguistic element is also accentuated in the series Tobacco Archive by Panos Charalampous (GR) who prints letters, names, numbers, and dates on tobacco leaves in order to juxtapose the labor of local tobacco farmers to the glorifcation of smoking in flm noir, literature and advertising. The works function as material cognitive landscapes, as “dry gardens”, as testimonies of a production and economic power that fourished in Greece in the beginning of the previous century, but is now dying out.

Means of production and protocols of trade also become the backdrop in the work of Panos Famelis (GR). The silencer (draft 2/ the roar) is a “sculptive drawing” on a wooden cargo surface, where codes and protocols of transport are still visible behind the writing. The multi-layered automated transcription of poems renders the writing illegible and drives language towards abstraction: it becomes image and rhythm. Famelis contrasts the personal with the social, and he asks how they both coexist in the formation of a subjective identity in a moment of crisis.

Léllé Demertzi‘s (GR) series Original Bodies are hybrid collages on mirrors inspired by Greek mythologies and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular. The melding of sculptural and physical bodies, through photographs sourced from metropolitan museums and her sitters, alludes to the diaspora of artefacts and people, and aspires to reiterate and embody eternal traits of the human nature. The use of mirror invites the onlooker to become part of the artwork and to identify with the narratives of mythical creatures, deities and mere mortals in a process of assuming personal responsibility for trauma and igniting social healing.

Finally, Alekos Kyrarinis (GR) inspired by byzantine iconography contributes a trapezoidal marble pillar with an angelic fgure in the center of the work. Simple geometrical patterns, as well as naturalistic friezes on the top and the bottom fll the space. The light blue and beige hues and the low-relief outlines create a sense of motion and lightness for the otherwise heavy volume. History, folklore and the Christian tradition coexist in Kyrarinis’ work, which offers a dense landscape where fguration and ornament, physical and metaphysical, the Good and the Evil merge.