It is well known that art functions as a universal code of communication. Therefore, it is important for artists to express social concerns by creating bridges of communication as an antidote to war and ecological destruction.

Bright news comes as visual artist Maria Zervos opens the doors of her art studio in Athens for the first time, inviting us to see her work based on the nature-culture dichotomy. In a world torn by loss and growing harsher, Zervos’s work promotes multicultural dialogue and the exchange of ideas.

Her artistic practice involves an interdisciplinary approach to moving images, performance, painting, poetry, and sculptural video installations, continuously negotiating between place and utopia. Zervos explores the fusion of nature and culture, finding pivotal meaning in the subtle concepts of passage and ritual. Investigating how social conditions affect human experience, her work deals with history and memory by remapping liminal spaces. This manifests in video recordings of eerie places such as the summit of Mount Olympus, gray zones, or off-map locations, seeking a kind of personal geography.

At her art studio in central Athens, Maria Zervos will welcome visitors to present her work. She will showcase a new montage of the piece “Nomadology (The Desert),” filmed in Chile in 2011, which documents her performance journey through the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert. For this project, Zervos walked along the Loa River that crosses the Atacama Desert, covering great distances and capturing these journeys through her cinematic lens.

The imagery of Zervos’s Nomadology (The Desert), with its dunes, the river running through the desert, endangered plants, seaweed, salts, llamas and antelope, suggests that there is more to life on earth than mere human activity. This idea is extremely important to the Greek visual artist, considering the scale of the climate crisis today.

Maria Zervos’ work is about personal and cultural transitions from one place to another, tracing ghostly landscapes on and off the map, but at the core of Maria Zervos’ work is a call for ecological consciousness, creating a dialogue about the imperative for environmental action, highlighting humanity’s role in the larger ecosystem.

As part of the artist’s Open Studio on July 7, Maria Zervos will present her work with free admission to the public. The aim is to encourage constructive dialogue and the exchange of ideas on an artistic level.

BIO

Maria Zervos is a visual artist, performer, and poet living and working in Athens. She studied fine arts in Athens, Amsterdam, and Boston. Her work includes drawings, painting, video, installations, and performances, often starring herself in her video pieces. Through her art, she explores the tension between nature and culture, fiction and documentary, creating a framework for sociopolitical critique.

Zervos has represented Greece internationally with participations such as the prestigious New York artist residency program International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in 2017 and 2020, and was invited as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University in 2012 with a Fulbright Foundation scholarship. From 2014 to 2017, she taught as an Assistant Professor at Harvard and Emerson College in Boston.

Her work has been presented both in Greece and internationally in exhibitions, galleries, and institutions including MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, ISCP New York, the Onassis Foundation in New York, the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, the Hellenic American Union, and the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. She has exhibited extensively in the USA, UK, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, France, among others. Her works belong to collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection, and Leonidas Beltsios Collection. She has received awards for her artistic work from institutions including Fulbright, NEON, the Onassis Foundation, Mondriaan Fund, AFK in the Netherlands, and the Arte Laguna International Art Prize Award in Venice.

More information about her and her work can be found on her website: www.maria-zervos.com.