The exhibitions “Paola Pivi: I wish I am fish” and “Eva Papamargarriti: All that now flows through us” are part of AMA House’s mission to encourage the production of new artworks and the presentation of others that have not been exhibited in Greece, providing a platform for both Greek and international artists. The inaugural solo exhibitions are in dialogue with the context of the AKSS space and explore issues of positioning, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the passage of time and thinking outside of human territory.

In this year’s exhibition programme, water maintains a central role as an element of fluidity and transformation, transcendent in time and space and at the same time physical. It reflects waves of feminist thought and connects to contemporary environmental and political issues by challenging the dichotomies between nature and culture. It moves, diffuses through tides, connects, collapses, bears, metabolizes, pushes, holds and draws into depths.

Ubiquitous, water negotiates our human contract with the non-human world. How can we think through the water perspective? Can we see the world from the position of the wave, as in Pivi’s work, or can we mimic embodied hydrological cycles, as in Papamargariti’s universe?

The exhibition “The Water Or The Wave” borrows its title from John Fowles’ novel “The Magus” (1965), which was written when the author was living in Spetses and working as an English teacher at A.K.S.S. “Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?” (“What are you drinking? Water or the wave?”): the narrative hovers over this phrase, as the transmission of an accumulated poetic consciousness, never static and perpetually shifting. This displacement, linking references, reaches Virginia Woolf’s ” The Waves” and creates a firmament of allusions that grope for notions of the individual and the collective.

Papamargariti and Pivi highlight the structure and consciousness of the self within language, form and storytelling, as well as the boundary between control and knowledge. Their works delve into the theme of alternative narratives and the passage of time reflecting their impact on the landscape. The exhibitions traverse the concepts of memory and desire, while simultaneously daydreaming in a watery way, outside of time and place. It is, overall, an oscillation between water and wave, fragility and momentum, which exaggerates the tension between the material references and the energy that animates them.

Curators: Panos Giannikopoulos, Georgia Liapi
Supervised by: Anna Maria Loudarou
Production Company: AMA HOUSE

Opening hours:Daily: 18:00 – 22:00, Wednesday closed

Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses Foundation

Exhibition Duration:
8 June– 13 July 2024