PCAI (Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative) is supporting Greece’s participation in the 61st Venice Biennale, where Andreas Angelidakis is presenting his solo exhibition Escape Room, curated by Giorgos Bekirakis.

The Greek Pavilion is transformed into a modern-day Platonic Cave, reinterpreting the iconic philosophical text as a captivating, experiential environment that engages with today’s era of post-truth and the rise of nationalist populism.

In Angelidakis’s work, the Platonic allegory serves as a flexible tool for exploring contemporary reality, where the world of images is inundated with digital illusions and cultural replicas. Turning our gaze to the history of the Greek Pavilion itself, the installation assembles a set of elements presented as contested and constructed “truths,” highlighting both the complex nature of historical knowledge and its entanglement with nationalism and propaganda.

Reimagined as an escape room, the Periptero embodies a reality structured like a game, while simultaneously confronting the paradox of a building that attempts to escape from its own “self” and, by extension, from its own history. Through a plunge into its turbulent past, the Greek Pavilion encounters a “selfie in the bathroom mirror,” frozen in Year Zero (1934): the year the Nazis began persecuting homosexuals, when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time in Venice following their electoral victories, and when the pavilions of Greece and Austria were officially inaugurated.

The 61st Venice Biennale will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2026, once again establishing itself as one of the most important international institutions for contemporary art.