The visual story of 35 years a migration
Beskida Kraja, Familja, 2013
Photo-installation, stampa lambda on dibond, variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist
Some notable moments
Something that we speak little of in regard to migration is displacement as an aesthetic project. People move across geographies for well-known reasons: social inequality, economic destitution, climate catastrophe, colonial settlement, and invasion. However, before the act of displacement occurs, there is imagination. As all the above conditions cause restriction of freedoms, imagination often serves as a symbolic agency for people. Not abiding by societal rules, imagination may lead to representations of futures in another place, where one lives a better life. Needless to say, the very idea of a ‘better life’ conveys symbolic elements of beauty for imagination liberated by the constraints of the pragmatic world, allowing for the formation of the aesthetic condition.1
Eventually, as they embark on their journey toward the ‘better place’, populations are caught up in the contradiction between what the affluent West promises as a cultural setting of values (liberty, justice, meritocracy) and how its capitalist economic system reveals itself as a material realm. While the former infuses popular imagination, the latter acts against its agency of displacement through border control, labour, and civil exploitation. Albanian migration, which began in the first months of 1991, was no exception to this.
Soon after student riots began in the capital of Albania, Tirana, in December 1990, en masse groups of people jumped onto boats to reach Italy or took to the mountains on foot to neighbouring Greece.2 Breaking out of their country’s 45-year autocratic regime, they carried a loaded imagination of freedom, justice, and an affluent life.3 But they were soon to meet with a different experience. The view of young men walking kilometres towards the Greek cities, tired and poorly dressed, sleeping roughly on public benches, hoping to be picked up in the morning for daily manual work, was not perceived as an aesthetic pursuit but rather as a sign of an inferior culture.
Spyros Staveris, “Albania, 1991. The Great Escape to Greece”, photo reportage, 1991, ASKI.
When I arrived in Greece with my parents in June 1991, there was a general public sentiment that this was a small country, unjustly treated by history and the global powers until then. At the same time, its ancient heritage seemed to inform a national understanding of a great European whiteness and to reassure its unquestionable geopolitical orientation toward the West.4 In a country which had not come to terms with its nationalistic formation, migrants from former ‘Eastern Bloc’ European countries, with the Albanian community being the largest, soon became constructed as the social ‘other’. Mass media portrayal of migrants contributed to the intensification of social stigma and pejorative language, which resulted in everyday racism permeating relations and communication through popular culture, films, and TV series, and the normalisation of demeaning jokes.5
Though Albania and Greece are neighbouring Balkan countries with centuries-long shared history (both having been part of the Ottoman Empire, only one example) as well as sharing geographical culture of food, folk music, or popular legends, these elements were deemed not sufficient to hold a ground of commonalities for those who arrived in Greece at the time. Social pressure was such that many Albanian migrants, coming from an atheist past, felt obliged to adopt the local Christian Orthodox religion and to change their names to Greek ones. They would often conceal their country of origin or teach their children not to speak of it in order to become ‘an accepted part’ in their new social habitat. This cultural devaluation of the migrant population gave rise to and consolidated the dominating native culture versus a ‘less worthy’ and silenced migrant one.6
Here came the artists
Amid the constructed public semantics of being an Albanian in Greece in the early 1990s, the visual artists arrived. Most were educated at a higher level at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana within a pedagogic environment of Soviet formation. Not only were the curriculum, bibliography, and the taught methodology such, but several of the teaching professors had graduated in the Soviet Union. Albanian socialist realism was considered an extension of the Soviet school, as earlier avant-garde streams had not taken root locally. Moreover, socialist realism only appeared in the country in the late 1940s, by which time the radical aesthetic movements of the Russian avant-garde had already proved unrealised.7
Albanian artists of the early 1990s graduated from the Academy of Arts specialising in painting and sculpture. Due to a censored curriculum, they had little awareness of, but were eager to acquire knowledge of, conceptual practices that developed during the 50s, 60s, and 70s and that laid the groundwork for contemporary art as we understand it today. Meanwhile, new media as a visual form was being formulated worldwide with the emergent technology of the time. These artists arrived with their own high hopes of accessing information, techniques, and materials, and mainly, with the aspiration to develop new and unconstrained practices.
Instead, they were, almost entirely, thrown onto the market of souvenir crafts and ecclesiastic icons. There, migrant artists would make good use of their advanced technical skills to reproduce paintings of the Greek islands, intended for tourists, as well as iconography for local and travelling believers. Such a market thrived with the arrival of visual artists from Albania and other Eastern European countries. In Athens, Plaka, the historic centre around the Acropolis, became a working hub for migrant artists. Their working spaces were the basements of the numerous souvenir and gallery shops located in this buzzing tourist area. They were mainly painters, but also sculptors who turned to painting for a viable income and were commissioned to create murals in the interiors of restaurants and hotels. The commissioned work fabricated classical themes, such as Renaissance depictions of ancient Greece (reproductions of Michelangelo’s famous frescos), portrayals of mythical figures, or Olympian gods and goddesses.
This arrangement was meant to be a professional stepping stone, enabling them to initially afford their living while developing their own work and moving on to pursue individual practices. Eventually, it proved to be more than a temporary condition, and for most migrant artist of this generation, it remains their full-time occupation to date.
Agron Bregu, Evening, 1989
Oil on canvas, 120.5 x 131.2 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy Collection of National Gallery of Arts, Tirana
Agron Bregu, a promising young painter who had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana, was one of the artists arriving in 1991. In Albania, his painting Evening (1989) became a seminal work in the post-regime art history as the first artwork not to abide by the rigorous socialist realism guidelines. Evidently influenced by surrealist elements, Bregu painted his family in a quotidian, anguished moment that conveyed a grey uncertainty for today and tomorrow, features that made a clear break from the pompous forms, bright colours, and socially accomplished settings that a socialist realism theme would impose.8 One now wonders whether, in that uncertainty, he could foresee the setbacks and hardships of his own migration soon to come.
On his arrival in Athens, Bregu was ‘accommodated’ in a souvenir shop in Plaka, where he started working in decorative painting. Over almost 35 years, he has moved to numerous spaces in the area and has produced an immeasurable amount of works for tourists’ consumption, as well as religious icons and murals. He always kept his own painting alongside: (soft)surrealist depictions of his familial life, and the quasi-metaphysical reckonings. His son also paints but maintains a job to support his family, whereas his wife, Kozeta, graduated as a classical singer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana, but was never able to sing professionally in Athens.9
Bregu, like most migrant visual artists in the 1990s, came out of the limitations and censorship of socialist realism only to run into the firm structures of exclusion in their new, otherwise promised, free life. Their own aesthetic project of migration was put on permanent hold and did not come to the realisation they had once imagined.
The visual arts terrain for the migrants
What was to be found here in the visual arts of the 1990s was a terrain in its own transition. Legendary galleries of the 1970s and the 1980s, like Desmos Art Gallery, were shutting down, and there seemed to be both an institutional and a formative crisis which postmodernity was good at causing, in Greece perhaps more than elsewhere. Modernity in the arts seemed to have evolved mainly around the circles of the social elite. As the country had battled with historical challenges until the mid-1970s, the working class was socially absent from art spaces.10 And now that mass migration had moved in, replacing the existing working class almost in its entirety, it caused major shifts in the country’s social order and, eventually, in that of artmaking. Migrant artists were treated as the working class of the arts, designated to fabricate reproductions or decorative work, while migrant audiences were nowhere to be found near art exhibitions, even as passers-by.
Antimigrant sentiment grew significantly around 2004 as a result of Greece holding the Olympic Games (the Games coming home reinforcing the nation’s attachment to the ancient heritage) and winning the European Men’s Football Championship (Euro 2004). Both events were widely perceived and publicly magnified as a cultural and national triumph. A crescendo of nationalistic language prevailed, and there was a loss of migrant life to racist attacks. The notorious slogan “Albanian, you will never become Greek” that was chanted in the streets and sprayed on public walls, inflicted the social understanding of our migrant community and designated us as the ‘absolute other’ to Greekness.
A bag full of telephone cards: Making the Archive of Albanian Migration exhibition
ASKI and SNFPHI, September 2024, Tavros art space
In the same year, the first major contemporary art exhibition, Outlook, now considered historical, took place, followed by the appearance of the Athens Biennale in 2007. However, neither of these two large-scale projects turned their attention to capturing the political tension around the migrant population as a significant social shift in contemporary Greece. They rather focused and limited themselves to importing visual discourse from international art centres.11 This first edition of the Athens Biennale was titled Destroy Athens and aimed at a visual theorisation of “the other within us”. It, however, failed to take notice of the obvious ‘otherness’ that was constructed and now rooted in Greek society, and presented a vague attempt to deconstruct notions of Greekness.12 At the same time, public infrastructure for contemporary art was scarce, and the mere fact that these exhibitions were taking place was considered a somewhat optimistic event in art circles.
In the editions that followed, the Athens Biennale developed and grew, receiving funding mainly through public institutions. It made a point to occupy old, empty buildings in the centre of Athens, coincidentally in the neighbourhoods where migrant communities had settled and had become a major part of social production. Yet these communities remained absent from the artistic discourse and practices that were taking place in the very spaces they inhabited. The Biennale’s Agora of 2013 and Omonoia of 2015–2017 intended to present innovatory curatorial methods in the form of social laboratories involving multidisciplinary practitioners. Already deep into the decade of the Greek financial crisis, these iterations delved into its vast social ramifications.
But Omonoia. Omonoia. Omonoia. If there is one place in Athens where migrant populations feel they belong, or where they feel it belongs to them, it is Omonoia Square. Yet, the curatorial text for Omonoia spoke only of the Greek intellectual heritage of the area from the 1920s while there was no significant engagement in the programme with the numerous social groups living in the margins around its neighbourhoods (being not only migrants, but substance users, sex workers, LGBTQ+, and more) that in fact the Greek financial crisis pushed further to destitution.
In the meantime, conversations that took place internationally examined our transient experience as a migrant population emerging from the former Eastern European Bloc in a broader context and theorised the contemporary global condition following the 1989 Berlin Wall events.13 Though Greece is geographically surrounded by Eastern European countries such as Albania and Bulgaria, and is home to people from Romania, Poland, and former Soviet countries, there was no genuine interest in these theoretical and curatorial fields as experienced by its living population. Historical or contemporary art from this region was hardly available for public view; it was considered ‘outdated’ or just ‘not Western’, unlike what the dominant culture identified with.14
The lack of this discourse contributed to large migrant populations being viewed as artless or culturally as victims of autocratic propaganda, and therefore not able to engage in contemporary thinking and artmaking. Whereas importing Albanian established contemporary artists from abroad, such as Anri Sala and Adrian Paci, had started to become a trend. Needless to say, their work was very much about their own migratory experience or the personal transition into contemporary life.
Mario Banushi, Mam, I remember everything, documentation of live performance at Onassis AiR Dramaturgy Fellowship programme 2023-2024; photo by Mario Banushi
Slow change was noted at documenta 14, which took place in Athens and Kassel in 2017 and attempted an understanding of the diverse historical and contemporary art of Eastern European countries. Its artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, himself Polish, set a different tone to the many ways of looking at the region. Quintessential artworks of Albanian socialist realism, alongside several contemporary works, were placed on display in major venues throughout Athens. Those of painters Abdurrahim Buza, Hasan Nallbani, and Edi Hila were included among a dozen others.
In addition, Albanian art practitioners were engaged in various capacities, either as curatorial advisors, writers, or project facilitators; roles that were covered by Erzen Shkololli, Edi Muka, and Arnisa Zeqo, all three accomplished curators living and working abroad. This arrangement certainly helped place Albanian art within a broader international context and established a much-needed presence on the local scene. As such, it enabled exploration of diverse trajectories of Albanian historical and contemporary conditions and experiences. At the same time, the Athens iteration of documenta 14 was not able to instigate a meaningful relationship with the large Albanian local community, which could have been fostered through educational meetings, special tours, or participatory projects. In this perspective, an opportunity was missed for the migrant, working-class, and frowned-upon community to revisit their own past via the presence of these recontextualised Albanian historical artworks. And alas, to create an encounter with the discourse and materiality of contemporary art that could have provided them with significant tools to comprehend their current position in Greek society.
An additional project dedicated to the broader migrant experience in Athens was initiated by documenta 14: the ‘Victoria Square Project’, named after and located in a central Athens square, which was a meeting point and rough-sleeping place for frequent groups of migrants and refugees arriving at the time from Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries in a new historical flux. By posing the critical question “Who is the contemporary Athenian?”, this project was imperative for the visibility of migrant communities in public space and ran a 7-year programme that engaged them in art practices and creative cohabitation.
Stepping into the 2020s, we saw the reinauguration of the National Museum of Contemporary Arts, Athens (EMΣT), as well as the opening and grounding of several influential private foundations.
The National Museum of Contemporary Arts’ new mission statement reinstated the role of the public museum as a space of knowledge production, as well as of critical thought and practices. It also reoriented the museum’s cultural focus toward the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the neighbouring Arab and North African regions. A necessary lens to decentralise the 1990s’ and 2000s’ idea of Greece being understood solely as a Western and European nation, which had brought the arts and culture to a formative crisis and had fostered the Greek meanings of non-European ‘otherness’. Moreover, it recognised the hybrid and fluid composition of individual and collective identity, as well as the diverse inhabiting societal communities. Statecraft and Beyond, a 2022 group exhibition, set the tone for the above by examining how notions of the modern state are constructed, the prevailing narratives of national homogeneity or uniformity, and its colonial foundations. It also opened the public discussion around the possible formation of social citizenship.
It was only in 2024 that major exhibitions dedicated to the migrant experience and their social condition made an appearance in the Greek capital. A bag full of telephone cards: Making the Archive of the Albanian Migration, a presentation of the newly founded Archive of Albanian Migration, took place at Tavros art space and was curated by me and the coordinator of the archive at the time, Ilirida Musaraj. Initiated by and housed at the Contemporary Social History Archive (ASKI), a historically significant depository and research institution, the Albanian Archive ran a two-year pilot programme from 2022. With support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University, NY, the pilot programme collected oral histories from members of the community across generations, genders, abilities, and backgrounds to showcase their multilayered migratory experience. Personal objects, handwritten letters, books, and magazines published in Albanian in the past three decades, documentation of the bureaucratic ordeal to obtain legality, and research of media profiling since the 1990s make all part of the archive and were on display in the presentation. Black and white photographs by Greek photographer Spyros Staveris rolled on a slide projector onto one of the exhibition walls; a pioneering documentation of the walking route of Albanian migrants from the borders to their destination, their moments in sleeping shelters or being surrounded by police and getting arrested at Omonoia Square in the infamous ‘sweep’ operations.
2. Latent Community (Ionian Bisai / Sotiris Tsiganos), Otranto, 2020
Film stills
Courtesy of the artists
In addition, artwork Otranto (2020), by the artistic duo Latent Community, Ionian Bisai of Albanian origin and Sotiris Tsiganos of Greek origin, was shown. Now a seminal work on the historicity of the Albanian migration, the film turns the lens on the water borders of Italy, which were also a frequent passage route in the 1990s. The artists embark on a journey to follow the families of 81 migrants who were drowned at sea in the southern Italian city of Otranto. Starting from the Albanian port of Vlorë (the origin city of Bisai), this work is a poetic testimony of the unresolved migratory trauma and loss caused by the border violence in the Mediterranean. Italian authorities turned the shipwreck of Katër e Gjatës into a public ‘artwork’, destroying the evidence of its capsizing. Focusing on the years-long efforts of the families to find restorative justice, the artists compose an emotional anti-monument to the shipwreck’s cover-up. And, at the same time, they create a register for the visual liminality of these ongoing border practices in the Mediterranean waters.
To accompany the presentation of the Archive, a series of open discussions was organised to inquire into how we speak about borders and migration, the racist events of 2004, issues of contemporary archiving, and other ways of bringing to the fore silenced experiences.
The lived experience as seen today
Alongside Latent Community, a vast body of art practices has emerged over the past 4 to 5 years, many of them by young artists who have arrived in Greece at an early age or were born into Albanian migrant families. Their field of research and dynamic visual language explores the migratory lived experience as a personal and intergenerational condition. Manifesting in a variety of art forms, these practices have started to gain recognition, drawing the attention of audiences and critics alike.15 Crossing the borders, resolution of trauma, tracing discontinuity, reconstructing memory, Balkan rituals, and a particular emphasis on the migrant mother and woman are only some of the reccurring subjects.
Kleitia Kokalari, Make me – Generation 2, 2025
Oil on canvas, 84 x 84 cm
Cοurtesy of the artist
Kleitia Kokalari walked the Albanian-Greek border twice at the age of six with her parents and her younger sister. This crossing has had a lasting effect on her and appears in her work in various treatments. Graduating from the Athens School of Fine Arts, she initially engaged in multimedia installations and now works in painting. Kokalari is interested in the depiction of her story as a study of subject formation. Considering migration as a passage in cognition, she visits the geography of borders as a landscape of the psyche. Her work often examines the physical scale of perception and representation, inviting the viewer to release the boundaries between self and artwork, and experience her passage.16
2. Neritan Zinxhiria, A Country of Two, 2016
Single channel video, colour with sound, 10΄΄
Cοurtesy of the artist
Recovering fragmentation and reconstructing memory are central to the work of award-winning filmmaker Neritan Zinxhiria. In the 10-minute film A Country of Two (2016), he revisits his parents’ love story to come to terms with his family’s migration journey. His parents arrived in Greece on foot, and Zinxhiria decides to embark on the same walking route in reverse. Questioning whether it is love that brought his parents to migrate or whether it is migration that kept their love alive, the artist reveals the emotional and imaginary fragments of his childhood. Through wandering speculations, his visual work allows for continuous construction of understanding.17
Beskida Kraja, The Map, 2021
Photo installation
88 pieces of 22-karat gold leaf hand-sewn, metal print, 100 x 75 cm, project in progress
Courtesy of the artist
Part of Beskida Kraja’s practice is the attempt to overcome discontinuity through material and emotional mending. In The Map (2021), she tries to piece together the memory of her matrilineage by stitching onto paper with scraps of gold leaves and thread. The assembled surface conveys events of loss and separation, and becomes an emotional site that she then physically carries. Other elements of eventual synthesis appear in her work Familja (2013), where Kraja uses the ritual of baking bread to create a place of co-being by shaping the bread into a binding form that fits on her and her husband’s heads. This work could refer to the familial couple struggling through their bewildering life of migration. Or to other situations of conflict, such as the one of two Balkan bordering countries sharing the same cooking traditions, and that despite all inflictions, now appear moulding their heads in dough.18
The critically praised director and performer Mario Banushi, in Mam, I remember everything (2025), opened phyllo pastry, a staple known to every Balkan household. He then carefully covered his reclining mother at an open performance to the public. Following his poignant tribute to the maternal figure in his theatre play Mami, Banushi releases the tension in the mother-child relationship by unfolding the many layers of complexity that migration can infuse it with. He uses dough as a carrier of meaning to elevate the contradictions of love and adoration with the battling feelings of a child who was brought to migration. Having grown up well before his time and carrying the burden of the hardworking migrant parents, this child is propelling a moment of intergenerational trauma.
Hail to the mother for enduring this performance. An evocative enactment on her own migratory experience and the deeply felt duty to sacrifice for her child.19
Doreida Xhogu, Mama Klorin, 2024
Single channel video
Video still
Courtesy of the artist
The mother-child relationship is also present in Doreida Xhogu’s practice. From the age of 12, when she arrived in the country, Xhogu worked as a cleaner alongside her mother and aunt. Entering arts education only at the age of 34, in her project Mama Klorin, she composes a visual memoir of her path to becoming an artist while constantly negotiating her identities as a migrant woman and cleaner. She paints on found bathroom tiles and maintains her diary in the form of an artist’s book on a roll of kitchen towel, where she draws and records her everyday thoughts and poems in Greek and Albanian. Xhogu shares her creative space with other women cleaners, her colleagues and friends, as her companions across realms. Together, they make ceramics, shaping bottles of cleaning products, telling stories about the places they come from, sharing their dreams and memories, or the daily anxieties of their working migrant life.20
As well as resembling forms of maintenance art from the 1970s, Xhogu’s project speaks of the creative practices as a survival strategy for working migrant women. Despite their qualifications, professional skills, and aspirations, cleaning work was the only available and viable option offered to them. In many ways, the migrant women ‘liberated’ Greek women from the burden of housework, caring for children and the elderly, and opened the way for them to pursue professional paths or engage in social activities. And one wonders how the Greek MeToo movement of the past five years has echoed for these everyday encompassing women.
Other visual practices withhold transformative and reparatory elements in their conveying of the migratory experience. Magnum International photographer Enri Canaj uses his camera to capture the lives of migrant and refugee groups as they journey on foot to their destinations or as they go about their daily routines in refugee camps. Other marginalised communities in the Omonoia area, where he grew up, have also been subject to his work.21
Choreographer and movement artist Ermira Goro, alongside her internationally shown choreographed performances, organises the Meetings (ongoing) in various locations. She creates situated gatherings where she invites people of different ethnicities, ages, abilities, sexualities, and other backgrounds, in a reparatory cohabitation of space. By enacting movement, she attempts to reset societal relationality within a collective synthesis.22
A younger generation of artists and activists in Athens is developing practices that are in-between and intersectional, addressing hybrid formation, grassroots activism, community archiving, and cross-disciplinary engagement. Poet and researcher Marleno and fluid collective MiQ inhabit the space of queer and migrant youth identity. They organise cinema screenings, collect oral histories, produce zines, hybridise language in written and spoken words, and display ephemeral DIY projects.23
2. Ermira Goro, Meetings, ongoing
Community dance performance documentation
Courtesy of the artist
Photo by Christina Karagiannis
Brikena Gishto is a playwright and stage director, a published poet, and a performer. She initiates public interventions, such as tracing social landmarks of violent loss of life in the public domain or reading poetry on public transportation, alongside working on sign language methodologies.24 Fjorida Cenaj is an emerging visual artist and activist; on the side of her moving image and performance practice, she is part of Culterra, a cultural activist collective that organises around working-class migrant communities in Elefsina, an industrial town on the outskirts of Athens.25
Towards an ending or a start
While there are too many young and promising practices to mention here, the above make for a versatile visual ecology, in most part yet to be picked up by our museums and galleries. While theatre, film, and dance-based forms by artists of migrant background have found a place within institutions, we are left with higher expectations for an in-depth engagement and curatorial commitment from the programming of the visual arts milieu.
And since we Albanians first settled 35 years ago, a hierarchy of migration has occurred with the arrival of other non-white and Muslim communities. We no longer represent the ‘absolute other’ in society or the arts, whereas visual practices of other communities still strive to gain their own agency beyond the confines of the curatorial and artistic presentation by established Greek practitioners.
Assimilation, integration, or even inclusion are not adequate conditions to address these issues. For all of them, in different degrees, presume and establish the unquestionable dominance of a main social body to which smaller ones are ‘allowed in’ or asked to ‘adapt to’. While most of this has already taken place through cultural devaluation of the migrant population, what is now needed is to seed cultural and social terms of cohabitation and coexistence. And if contemporary art wants to own its place as the vanguard of society, now is the time to act on it.
Immanuel Kant establishes imagination as central to what he calls the “aesthetic idea” in the Judgement of Taste and Judgement of Aesthetics in his Critique of Judgement (1790). For other readings on the relation of imagination and the aesthetic experience, see Amy Kind (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, New York: Routledge, 2016.
The reasons for this en masse departure lay in social asphyxiation and dire economic conditions caused by nearly total isolation of the country from the international community, even from the Eastern Bloc nations that adhered to its ideology. Albanian-American historian Elidor Mëhilli provides an account of these political and diplomatic events in From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.
Writer and philosopher Lea Ypi vividly describes how the symbolic and cultural understandings of the prohibited liberties manifested in the imagination of the Albanian people during the dictatorship in her award-winning book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, London: Penguin Books, 2021.
Yannis Hamilakis’ The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) analyses how the Greek national understanding and identification with European whiteness were constructed around the glorification of ancient culture and archaeology.
In her paper, “Antiracist critique, cultural theory and analysis, and public discourse in Greece in the 1990s and beyond”, Greek cultural theorist Ioanna Laliotou speaks of the supremacist narratives of national homogeneity and uniformity that prevailed in public discourse at the time, which led to migrants coming from Eastern European countries constituting the ‘otherness’ in Greek society. In Efi Avdela, Dimitris Arvanitakis, Eliza Anna Delveroudi, Evgenios Matthiopoulos, Sokratis Petmezas, Tasos Sakellaropoulos (Eds.), Racial Theories in Greece, Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2017 [in Greek].
Greek philoxenia (the ancient custom of hospitality) is often held up as a philosophical beacon when thinking and referring to contemporary migration. Albanian-Greek scholar Ervin Shehu provides an account of the hospitality relations as they unravelled when he arrived alone in Greece at the fragile age of 18. In Uninvited Guests (Ioannina: Isnafi, 2021, pp. 101–126 [in Greek]), he speaks of the hierarchy that emerges between the host and the guest in the migratory condition, a structure that is constantly under negotiation and evolves around the identity of the host. The migrant ‘guest’ is expected to give up elements of her own identity in order to ‘legitimise’ a place in the stay. Jacques Derrida considered this a conditional form of hospitality as opposed to the unconditional hospitality which he theoretically analysed and defended; the one provided without demands and limitations on behalf of the host, and which remains open to all kinds of otherness.
In-depth studies of socialist realism can be found in the work of theorist Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship and Beyond, transl. Charles Rougle, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. In the Albanian bibliography, Maxim Gorky’s novel The Mother lay at the epicentre of the aesthetic analysis of socialist realism, rather than the latter deriving from a historical continuum or a breakout of local visual traditions. Albanian philosopher Alfred Uçi, who studied in the Soviet Union, was among its leading formative scholars at the time. Substantial re-readings of socialist realism in Albania and its relation to contemporary understandings are gradually emerging, such as several recent writings by scholar Raino Isto.
Albanian curator and art critic Gëzim Qendro, who engaged in theorising socialist realism after 1990, included Evening (1989) in a dedicated exhibition while serving as a director at the National Gallery in Tirana. He also presented the artwork for theoretical and historical analysis in the gallery’s magazine PamorART, in its 4th issue (1999), now available online: https://afterart.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/pamorart-year-2-no-4-1999.pdf.
I met with Agron Bregu on Saturday, 1st November 2025, in Koukaki, Athens, for tea and to talk about this article. I hadn’t seen him in years.
Art writer Despina Zefkili, in her column for the magazine Athinorama and as part of the Temporary Academy of Arts collective (PAT), has written on several occasions about the crisis of the Greek art scene in the 1990s. PAT’s project “Agreement Without Principles” aimed to investigate the Greek contemporary art historiography and ran from October 2016 to July 2017 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ISET), Athens.
For more information on the exhibition Outlook, see Catherine Cafopoulos’ review in Artforum magazine at the time, https://www.artforum.com/events/outlook-204697.
Information about the first edition of the Athens Biennale is available online: https://athensbiennale.org/en/. The latest 2021 edition, entitled ECLIPSE, spoke of the social conditions and art practices from the Global South and of the geographical position of Athens as a centre of flux and movement. However, those elements were set within a discourse of decoloniality as understood and developed globally and did not extend to explore the ways that colonial relations may have developed in Athens (or Greece) in the past decades regarding migration. A special reference to the African Diaspora was made in a global context, but it failed to address the social conditions of the populous African community living here in the country.
In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC (MoMA) started its publication series Primary Documents, whose first edition was A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. This was then expanded in its 9th edition of 2018 in the Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Both publications presented examples of critical theory and curatorial practice on the visual arts of the former Eastern Bloc. Redefining the Balkans geographically and avoiding viewing socialist realism through a colonial gaze, as art writer Claire Bishop pointed out, were among its many topics. Furthermore, the transnational project titled Former West (2008–2016) lasted for several years as a platform of participatory workshops, discussions, and exhibitions, and took place across Europe, including key locations like Berlin, Utrecht, London, Budapest, and Warsaw, with contributions by numerous scholars and artists such as Boris Groys and Hito Steyerl. It culminated in 2016 with the publication Former West, Art After the Contemporary 1989, which aimed to destabilise the notion of the West as a prevailing, supremacist condition after the events of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
One such connection point could have been the Costakis Collection, the most important collection of the Russian avant-garde in Greece and the largest outside Russia, containing artworks by Tatlin, Malevich, Popova, and Kandinsky. Most of the artworks are dated to the first three decades of the twentieth century, and a number of them are relevant in both time and form to socialist realism. Despite the collection’s immense historical significance, its exhibitions remain attractive to a limited audience. The collection was brought in 2000 by the State Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki (MOMus).
Art writer Despina Zefkili has consistently covered and supported the emerging practices of migrant artists in her column for the magazine Athinorama.
After Kokalari finished high school, her father, a mathematician, was not keen on her becoming a visual artist, fearing that it would not provide professional stability. When he heard that Albanian painters were selling work in Plaka’s souvenir galleries, he reconsidered. Kokalari attended the Athens School of Fine Arts at the age of 27 while supporting herself. She studied painting with Zafos Xagoraris and sculpture with Afroditi Liti.
Neritan Zinxhiria’s migrant home was in central Athens in front of the historical cinema ‘Trianon’. As a kid, he used to sneak in and watch films. He made his first short film at the age of 18, and four years later, in 2012, he won his first Golden Dionysus at the Drama Short Film Festival with Chamomile, gaining broad international recognition. In 2025, he was for the second time the winner of the festival with his film Noi.
Beskida Kraja arrived in Athens at the age of 18. With a sculptor father, Kraja attended arts school in Albania. Though she brought a certain level of visual literacy, she was not able to enter the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Over the next 10 years, she was fully involved in the production of Orthodox iconography, during which she developed an understanding of its language and historical aspects. She eventually succeeded in passing the exams to enter ASFA at the age of 29 and pursued her studies while continuing to work in iconography and caring for her family. In her contemporary practice, Kraja incorporates elements of iconography, perhaps the only Albanian migrant visual artist of her generation to do so.
Mario Banushi was separated from his migrant parents as an infant and was entrusted to his grandmother, as many children of migrant families were. He eventually travelled to Greece to rejoin his parents at the age of six. This event appears in his theatre work in multiple variations. His live performance, Mam, I remember everything (2025), was a presentation of his Dramaturgy Fellowship at the Onassis AiR programme 2023–2024.
An exhibition of Doreida Xhogu’s project Mama Klorin took place in 2024 at The Demos Center of the American College of Greece and included an open discussion and a participatory workshop with the women cleaners. The exhibition was curated by Ioanna Papapavlou and me. The artist is working on a documentary that follows the daily lives of cleaners, produced by Marni Films and set to be released soon. See also Dafni Vitali’s text in the present issue of Octopus.
Enri Canaj’s work was part of the group exhibition Space of Togetherness, organised by NEON Organization in 2024, and is currently on a solo presentation at the newly opened cultural centre by Melissa Network. An overview of his work can be found on his web page, https://www.enricanaj.com.
Ermira Goro’s choroegraphic work has been supported by the Athens Epidaurus Festival and numerous private foundations and has been part of contemporary dance festivals nationally and internationally. For further information, visit https://www.ermiragoro.com/.
See the Instagram pages of the MiQ collective (https://www.instagram.com/miqitalb/) and the poet and multi-practitioner Marleno Nika (https://www.instagram.com/le_nomar/?hl=en).
The National Theatre of Greece supported and produced Topography of death or Let us not forget, directed by Brikena Gishto, a walking play that revisited the streets of central Athens where young lives were taken violently, such as trans activist Zak Kostopoulos and teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos.
More information on the practice of Fjorida Cenaj and Culterra can be found on https://www.instagram.com/fiofiro444/?hl=en and https://www.instagram.com/cult_terra/?hl=en.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pati Vardhami is a writer and curator. She has studied Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has worked with art institutions in Athens, Tirana, and London, such as Melas Martinos, Frieze Projects and Talks, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Hayward Gallery, and Tirana Biennial of Contemporary Art, among others.