• Flisvos Building & Palaio Faliro Beach

Temporary installations form successive theatrical scenes, screens and floating stages, while the spectators and the spectacle interchange, as residents and users of the aquatic limit are invited to attend actively in the configuration of communal spaces. New uses of the spaces are triggered, under the surface of the sea, in the street or in the roofs of neighboring buildings, without impeding the ones already existing.

• Esplanade Building (next to Tae Kwon Do Court), Water Plaza, Faliron Olympic Complex

The departure point of Chus Martínez’s exhibition is to expand the limits of know through the development of working hypothesis; the exhibition is entirely dedicated to the radical importance of questions. Heaven could be understood as a space for mere speculation. It seems easy but is not. Nothing is more difficult nowadays than to escape the logic of the ‘what for’. The logic of the show is simple: every one of the artists is requested to submit a work, a question, a thinking hypothesis in their own terms. Nonetheless, the show should be here conceived not from the artistic response to a topic, but as an assemblage of very different thinking logics. Logics that hopefully will help the viewer, but also the artists to develop further different interpretations of the near future.

• Esplanade Building (next to Tae Kwon Do Court), Water Plaza, Faliron Olympic Complex

As one of the curators invited to contemplate the subject of Heaven, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz oriented her approach to this immeasurably broad topic by naming her exhibition Splendid Isolation, Athens. Guided by an immersive approach rather than a topical or thematic one, her selection and presentation let the viewer ponder if and how creative activity, social practices, and aesthetic experience may be directed. “Splendid Isolation, Athens” includes a number of art works that employ some formal or structural principle, whether it be as rigid as scaffolding, as symbolic as a monetary exchange, as modular as blocks, or as flexible as narrative. For many artists in the show, some existent form—be it physical or immaterial, biographical or contrived, religious or scientific—offers a means by which to re-consider, re-form, re-imagine or even re-structure a momentary or lifelong place of inspiration.

• Esplanade Building (next to Tae Kwon Do Court), Water Plaza, Faliron Olympic Complex

Diana Baldon’s exhibition is arranged around a framing device represented by the eight circles of the anti-chamber of heaven: the purgatory. According to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a mountain brings souls to heaven through a series of tests visualised in “gironi”. Beyond being a geographically situated place, purgatory is a human condition, a process of purification or temporary punishment where souls of those who die depend on self-achievement, compassion and imagination to be prepared for redemption. However, her concept distances itself from Dante’s epic poem simply using its structure as a tool to organise works inside what we could imagine is a horizontal representation Mount Purgatory, that is a vessel, or Nautilus shell that gets smaller and smaller as it grows to end up in a rabbit hole, which could stand for the Pearly Gate.

• Esplanade Building (next to Tae Kwon Do Court), Water Plaza, Faliron Olympic Complex

Between the only common certainty that is death and the endless possibility that is after-life, there is a kind of terrible tension, the very spark of everything that is: Desire. In this light, Paradise can be understood as “Desire unleashed”. Not as an idyllic place (island, garden, Arcadia) of bliss and innocence regained. As a monument constantly rising towards its ruination, as something equally rooted in and free of the land, as a paradox that punctures time, the Hotel Paradies is such a lair of Desire. The name derives from a rather common language corruption; one which serves as a starting and end point for the conceptual references of this exhibition. Paradies: This which lies next to and beyond death. It is therefore a name that invokes an era when no names existed.

• Esplanade Building (next to Tae Kwon Do Court), Water Plaza, Faliron Olympic Complex

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? is one of the six curatorial projects of the 2nd Athens Biennial. The exhibition traces the spiritual meaning of paradise more as a ‘possibility’ or ‘promise’ within the daily spectre of life and less as a redemptive phenomenon located in an afterlife. Divided into three sections, the exhibition features works which together explore the idea of a domesticated heaven: The first section is equivalent to reality enforcement and the way one remembers Paradise through a glass darkly; in stark contrast, the second section corresponds to psychedelic journeys, decadent dreams, theatrical gestures and utopian constellations; while the last one is symbolized by an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, a sense of foreboding melancholy as well as an irrepressible impulse of repetition.