Four November occasions at the Hellenic Centre, from a photographer’s first monograph and a panel on femicide in Greek media to a Cypriot actor’s life’s work and tragedy read through queer theory.
The Hellenic Centre does two things from its Marylebone building. It curates its own programme, and it lends its rooms to the Greek and Cypriot societies that have no premises of their own. Both run under the Hellenic Community Trust, a registered charity since 1994.
November shows both sides. Three of the month’s occasions are the Centre’s own. Georgia Metaxas talks about her first photographic monograph, and a panel asks how Greek film and news coverage frame femicide. A lecture reads Electra and Medea through queer and feminist theory. The fourth, a presentation of the work of the Cypriot actor and director Vasilis Panayi, comes from Omilos Eksipiretiton, which travels from Athens for it.
Booking is required throughout. The month’s piano recital by Costas Fotopoulos is listed separately.
Mnemosyne Grove: Georgia Metaxas in Conversation with Dr Marta Weiss
Georgia Metaxas’ first monograph, published by Perimeter Editions in 2024, with the olive tree as its through-line.
The work moves between two places that hold her family: an olive grove at Palairos, where trees named for the women of her maternal line have stood five hundred years, and Ithaca, which her father’s family left for Australia in 1901. She reads photographs, archives and inherited stories as one porous account of memory. It is at seven, with a nominal five-pound entry.
Greece's Gender Divide: Femicide Through the Lens
An all-female panel on what film and news coverage of femicide in Greece makes visible, and what it draws attention away from.
The former judge Betty Iliadou sits with Dr Tonia Kazakopoulou and Dr Afroditi Koulaxi, arguing that coverage built on victimhood and emotional spectacle can obscure legislative failure and reach as far as the verdict. It is grounded in two films: Cacoyannis’ Stella of 1955 and Tonia Marketaki’s John the Violent of 1973. It is at seven, with a nominal five-pound entry.
In the Greatest Role of Life
A presentation of the work of Vasilis Panayi, the Cypriot actor, director, writer and journalist who has lived and worked in London for decades.
It is brought by Omilos Eksipiretiton, which travels from Athens and has spent more than forty-five years on Greek cultural work of this kind. It is one of the Centre’s member-society evenings rather than its own programme. It is at seven, free, with booking required.
Greek Tragedy Upside Down: Electra and Medea
Electra and Medea read through queer and feminist theory, and what that does to the hierarchies of gender, power, time and authorship the classical canon carries.
The director, choreographer and dramatherapist Mayra Stergiou, trained at LISPA and Guildhall, works through it with the artist and writer Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh. It is an afternoon session at three, with a nominal five-pound entry.