Four November occasions at the Hellenic Centre — a photographer's first monograph, a panel on how Greek film and media frame femicide, a Cypriot actor's life's work, and tragedy read queer.
The Hellenic Centre does two jobs from one building on Paddington Street, and reading its programme is easier once you know which is which. It curates its own events, and it lends its rooms to the Greek and Cypriot societies that have no premises of their own, which is why a bill from the Hellenic Community Trust, a charity since 1994, carries evenings it did not commission. The Vasilis Panayi evening this month comes from Omilos Eksipiretiton, which travels over from Athens for it.
November is the season’s serious month. Four evenings, none of them decorative: a photographer’s first book, a panel on how Greece reports the killing of women, a Cypriot actor’s fifty-year body of work, and two tragedies pulled apart by theory that did not exist when they were written.
Booking is required throughout and most carry a nominal five pounds. The month’s piano recital 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. Photographs, archives and inherited stories, read as one porous account of memory. Seven o'clock, £5.
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. Seven o'clock, £5.
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. One of the Centre's member-society evenings rather than its own programme. Seven o'clock.
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. An afternoon session at three, £5.