Four October occasions at the Hellenic Centre — two breakfast conversations around its autumn exhibitions, a lecture on the first Greek women painters, and a talk with Christos Dikeakos.
Several attempts to establish a Greek cultural centre in London had already failed when the Hellenic Community Trust bought the building at 16-18 Paddington Street in 1992 and registered as a charity two years later. The Hellenic Centre has run from it ever since, to promote Hellenic culture in Britain and keep the relationship between the two countries in working order.
October is where its autumn opens out. The house runs two exhibitions through the month, Giorgos Ioannou’s pop and the Fernweh collection, and builds its talks around them, which is why two of these four begin at half past nine in the morning with a breakfast rather than at seven with a glass.
The other two stand on their own. Gelly Gryntaki opens a lecture series that starts in antiquity and works forward through three millennia of Greek women’s painting; Christos Dikeakos, who has spent fifty years photographing Athens and Vancouver as though both were dig sites, talks through the work with Emily Butler.
Booking is required for all four, and everything except the two conversations carries a nominal five pounds.
In Conversation: Andrew Wilson with Dimitris Ioannou and Kostas Stasinopoulos
A breakfast reception at half past nine, then a conversation on the practice of Giorgos Ioannou, led by the critic and curator Andrew Wilson.
Wilson is joined by Kostas Stasinopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programmes at KYKLOS, and by the artist's son Dimitris Ioannou. It accompanies the Centre's exhibition A Different Kind of Pop, which runs 8 October to 19 November.
In Conversation: Irene Y. Panagopoulos, Katerina Hadji and Dr Nayia Yiakoumaki
A morning on collecting as a way of ordering the world — which stories are kept, shown and passed on.
Irene Y. Panagopoulos, who founded the collection the show is drawn from, sits with its curator Katerina Hadji and with Dr Nayia Yiakoumaki, Director of the Hellenic Centre. The exhibition behind it is Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands, and the German word it takes its title from — a longing for distant places — is the conversation's real subject.
Spinning Myths, Painting Shadows: Women and the Origins of Greek Art
The opening lecture of The Origin of Painting, a series tracing Greek women's work in the visual arts across nearly three millennia.
Pliny puts the origin of painting in the hand of a Greek woman: Kora of Sicyon, tracing her lover's shadow on a wall to keep his likeness before he left. The art historian Gelly Gryntaki starts there, with the earliest female weavers and the named women painters of antiquity — Timarete, Anaxandra — and the founding myth Western art has retold ever since while overlooking the women who followed her. Seven o'clock, £5.
Artist Talk: Christos Dikeakos
Five decades of Christos Dikeakos' practice, in conversation with the curator Emily Butler.
The talk turns on Sites and Places: Athens, made between 1986 and 1997, and on its Vancouver counterpart of 1990 to 2015 — two bodies of work that read a city as archaeology, and Greek myth as something still moving through the present rather than fixed behind it. Seven o'clock, £5.