Seventeen works by fifteen international artists from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, curated by Katerina Hadji — Greece as both a place and an idea.
Fernweh is a German word with no English equivalent: the ache for places you have never been. It is the exact inverse of nostalgia, a longing for a place you have left, and the two words together are the organising idea of this show. Greece is the subject in both senses — a real country and an imagined one, longed for by people who have never lived there and by people who cannot go back.
Katerina Hadji has curated seventeen works by fifteen international artists around that double reading, in which, in the show’s own phrase, past and present meet through the act of looking. Several of the fifteen have never shown in Britain, and none of them is Greek. That is the point: this is Greece as other people imagine it, hung in London.
The works come from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, a single private holding rather than a museum, which is why a London airing is unusual: a collector’s Greece rather than an institution’s, assembled by one person’s judgement over years and rarely lent in a group. It opens at the Hellenic Centre on 8 October, runs through Frieze week with late Thursday hours, and closes on 7 November. Free, and a month long, in a week when everything else in London is four days and ticketed.