Greece: Escape Room | Andreas Angelidakis

For the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Andreas Angelidakis presents Escape Room, transforming the Greek Pavilion into a present-day Platonic Cave. Plato's seminal text is reimagined as an immersive, inhabitable environment, situated within the current era of post-truth and rising nationalist populism. Recast as an escape room, the Pavilion embodies a reality structured like a game, while symbolically confronting the paradox of a building attempting to escape its own "self" and, therefore, its history. Through a plunge into its troubled past, the Greek Pavilion happens upon a "bathroom mirror selfie", frozen permanently in Year Zero (1934): the year the Nazis began the persecution of homosexuals, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for the first time in Venice following their sweeping electoral victories, and the Greek and Austrian Pavilions were officially inaugurated.