ΕΙΚΟΝΑ VS ΛΟΓΟΣ: Εργαστήρια Οπτικού Ακτιβισμού

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

ΕΙΚΟΝΑ VS ΛΟΓΟΣ: Εργαστήρια Οπτικού Ακτιβισμού is a visual-activism workshop for adults at the SNFCC (ΚΠΙΣΝ) in Kallithea, Athens, on Tuesday 8 September 2026, 18:30 to 20:30. Ninety meters of Greek text in Barbara Kruger's red, white and black run along the National Library as you arrive.

Kruger has spent five decades collaging found images with declarative text — Your body is a battleground, I shop therefore I am — turning advertising's own grammar against it. Untitled (Pride and Contempt), her first solo exhibition in Greece, occupies the SNFCC's outdoor spaces from 28 April to 1 November 2026: thirteen new site-specific works, written in Greek for the first time in her career, including the 90-meter mural on the National Library of Greece. ΕΙΚΟΝΑ VS ΛΟΓΟΣ — Image vs Word — is the exhibition's parallel workshop program, four Tuesday-evening sessions tracing how Kruger's practice made art a tool of activism, political criticism and social intervention. The 8 September session is the fourth and last.

The table this program draws is not an art class in the technique sense. Expect people who photograph billboards, who argue about whether a slogan can be art, design students next to retirees who came for the exhibition and stayed with questions — the program is deliberately built to open contemporary art to people who do not already live inside it.

The setting is the SNFCC itself, Renzo Piano's park-and-culture complex in Kallithea that houses the National Library and the Greek National Opera and draws more than three million visits a year. On a September Tuesday at 18:30 the park is in after-work mode — runners on the canal, the light going gold — and the workshop runs at conversation volume, closer to a seminar table than a lecture hall. The door is open admission: no ticket, places allocated on a first-come basis.

Two hours, one dialectic: image versus word. Each session this summer has approached Kruger's trajectory through a different artistic practice — how a phrase gains force when set in type, how an image argues back, where commentary becomes intervention. You leave reading the city's surfaces differently, which is the argument Kruger's walls have been making across the SNFCC since April.

If you want brushwork instruction or a quiet craft evening, ΕΙΚΟΝΑ VS ΛΟΓΟΣ is not that — it is idea-first, built around language, argument and the machinery of persuasion. But if you have ever wanted tools to answer the messaging that surrounds you rather than just absorb it, this is a working seat inside a live exhibition rather than a view of one.

The SNFCC sits at the seaward end of Syngrou in Kallithea, and there is no adjacent metro: take the tram, a Syngrou bus, or the SNFCC's own shuttle from Syntagma. With places going in order of arrival, turning up well before 18:30 is the difference between working and watching; the session ends at 20:30, when Kruger's texts meet the first dusk.

Four sessions, May to September — after this one, ΕΙΚΟΝΑ VS ΛΟΓΟΣ is finished, and on 1 November the walls themselves fall silent.