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In Venice, Andreas Angelidakis Is Queering the Idea of a National Pavilion

In conversation with Observer, the Athens-based artist and architect explains what Byzantine columns, Peggy Guggenheim's glasses and a stack of riot shields from Temu have to do with the gay reckoning at the heart of his expansively welcoming work.

Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis will take over the Greek Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, delivering an anti-fascist escape room embellished with intentionally campy flourishes. Half Greek, half Norwegian, Angelidakis studied architecture in Los Angeles and in New York. His artistic practice is deeply interdisciplinary, encompassing architecture, publishing, exhibition design and curation. A self-proclaimed internet obsessive, he remixes online culture with architectural emblems, creating environments that explore how space and infrastructure are inextricable from power.

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Using the pavilion’s national and architectural legacy as source material, he scrutinizes the venue’s inaugural year, 1934, through historical research. The year the pavilion debuted, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time in Venice. The roots of fascism lay latent there, resonating alarmingly with today’s MAGA zeal and even Italy’s own far-right government. The installation—curated by fellow Athenian George Bekirakis—draws from virtual reality, Fire Island gatherings, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the legacy of the Greek empire. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the soft sculptures and contemplate the themes of the show, including the way past political turmoil slithers into the present, the marketability of tourism and antiquity-as-spectacle.

We spoke with Angelidakis about his “Byzantium goth disco,” as he dubbed his installation, in addition to his memories of attending the biennial as a young visitor, buying unofficial riot shields online and what he’ll be doing at 4:20 p.m. on the Biennale’s opening day.

Tell me about how you conceptualized the pavilion.

I treat the pavilion as a being with consciousness, and I give her the microphone. The subject is the building itself, which looks like an Orthodox Church. The pavilion was built in 1934—12 years after [the Lausanne convention, which recognized the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey]—and it’s literally a souvenir of a MAGA moment for Greece. It’s like a Trump hat left over from that period. On the ministry’s website, they have a great text from a historian about the political maneuvers behind the pavilion being Byzantine. The competition was canceled because they wanted to assign somebody to make it exactly like that. I exhibited at the Greek pavilion four times with the architecture biennial, and I had never checked........

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