Closing Soon presents its first exhibition since adopting a nomadic format, hosted by Nitra Gallery in Athens. Untitled (A Common Story) / 25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners brings together photographic works by Kostas Kapsianis and the artist duo Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt that approach the Greek landscape as a site of memory, politics, and representation, shaped by constant crises.

The two Untitled photographs (2015) are drawn from Kapsianis’s series A Common Story, which explores ancestry and belonging in rural Greece. Taken in a small hut on the outskirts of the northern city of Drama, the works engage with a modest, improvised setting that bears traces of both collective and personal history. One photograph focuses on an A4 printout taped to the semi-transparent tarp of a makeshift window, recounting the three final wishes of Alexander the Great before his death, with his portrait placed in the middle. In the text, this ancient symbol of power and national pride reflects on the vanity of material possessions and the limitations of science, represented in his words by medicine, to overcome mortality. The other photograph depicts a miniature trophy cup, evoking anything but a victorious spirit.

In 25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners (2015–2020), Källström & Fäldt examine how the Greek financial crisis was constructed and circulated in international media. Centred on a fabricated story about Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, allegedly employing gardeners despite having no garden, the work addresses the mechanisms through which information becomes myth in a contemporary context. Produced during one of the most polarised periods in recent Greek history, in the midst of the financial crisis that led to widespread impoverishment, social upheaval, and a humanitarian emergency, the project traces the shifting focus of the European news cycle. Moving from the financial to the refugee crisis, to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, it reveals how attention, value, and meaning continually fluctuate across the image economy of a mediatised world.

The presentation of these works in Greece for the first time coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the 2015 bailout referendum, one of the most significant and contested events in the country’s recent history. Frequently described as the “sick man of Europe”, Greece becomes here both subject and metaphor, a reminder that the notions of wealth and health, material and moral, remain inseparably intertwined.

Curated by Orestis Mavroudis