NEW Hotel in Athens Hosts Unique Installations Celebrating Contemporary Art

Photo source: NEW Hotel

The NEW Hotel in Athens has launched a series of art installations in its Art Lounge and other select spots, under the title “Contemporary Artists at NEW Hotel in Athens”.

The aim of the project is to promote contemporary art in Athens, as well as the continuous and unpredictable reconfiguration of certain spaces of the hotel.

The first part of the program is entitled “Forever in composed of Nows” and hosts significant works of artists Petros Moris and Malvina Panagiotidi.

Underneath the glistening surfaces, mythological creatures are about to wake up though delicate tangled threads wandering on the walls and other impressive installations. The artworks of Petros Moris and Malvina Panagiotidi take over the reception and the art lounge of NEW hotel creating a cosmos inside a cosmos.

A blend of mythology and art

The sculptures of Petros Moris emerge as a synthesis of archaic memories, geological matter and eerie artifacts. Both the anatomical “Vein I and II”, “Times Circle” diptych and the “Future Bestiary (Sphinx)” refer to an irrational and repressed aspect of antiquity.

At the center of this artistic practice lies the metaphor of subterranean space; the domain of deep-time entropy, traces of a realm of bodily and spiritual anatomies. That materialized imaginary is bound to social and environmental transformations, unearthing the chthonic origins of what has been called the Past and what is called the Future.

Athens-based Petros Moris has received a BFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MFA from the Goldsmiths University of London.

The rebirth of the spider

Malvina’s Panagiotidi sculptural works reintroduce the spider as a symbol and a carrier of wider systems of perception and re-creation of the world. An oversized web traps anthropomorphic preys and becomes a reservoir of narratives.

The lifeless sculptures, scattered on the shelves of the Lounge, draw from the witch Erichtho described by the Roman poet Lucanus, who attempted to recreate life through the inanimate parts of the human body.

Those fragmented parts compose a new body that echoes images of archaeological excavations. Unlike ancient witch Erichtho, they attempt an inversion: to raise questions of Nows instead of giving answers. Forever is composed of Nows.

Malvina Panagiotidi, born in 1985 in Athens, lives and works in the Greek capital. She studied architecture at the University of Thessaly and art at the postgraduate program “Art in Context” at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

Photo source: NEW Hotel

The NEW Hotel is part of the YES! Hotels Group, which also includes the Semiramis Hotel, Periscope Hotel, and NOŪS in Santorini. The group was created to offer a new and vibrant hospitality experience, integrating art into the concept.

All of the hotels in the YES! Hotels Group are designed to reflect the local culture and environment.