Abandoned Cartographies & Other Odd Hours at CAN Gallery in Athens, Greece, conjures a state of lucid disorientation, an invitation to roam the hinterlands of perception and the subconscious.
A group exhibition of international artists including Elli Antoniou, Despina Charitonidi, Socrates Fatouros, James Fuller, Shambhavi Kaul, Konstantinos Lianos, Louis-Philippe Scoufaras, Sasha Streshna, Stefania Strouza, Dimitris Tampakis, Yorgos Yatromanolakis, curated by Dinos Chatzirafailidis, the show unfolds like a dream without syntax—evocative, erratic, and irreducibly complex. Drawing its conceptual spine from Surrealism yet eschewing its familiar iconography, the exhibition privileges affect over articulation, making space for fragmentary encounters, flickers of memory, and irrational gestures.
What emerges is not a curated thesis but a porous terrain, haunted by unformed thoughts and unstable images. The works dismantle narrative coherence, allowing the viewer to slip into non-linear experiences where temporality and space appear suspended. In this fragmented topography, motifs recur with the logic of dreams—seductive, slippery, and unresolved. If Surrealism once made the unconscious visible through exquisite technique, this iteration collapses that clarity into rupture, favoring disjunction over depiction. It is Surrealism not as style but as state of mind, as method rather than motif.
Materiality shifts and slides across media—photography bleeds into sculpture, sound intervenes upon installation, poetry stutters into visual space. Each artist contributes to a collective disruption of logic, drawing from altered states, psychic automatism, and the poetics of the absurd. Some works hum with menace; others lull with elusive beauty. They resist containment, reflecting instead the condition of being unmoored—emotionally, politically, perceptually. In the process, Abandoned Cartographies becomes a map of nowhere, a cartographic refusal to settle, define, or stabilize.
At its core, the exhibition asks how art can operate outside the strictures of reason, not merely as escape, but as inquiry. Through its refusal to fix meaning, it gestures toward a kind of radical vulnerability—one that mirrors our contemporary psychic landscape. This is a show that demands nothing but attention, and in return offers uncertainty, ambiguity, and fleeting grace.
