Angelidakis Turns Greek Venice Pavilion Into 'Escape Room'
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- Andreas Angelidakis has installed his "Escape Room" inside the Greek pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, complete with a light-up dancefloor, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax on the sound system, an official 4:20pm opening time, and a "tea dance" with DJs from Berlin's queer Power Dance Club.
- The Greek pavilion, designed by M Papandreou and inaugurated in 1934 — the year Hitler met Mussolini there — houses Angelidakis's columns referencing Picasso's Guernica, the migration crisis he calls "a contemporary Guernica," and the artist's own sexuality, hung from the ceiling or arranged as bean-bag seating.
- Angelidakis says his father's death from cancer, family bankruptcy, and his own HIV diagnosis all hit in the same three-month window in 2010, forcing him to abandon architecture for art; his mother later died by suicide and he split with artist-husband Angelo Plessas in 2021 after 22 years together.
- The installation includes deconstructed MAGA slogans including "Make Erika Eat Again" about Charlie Kirk's widow Erika, T-shirts commemorating Greek LGBTQ+ activist Zak Kostopoulos (beaten to death by civilians and police in Athens in 2018), and a tribute to Vaso Katraki, the only Greek artist ever awarded for visual art at Venice, for etchings in 1966.
- Angelidakis, born in Athens in 1968 to a Greek father and Norwegian mother, graduated top of his class at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles in 1989 and later studied at Columbia, crediting early digital-architecture experiments and RuPaul's Drag Race as formative influences — calling RuPaul "Malcolm X for gay kids."
- Angelidakis frames the work as a deliberate attack on the concept of national pavilions, which he says exist to "continue the original purpose of the biennale" as late-19th-century foreign policy — a critique he underlines by reclaiming a 1934 building opened when Greece was angling toward the fascist axis.
Why it matters: By transforming a 1934 national pavilion built when Greece courted the fascist axis into a queer, drug-tolerant "escape room" that explicitly protests the far right, Angelidakis uses Greece's flagship cultural platform to argue against the very concept of national pavilions while centering LGBTQ+ memory and contemporary political critique.
