‘I dealt with death, bankruptcy and HIV in three months’: Andreas Angelidakis on his radical, Ru Paul-influenced art installation
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Andreas Angelidakis has installed 'Escape Room' at the Greek pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, transforming the 1934 M Papandreou-designed building — inaugurated the same year Hitler met Mussolini there — into a club space with a light-up dancefloor, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Relax' on loop, and wilted classical columns hanging from the ceiling.
- The Greek pavilion officially opened at 4:20pm — a number the artist concedes may have been lost on the dignitaries — followed by a 'tea dance' with DJs from Berlin's Power Dance Club, described as the city's hottest queer night.
- Angelidakis's installation includes an LED screen broadcasting hall-of-mirrors images (a Plato's cave reference), inflatables with deconstructed Maga slogans like 'Make Erika Eat Again' — about Charlie Kirk's widow appearing 'dressed like Janet Jackson doing Rhythm Nation' — and riot shields protecting neon eggs representing 'the fascism that hatched in 1934.'
- A dedicated space inside the pavilion honors Vaso Katraki, the only Greek artist ever awarded for visual art at Venice (etchings, 1966), who was imprisoned the following year for being a communist.
- Angelidakis explicitly frames the work against national pavilions: 'I'm turning it into an escape room,' arguing the biennale format originated as 'foreign policy in the late 1800s' — comments made as protests target Russia and Israel's participation this year.
- In 2010 the artist was diagnosed with HIV in the same three-month window his father died of cancer and a 1999 family business bankruptcy came due, forcing what he calls 'a reset quite late in life' from architecture into full-time art; two years later his mother committed suicide.
- Born in 1968 in Athens to a Greek father and Norwegian mother, Angelidakis studied architecture at SCI-Arc (1989) and Columbia, graduating top of his class; cited influences include Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and digital artist Miltos Manetas, with whom he roomed in New York.
Why it matters: Angelidakis is using a state-funded national platform to argue against the very concept of national pavilions — explicitly connecting that critique to the ongoing protests over Russia and Israel's biennale participation. For Greek art history, the installation also resurrects Vaso Katraki, a Venice-recognized artist erased from official memory after her 1966 award was followed by imprisonment for communist ties.
