'It’s going to be alright, just imagine you’re a country,' said the architect to Baby Grecia. So begins Once upon a time in Grexia, a myth-making catalogue text by Andreas Angelidakis, written to accompany his show, ‘Escape Room’, at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Taking over the Greek Pavilion, architect-turned-artist Angelidakis reimagines the building as a drag queen in the throes of an identity crisis, desperate to shed her role as a national subject. Like drag, Angelidakis suggests, nationality is a performance, and for Giardini’s Baby Grecia, becoming an escape room is one way of slipping out of costume.
Stepping inside the pavilion feels like entering the glitch-ridden vortex of the early internet. Maybe also a kink dungeon. Or a queer goth disco. Or a souvenir shop. For Angelidakis, it’s also a cave, a metaphor for Plato’s famous allegory where all of these typologies collapse into one another like an oven-baked moussaka. There are neon lights, light-up floors, soft chain-wrapped columns hanging from the ceiling and a soundtrack that includes Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1980s anthem ‘Relax’, playing over and over in dizzying loops.
It’s fun, light, and even a little camp, but this head-spinning sensory ‘pleasure dome’ is underpinned by a serious critique of nationhood. Using the building’s architecture as a starting point, Angelidakis studied the details of its symmetrical, neo-Byzantine façade, and found within it a snapshot of Greek modernity. Notably, he discovered the building’s exterior columns are simplified replicas of those in Hagia Sophia. 'Byzantium was not a random choice for a Greek pavilion,' Agenlidakis explains. Rather, these architectural flourishes functioned as a state-sponsored act of imperial yearning mirrored by the right-wing sentiment to ‘make Istanbul Constantinople again’.
Study for an Escape Room
The parallels between modern-day MAGA are not lost in the show, which features a series of sculptures that approximate the movement’s infamous red caps, each more incoherent than the last as random letters disappear and reappear.
'The event that inspired this [exhibition] is the 6 January storming of the Capitol,' Angelidakis told me, smoking a cigarette on a printed column-turned-beanbag outside the pavilion. 'We saw this internet culture, people who were dreaming of crazy war, spilling out onto the Capitol.' By making physical the hyper-stimulus of our mediated reality — a space where images and events both past and present fracture into replicas, projections and in some cases sheer illusions – ‘Escape Room’ updates Plato’s allegory of the cave for our algorithmic age. While the original story describes a struggle to see past illusions to the truth, ‘Escape Room’ presents a hall of mirrors where history itself is the prisoner. 'Don't believe anything,' Angelidakis warns. 'We live in the fake news mode. That's why in the catalogue it says in Greek; free errors, free mistakes.'
Curated by George Bekirakis, the exhibition itself is split into two parts, each operating as a reality-building mechanism. The first space references the nation and is built like a stage with an LED-flashing dancefloor and a 21m-long screen whose mind-bending video effect is created by surveillance cameras turned in on themselves to create a kind of tautological panopticon – a closed loop, like a bathroom-mirror selfie that goes on forever. Soft sculptures resembling the pavilion’s columns lie slumped across the floor, as if exhausted by the labour of upholding Grecia’s conflicting national narratives. By turning marble into plush, Angelidakis flattens the hierarchies they are built to uphold. By inviting people to sit on them, he domesticates them, too.
The second part of the exhibition resembles a more commercial space, riffing on the typology of the periptero, a Greek street kiosk, which is a direct translation of ‘pavilion’ in modern Greek. Typically found on urban corners selling everything from cigarettes to ice cream, these local hubs are reimagined here as a distribution point for national myths. In this neon-lit market, display cases are filled with distorted plastic trinkets, 3D-printed figurines that resemble classical sculptures chewed up and spit out by a computer. Nearby, giant plush books rest open on fetishistic metal frames, while racks hang heavy with oversized plush T-shirts. Both are printed with ‘clues’ – a collage of newspaper clippings, Wikipedia entries and fragments from Angelidakis’ own archive. 'Modern Greece was literally a souvenir of ancient Greece, arranged to be a country by the British, French and the Russians. We are a bibelot of antiquity, of all those ancient ideas,' Angelidakis contends. 'I'm trying to restate modern Greece in a way that makes sense, not as a fabricated national story.'
Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this edition, who sadly passed away in 2025, chose ‘Minor Keys’ as the Biennale’s theme, a musical modality that casts a shadow across ‘major’ notes. Angelidakis leans into this register by weaving overlooked histories into his disruption of larger national narratives. He foregrounds figures like Zak Kostopoulos, the queer activist and drag artist brutally killed in Athens in 2018, and Andreas Nomikos, the city's legendary ‘feather lady’, a street hawker and formative figure for Angelidakis: 'That was the first time in my life I heard someone outside of me who I understood was gay.' Though this minor attunement manifests most poetically at the entrance, where a heavy black veil hangs in homage to the artist Vaso Katraki, who won an award at the 1966 Venice Biennale before being imprisoned the following year for her political beliefs.
In its heady collision of political history and queer pop culture, ‘Escape Room’ gamifies the idea of the nation, presenting the visitor – or player – with clues that reveal the conditions of its development and the contradictions that exist within it. Only here, the goal isn't to win but to navigate a confusing system that lays bare the architecture of the fictions we inhabit. 'The moment we start asking if an event is real means we have passed believing images and video as evidence. Now, we’re in a time of post-truth.' He shows me a tattoo on his hand: another hand, throwing dice into the air. It is a fitting motif for the exhibition, a delirious meta-environment where ‘truth’ is up for grabs.
The Venice Art Biennale until 22 November 2026, labiennale.org
