Unlike most Greeks, the curator of ‘Britannia Works’, Katerina Gregos, is a self-confessed Anglophile, but this Britannia is not Blake’s utopian vision of ‘England’s pleasant pastures’. Instead this show brings together British artists with different ethnic origins to represent the post-colonial culture of Britain today. Gregos looks to London’s multi-cultural East End for inspiration, naming the show after one of its artists’ studio complexes. While the title deliberately echoes the cool Britannia of the 1990s, this show conspicuously excludes the usual yBa suspects as, for Gregos, the Brit art era is clearly over. ‘Britannia Works’ draws from a new generation of British artists who seem to consciously distance themselves from the ironic, attention-grabbing, conceptual one-liners of their predecessors.

Located in three sites throughout Athens – the city that is experiencing Europe’s fastest growing immigrant population – this large polymorphic exhibition offers a meta-commentary on multi-ethnic communities, challenging the notion of homogenised national art.





Xippas Gallery is aptly located in one of the new immigrant districts of Athens. When I visited, an African prostitute was being accosted by a destitute Kurd, while opposite, a trail of exhausted immigrants queued for documentation outside a decrepit municipal building. On the ground floor of the gallery a group of men loitered outside a Bollywood video stand, as loud Bangra and the smell of South East Asian spices press against the bolted gallery door. Once inside the bourgeois white cube, the hard-core spectacle of the street outside vanished, only to uncannily reappear in the artwork itself.

Ergin Cavusoglu’s video Street Dance (2003) illicitly documents life outside his window, where semi-closed blinds reveal a group of boys dancing around a car. The voyeuristic camera provokes a sense of anxiety as it uncomfortably draws the viewers’ attention to the similar scene being played out downstairs.

In States of Things (2000), Rosalind Nashashibi superimposes an old Egyptian song over a 16mm black-and-white film of a Glasgow jumble sale. The un-dramatic event set against a soundtrack drawn from a hybrid past eloquently offers us insight into the co-existence of cultural identities.

Jeremy Deller’s After the Goldrush (2002) is a collection of photographs, bumper stickers and a video from a veterans’ parade day in California. Deller’s lo-fi, reflexive documentation draws attention to the ubiquitous camcorders that indiscriminately document our lives and rituals, while the patriotic Americana offers a disturbing vision of an empire which is overextending itself.

Julie Henry’s installation Going Down (1999) comprises two monitors showing videos of chanting fans from opposing football teams. The collective euphoria and disappointment suggests the sinister yet seductive power of patriotic ritual.

George Shaw’s paintings meticulously reproduce photographs of suburban England. Although they reference Romantic landscape painting, these scenes sinisterly evoke the brutal iconography of inner-city life rather than rural idyll. Marine Hugonnier’s Super-16mm film Ariana (2003) (named after Afghanistan’s national airline), and accompanying photographs of mountains in the Hindu Kush range, portray the landscape as a place of freedom, where enforced notions of utopia, such as Communism and Islamic Fundamentalism, have been resisted. As the artist attempts to shoot from Afghanistan’s highest panoramic vantage point, she suggests that this may be a form of cinematic colonialism – a point which is emphasised by the use of National Geographic travel cinematography. Ariana is reminiscent of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), both formally and intellectually, as it raises questions about the possibility of representing the other.

While the work at Xippas Gallery is concerned with personal and subjective notions of ideology, culture and identity, the work at Ileana Tounda Contemporary Art Centre is more preoccupied with exploring the utopian and formal legacies of Modernism. Toby Patterson, for instance, has responded to the architectural developments in the city by focusing on the Eleftherias Park, which was designed by Panos Vokotopoulos in the 1960s and, like much of Athens, is now under re-construction for the Olympic bid. This has been a site of political contestation in recent years, as developers have attempted to re-designate this public space. Patterson’s monumental acrylic wall drawing is reconfigured from an architectural design into an idealised abstraction. Like Walter Benjamin, Patterson seems to be commenting on the fate of Modernism’s utopian architectural projects, whose success can only be conceived as idealised designs. Once the architectural project has been realised, the process of dissolution and ruination is already in place. Therefore, according to Benjamin’s dialectical concept, Modernism can only be conceived of as a failed project. Patterson’s model offers us a vision of architectural utopian idealism before it undergoes the inevitable process of decline.

Runa Islam’s looped 16mm film, Parallel (2001), required the gallery to import a unique loop projector, in itself a spectacular piece of cinematographic apparatus. The loop cuts from a blue screen to a panoramic view of Athens to a close up of a woman spinning a ring on a table. While nostalgically gesturing towards the films of Jean-Luc Godard, this film dispenses with the formal rigours of Godardian structure in favour of a stylised simulation. The loop is made up of narrative fragments that explore the relationship between the subject and the city.

Beyond the galleries, the show includes a series of screenings at the British Council, who produced and organised the exhibition. Sitting in the empty basement cinema watching Handsworth Songs (1986) by the Black Audio Film Collective, I am reminded of a city that played out its post-colonial identity through violent struggle. Nearly 20 years after the race riots of the 1980s, Handsworth Songs is being shown alongside a second generation of artists who have emerged from that history. Outside, meanwhile, a new generation of immigrants in another European city are in the process of becoming the future.