Vangelis Vlahos’s project 1992, 2006–, is an ongoing archive that documents Greek policies in the Balkans in the wake of communism’s collapse and the Kosovo conflict; it follows the threads that connect architecture, politics, and economics. The artist’s research was triggered by the funding of the renovation of the former parliament building in Sarajevo—partially destroyed during the war in Yugoslavia in the early ’90s—by the Greek state, as part of the Greek Plan for Economic Reconstruction in the Balkans. In this exhibition, the archive is displayed alongside two architectural models, suggesting what the building will look like when it reopens in May. Symbolically, it will then be renamed the Building of Friendship Between Greece and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In a separate room, the artist explores the Greek banking sector’s investment interest in the area. Here, archival material and architectural models of the new National Bank building in Thessaloniki illustrate the internal reasoning behind the bank’s new image, which will be used to brand its vast presence in the Balkans during the years to come. Although 1992 succeeds in unveiling the interconnections between the state and business when it comes to Greek foreign policy and economic diplomacy in the region, Vlahos’s mood is never critical or didactic. Rather, by conjoining seemingly unrelated documents and architecture, the most public of cultural symbols, it appears he intends to weave a more robust understanding of the context within which new structures—physical and invisible alike—emerge.
