Curated by Konstantinos Giotis, the group show “Beyond Nostalgia Hijack” explores different forms of entanglement between physical and virtual environments. As this concept arose in March, when Athens was emerging from a long lockdown, the exhibition sparks questions of whether looking back carries the urgency needed to propel us forward.

An exercise in visual morphology, Marios Stamatis’s video EXOEXO, 2020, shuffles through hundreds of images of insect exoskeletons alongside manmade prosthetics. Inspired by these hybrid forms, his sculpture series “Real Physical Matter,” 2021, is made of actual tears, dried flower petals, marble dust, and polyurethane, among other things that look neither entirely natural nor manmade. Konstantinos Pettas’s sculpture Untitled (Dasein I), 2015, is an artificial granite rock cast in aluminum and then printed with a water transfer technique that both belies and imitates a metallic geological surface. It’s sleek and futuristic, yet it contains evocations of seaweed, logos, and trash.

A real standout is Eva Papamargariti’s Technicolor trio “Always Ecstatic, Always Lost,” 2021. Mixing print and embroidery on neoprene textiles, the three “object-sculptures” read as digital artifacts. Valinia Svoronou’s Salvaged Notes, 2021, are wall-mounted ceramics that resemble crumpled paper and incorporate found poetry (including a fragment discovered on Emily Dickinson’s cooking card) and personal annotations. There is irony in the idea of light, discarded notes cast as weighty afterthoughts.

Giotis has contributed a couple of his own paintings, including Club-Mate, 2021, a shadowy landscape that gestures toward the rave scene as much as it does toward Romanticism. While the exhibition doesn’t actually move beyond nostalgia—as a trope and as pop culture—its fluid syntheses of online behaviors and analog textures creates a sense of provisional materiality that dissolves and distorts the boundaries of the virtual.

— Nadine Khalil