My Past is a Foreign Country at DEO Projects, Chios forges transregional perspectives on migration and historical change in the eastern Mediterranean
Amid migration, pasts can become foreign countries instantly, as homelands are renounced in departure and exile. The Greek island of Chios, situated in the eastern Aegean, west of Turkey, is a microcosm of the past’s otherness. Ruled in turn by Byzantines, Genovese, Ottomans and then Greeks, it witnessed mass migrations through war and population exchanges between Greece and present-day Turkey, leaving behind still-abandoned villages and a palimpsestic architectural heritage. My Past is a Foreign Country, organised by local art nonprofit DEO Projects, excavates Chios’s pluralistic pasts through site-specific commissions by artists from Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and Iran. The works engage the island’s multilayered identity to forge transregional perspectives on migration and historical change in the eastern Mediterranean.
The show’s two venues – the Temenos Hamidiye, a deconsecrated mosque, and the Ottoman Baths, a former hammam, both located within Chios’s walled castle – reflect the island’s Ottoman past. Each building housed refugees from Asia Minor during the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchanges, while recent migrants have temporarily settled in the castle’s nearby trenches. Within the mosque, Avish Khebrehzadeh’s crimson-toned ‘Red Paintings’ (2014) depict Iranian political prisoners, some with eyes closed, all in states of dreamlike calm. Their collective presence alludes to spectres of dispossession embedded within the site, which resonate too in Maro Michalakakos’s To All of Us (2023), a colossal braid woven out of bloodred velvet and hung from an upper window. Its monumental structure thins into the shapes of veins and tree roots, conjuring how territorial and psychic uprootedness endure as affective inheritances.
Several new commissions in the Ottoman Baths reimagine the building’s past function. In An Ode To A Distant Spring (2023), Hera Büyüktaşcıyan drapes blue fabric topped with cubes of soap from the building’s water taps, gesturing to the flows now absent in the defunct hammam. Aykan Safoğlu has arranged his Sweat Poems (1st Variation) (2023), a Turkish-language poem printed onto glass tiles, along the border of the hammam’s marble floor. The poem invokes the transfigurations of queer desire; its montaged lettering pattern is composed of photographs the artist took of body-sweat prints on a blue surface, underscoring the building’s original use for purification and pleasure. Installed within the former water tank, Yorgos Petrou’s Body Knows That Too (2023), a flat silicone sculpture of coloured spills coagulated into a human silhouette, further captures the porous bounds of community and history.
Another grouping of artworks in the same venue explores interconnected Mediterranean migrations. Nikomachi Karakostanoglou and Maria Tsagkari, both descendants of the Greek-Turkish population exchange, address this collective migration history. To produce Cross Section (2023), Karakostanoglou sculpts womblike ceramic orbs, then bisects them to visualise the remains of separation. Tsagkari sought permission from a Piraeus priest to remove and replace the glass protecting an Orthodox church’s icons, which refugees from Asia Minor historically brought to Greece. In One Day (2023), Tsagkari displays the panes as sculptures without their icons, revealing the prints of kisses left on their surfaces from ritual use. At the entrance, three text-based stone sculptures spell out ‘Waves Whisper Woes’ in Petros Moris’s installation Sphinx (Waves Whisper Woes) (2023). The alliterative phrase forms a counter-monument to the migrant lives lost at sea in perilous Mediterranean crossings and pushbacks. Sensitively juxtaposed with heritage sites, the new commissions in this exhibition open connections between past and present migrations, challenging the region’s fortified borders by reinscribing the locality of Chios into a dialogue beyond national divides.
My Past is a Foreign Country at DEO Projects, Chios, 8 July – 28 August
