Greek Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Becomes an Escape Room About Fascist History and Zak Kostopoulos

At the 61st Venice Biennale, Greece is represented by artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis with the installation Escape Room . In the Greek Pavilion, he brings together an S&M club aesthetic, the building’s 1934 history, Plato’s allegory of the cave, and the memory of Zak Kostopoulos, the Greek-American LGBT and HIV activist and drag artist known as Zackie Oh.

The exhibition is open to the public from May 9 to November 22, 2026, with Biennale previews taking place on May 6-8. According to the official Venice Biennale website , the 61st International Art Exhibition is titled In Minor Keys and is held at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and other venues across Venice.

Inside the pavilion, Angelidakis does not create a neutral exhibition hall but an environment resembling both a night club and a game of escape. Visitors enter a darkened space with red light, soft objects, images of chains, column fragments, and references to drag culture. In this system, chains and club-like bodily imagery are not decorative details, but a language for discussing control, violence, national mythology, and attempts to move beyond inherited historical forms.

Kostopoulos has a distinct place in the work. He was killed in Athens on September 21, 2018, after an attack in the city centre. Amnesty International described him as a queer activist, drag artist, and human rights defender. Human Rights Watch later reported that in July 2024 an Athens appeals court unanimously convicted two men over his killing; one was sentenced to six years in prison, and the other to five years of house arrest because of his age.

For readers outside the art-world context, the national pavilions in the Giardini are not just exhibition rooms. They are buildings through which states have represented themselves internationally for decades. The Venice Biennale website notes that the first permanent national pavilion in the gardens appeared in 1907, when Belgium built its pavilion.

The Greek Pavilion opened in 1934. Angelidakis treats that year as the work’s starting point: in 1934, the Greek and Austrian pavilions were inaugurated, Adolf Hitler first met Benito Mussolini in Venice, and the Nazi regime began persecuting homosexuals. The official project description says the pavilion has been turned into a present-day Platonic cave, where the building’s past is linked to post-truth, nationalist populism, and propaganda.

The project is contentious because it uses a national pavilion against the idea of a polished national image. Angelidakis treats the building as a character trying to “escape” its own history. In that sense, Escape Room is not only an exhibition about Greece, but also a question about what national representation in art actually does: show culture, reinforce a state myth, or allow that myth to be dismantled.

The project is curated by George Bekirakis. The national commissioner is MOMUS, the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, and Greece’s participation is primarily funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The work therefore operates in two registers at once: as an official national presentation and as a critique of the mechanisms through which national identity becomes an exhibition form.