Plásmata 3: We’ve met before, haven’t we?

This nocturnal exhibition organised by the Onassis Foundation’s cultural platform transforms a public park in Athens into a space for encountering artworks at night

The Callas (Lakis and Aris Ionas). Punkthenon, 2022. Pedion tou Areos, Athens, 2025. Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou.

Pedion tou Areos Park, Athens
27 May – 15 June 2025

by ALLIE BISWAS

For the third iteration of this outdoor exhibition organised by Onassis Stegi in Athens, which like previous editions occupies a substantial municipal space in the city, the premise is to “see the world around us differently”. This could be taken literally – viewing art while visiting a public park at night isn’t usually a readily available experience, especially not for 20 evenings in a row. But added to this is the technological component of the 25 artworks by a largely emerging and Greek cohort of artists who have been dispersed within the trees and pathways of Pedion tou Areos, one of Athens’s largest urban parks, which are motivated by artificial intelligence, 3D animation and video projection – or, in other words, by trickery of some kind.

Pierre-Christophe Gam, The Sanctuary of Dreams, 2025. Video installation, 44 min. Pedion tou Areos park / Plásmata 3, Athens, 2025. Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou.

The films and installations that are encountered, several newly commissioned by Onassis Stegi or developed through the foundation’s ONX platform for new media art, integrate seamlessly with their surroundings. The curators might be making a point about our present-day lives operating between reality and illusion (“plasmata” in Greek translates as “creatures” – artificially constructed ones?), but perhaps more interesting is the opportunity itself to experience art within such a setting.

Maria Mavropoulou, The Sleight of the Machine, 2025. Film, 9 min 42 sec. Pedion tou Areos park / Plásmata 3, Athens, 2025. Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou.

There were several highlights. Maria Mavropoulou premiered her AI-generated short film, The Sleight of the Machine (2025), which uses AI video technology to document a magician performing sleight-of-hand tricks in front of an enraptured audience – only, in this illusion, the magician is the machine itself, and magic becomes computational deception.

Aias Kokkalis, Ares Awakening, 2025. Video installation, 10-18 min. Pedion tou Areos park / Plásmata 3, Athens, 2025. Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou.

Aias Kokkalis’s Ares Awakeningis a mockumentary that takes its source material from the park itself. Under Ioannis Metaxas, dictator of Greece from 1936 to 1941, the ancient ecosystem known for its rare fauna and biodiversity was replaced by concrete grounds designed for military parades, with all its creatures driven into an underground bunker. Kokkalis’s video chronicles the exodus of these animals over the course of a single night during the Plásmata exhibition, using footage from security cameras, breaking news bulletins and phantoms.

Martyna Marciniak’s AI Hyperrealism is the first chapter of a work titled Anatomy of Non-Fact, which premiered at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2024. The video installation shown here included three sculptural components centred on the notorious image of a fake Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga jacket, which did the rounds in 2023, drawing attention to the weight of AI-generated images in the media. Amidst these critiques was a poetic animation by Manousos Manousakis, Neighbours (2025), in which fantastical creatures appear to exist. Initially drawn in ink on paper and later animated through digital processing, the hybrid figures are gradually projected on to a wall as if emerging from an unknown dimension, before disappearing. Inspired by mythological motifs and manga, the artist’s use of technology here felt less like a trick and more a dream.

• • Plásmata 3 is open daily from 6pm to 11pm. Admission is free.