Opening: Tuesday, 14 October 2025
Exhibition duration: 14 October – 28 November 2025
Location: The Hellenic Centre London, 16–18 Paddington Street, Marylebone, London W1U 5AS, UK
Curators: Project 2 Athens (Fiona Mouzakitis & Despina Stavrou) and Christina Mitrentse
Participating artists: Eleni Angelou, Nikos Arvanitis, Rania Bellou, David Blackmore, Sarah Bodman, Ismini Bonatsou, BOOKEND – Matt Hale & Nick Cash, Maria Bourbou, Thodoros Brouskomatis, Jonathan Callan, Natassa Chelioti – Naga, Ioanna Delfino, Joe Devlin, Anna Dimitriou, Stephen Emmerson, SJ Fowler, Michael Hampton, Rowena Hughes, Inscription Journal (Gill Partington, Simon Morris, Adam Smyth), Antonia Iroidou, Eleni Kastrinogianni, Peggy Kliafa, Alexia Kokkinou, Georgia Kotretsos, Nikos Kryonidis, Vasiliki Lefkaditi, Eleni Maragaki, Kyriaki Mavrogeorgi, Despina Meimaroglou, Christina Mitrentse, Fiona Mouzakitis, Kiki Perivolari, Stamatis Schizakis, Ifigeneia Sdoukou, Christina Sgouromiti, Danai Simou, Dimitris Skourogiannis, Annetta Spanoudaki, Nectarios Stamatopoulos, Despina Stavrou, Aris Stoidis, Evangelos Tasios, Yannis Tzortzis, Leonie Yagdjoglou
Peggy Kliafa participates with the artwork:
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS
2017, Cover: Pills’ aluminum blisters on paper and black leather, thread, silicone, glue, Inside: Black bold marker on the Medicines’ Instructions of Use sheets, paper, red ribbon
35 x 26 x 4 cm
The interactive exhibition “BOOKMORPHS: Artists’ Books from Greece & the UK” brings together a diverse selection of artists’ books, book works, book-art objects, limited and multiple editions, ephemera, and journals by 44 visual artists, curators, publishers, and theorists from both Greece and the UK. It marks the first comprehensive presentation in London of contemporary artists’ books by Greek and British visual artists in dialogue.
BOOKMORPHS borrows its title from a term used by art writer Michael Hampton and aims to foster dialogue and exchange between Greek and British artists.
Showcasing a wide range of techniques and media – painting, printmaking, drawing, writing, poetry, digital printing, cutting, bookbinding, sculpture, sound, and photography – the exhibition highlights the rich materiality and experimental nature of the book as an artistic form.
What happens when a book’s legibility is disrupted? BOOKMORPHS invites audiences to engage with books through unconventional forms of ‘reading’: holding, touching, activating. Here, books transform into vehicles of unique, interactive experiences, allowing visitors to explore the anatomy of the book and connect more intimately with its content.
In re-examining the meaning and history of the codex, these works address a range of social, political, cultural, ecological, and gender issues. Personal narratives and subversive themes are reimagined in the artists’ book format, expanding the ways books can be created, read, and understood as cultural artefacts.
The various objects presented in BOOKMORPHS continue to abide by typical bibliographic references, even though an artist’s book presents a disruption to conventional literary structures. In an age of screen reading and doom-scrolling, this exhibition seeks to preserve a tactile connection with the book – as text, as layered object, and as interactive form.
Peggy Kliafa’s text on her artwork:
The artwork’s title is “Possible Side Effects” and it is a leather-bound volume, the cover of which is an assemblage of aluminium pills’ blisters motifs (empty pills packs). Paradoxically, the sense one has by the appearance of this assemblage is of a precious volume, although it consists of empty, often used pills’ blisters.
The interior part of the volume comprises of the “Medicines Instructions to Use” sheets, that one can find in all medicines’ boxes. The artist’s intervention is the “covering/erasing” with a thick black marker of a part of the information given in order to leave for reading only the reasons for which one takes each medicine and its side effects (what the medicine offers and what it might harm). Which means what each medicine can fix/cure and what it may destroy or disorganize/deregulate. It is the timeless concern on the medicines’ capacity to be a remedy and poison at the same time.