The opening of the group exhibition EROS – THANATOS / AGGRESOR – VICTIM, curated by art historian Stavros Kavalaris, will be held on Friday 16 June 2017 at 20:00, in the neoclassical building, located in 1 Vissis &Aeolou str., Athens, which is set to open its doors to the public for the first time.
The exhibition will run until 15 July 2017.
Could Eros be the antidote to Thanatos or visa-versa? Could this rhetoric become the connection between the subconscious and the “darker” place of the human substance with the corporeality, and even the sociopolitical need, of the human being?
As the curator notes, based on Sigmund Freud’s theory that human nature’s duality emerged from two basic instincts, Eros and Thanatos, as the instinct for life, love and sexuality, on one hand, and the instinct of aggression and death, on the other, these two impulses advance a person either to anything that is pleasurable or to a process called cathexis: holding.
In Symposium, Plato claims that Eros is of divine and, simultaneously, demonic origins, which gravitate toward the other party involved. More so, in Phaedrus, he alleges that a lover aspires to reduce his “amorous other” to something weaker and of lower level. In this dipole then, what role do passion and beguilement play and what does that of pathos? In that sense, could Eros mean activism, revolution, freedom, while Thanatos the strife between the good and bad, or even the state of being damned?
The exhibition, through a dialectical approach, presents the works of nineteen (19) artists which will attempt to provide the answers to above mentioned, amongst other, questions, by paying attention to sentimental and sexual details and evocations of “mood”.

With the support of NEON.
Organized by: HOUSE OF CYPRUS
Official air carrier sponsor: AEGEAN AIRLINES
Hospitality sponsor: CYPRIA HOTEL ATHENS