Book launch, talk & presentation: The Fumes of Mars by Katerina Angelopoulou

On Thursday, 19 March, at 8pm, don’t miss the Athens launch of the recently released book The Fumes of Mars by Katerina Angelopoulou.

Join us as we welcome the artist in conversation with journalist Argyro Bozoni of Lifo. The launch will also be accompanied by an exhibition of selected work and process from the book.

‘A large wildfire has a very distinctive sound. No one can tell you unless they have been in one. It is a sound that can haunt you…’

On 23 July 2018, one of the deadliest wildfires ever recorded swept through Mati and neighbouring areas. Over a hundred lives were lost. Artist Katerina Angelopoulou survived the fire, fleeing with her mother and three-year-old daughter.

The Fumes of Mars is a counter-archive — a forensic and deeply personal investigation into how official narratives of catastrophe are constructed and enforced, and how governance failures and the climate crisis converge in collective trauma. It brings together Angelopoulou’s photographs from the day of the event and the aftermath, survivor testimonies from public archives and the artist’s own, aerial maps, weather reports, CCTV footage, and personal artefacts recovered from the ruins. The work challenges the official narrative, one that persists, that blamed residents and victims.

Black-and-white photographs of interior and exterior landscapes, devoid of human presence, convey a soot-permeated world. They give way to colour images taken on the day itself: entering a space of heightened reality. The personal artefacts are photographed as archaeological remains, fragments through which the story of a life can begin to be reconstructed.

Its structure is non-linear, mirroring how trauma fractures narrative — fragmentary, refusing easy resolution. The work raises urgent questions about who controls the narrative of disaster and who is silenced in its aftermath, the failure of institutions, and the struggle for accountability in an era of compounding climate catastrophe.

The publication includes essays by Professor Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University) and Professor Yiannis Gabriel (University of Bath).

About Katerina Angelopoulou:

Katerina Angelopoulou (b. 1982, Athens) is an artist working primarily with photography to explore the performativity of space and the tension between private memory and public record. Through long-term research into oral histories and archival material, she recovers silenced or misrepresented pasts, weaving them into elliptical, non-linear narratives that question institutional power and the construction of collective memory.

Her photographic practice is grounded in two decades of work in performance design and dramaturgy across theatre, dance, opera, and film.

Her work has appeared in British Journal of Photography, Photoworks, Blind, Phase, HUCK, Source, Aesthetica, and Público, and been presented at venues including the Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, and National Theatre in London, and the National Opera of Greece.
Awards and recognition include the FORMAT Reviewers’ Choice Award, shortlistings for the Belfast Photo Festival, the Dummy Award, and the CoCA Project Award, the Royal Opera House Bursary and Award for Stage Design, and a finalist placing for the Linbury Prize for Stage Design. Angelopoulou is a 2025 FUTURES Photography nominee, selected by VOID Books and mentored by Photo Elysée.

She holds an MA with Distinction in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication (2021), and trained previously in Scenography at Central Saint Martins and Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.

Her first monograph, The Fumes of Mars, was published by GOST Books in October 2025 and will be presented at PhotoLondon, the Sarajevo and Łódź Photo Festivals.