Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Athens Dialogues

Hans Ulrich Obrist often quotes Erwin Panofsky, who once famously said the future is built from fragments of the past. How these fragments accumulate, how the future becomes constructed, is often a matter of historical inquiry as well as shared personal experiences. Colored by digital technology, international conflict, domestic life, and more, twelve artists and an architect engage in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, challenging history’s defining notions and offering diverse accounts of how the present is imagined in relation to the past. One of the conversations takes the form of a photographic essay by Ari Marcopoulos examining Athens, the ancient city and its contemporary life. The Athens Dialogues reveals how antiquity is a toolbox for shaping not only artistic and research practices, but present-day realities and the futures to come.

The book includes interviews with Danai Anesiadou, James Bridle, Elizabeth Diller, Apostolos Georgiou, Isaac Julien, Jeff Koons, Ranjana Leyendecker, Charles Ray, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Christiana Soulou, Hito Steyerl, and Adrian Villar Rojas, and photographs by Ari Marcopoulos.