Danae Io’s recent exhibition at Akwa Ibom begins with a cryptic text. In “Locating Space and Time,” the artist recounts a sequence of questions posed to an unnamed subject working through fractured memories and aphasia in the wake of a medical emergency. “Where are we?” “What is the date today?” “We’re in Athens, but are we in a hotel or a hospital?” There is no context given for the text, at least not explicitly. But it speaks to a familiar form of absence some might recognize—of a memory, a person, or a place. By offering this text as an entry point to the exhibition, Io attunes us to such absences, which are explored in a series of works sparsely installed in separate rooms across the gallery.
The exhibition’s title, “Recording Angel,” references figures who appear across Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions to witness and document human events. Bringing together a video and three sculptures (all 2025), Io examines who or what takes up this tradition at present, using the modern city of Thebes as a narrative thread. The first of the sculptures, Dial II, comprises a rotating praxinoscope—an optical toy introduced in 1877 that creates the illusion of moving images. The sculpture features ten identical telephone cards (or calling cards) issued by the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE) in 2003, decorated with watercolor landscapes, a motif that appears later in the exhibition.
Moving into the corridor, an open window reveals Untitled (hours), a periscope constructed of a PVC pipe, retrofitted in a shallow air shaft. The title alludes to the Book of Hours, a Christian liturgical text published in the Middle Ages that sets fixed times for daily prayer. The work also draws on the polemoscope, a device originally used for military surveillance, its name deriving from the Greek Polemos, the mythical embodiment of war. An angled mirror sits at the aperture of the periscope, reflecting light from the building’s uppermost window back toward the viewer, in essence replicating the mechanics of a camera. Appropriating obsolete technologies, Io alludes to varying forms of “observance,” of acts of perception, whether physical, mental, or spiritual.
Anchoring the exhibition, the video Recording Angel follows an anonymous driver around Thebes, where Io’s films are often set. The film begins with a shaky tracking shot of a passing freight train, a backdrop of low mountains, pine trees, and olive groves. Car engines, motorbikes, birds, and cicadas form a fragmented sonic environment. A group of field workers briefly appear in the foreground before the next two shots cut to the rear- and side-view mirrors of the car. The camera observes both the scenery just outside the window and the reflection through the mirrors, creating a double image or a reverse parallax view. Like Untitled (hours), the intervention of this mirror interrupts one field of vision while simultaneously extending another.
The car radio switches on and surfs through multiple channels before settling on a documentary-style program on the work of Scottish landscape painter, writer, and lawyer James Skene (1775–1864). Skene began traveling to Greece around a decade after the conclusion of the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), following six centuries of Ottoman rule. Another sculpture, Dial I, is displayed opposite the video. Similar to Dial II, the piece incorporates OTE telephone cards featuring the panoramic watercolors, which Skene painted during one of his trips to Thebes. The telephone cards are arranged side by side and intercut with mirrors, creating a seemingly continuous landscape image. Skene’s muted watercolors convey a peculiar quietude, one that doesn’t quite account for the ways in which the Greek landscape shifted over many millennia. Thebes, the home of Mycenaean ruins, was once a powerful city-state and a rival of ancient Athens before its destruction in the fourth century BCE and the consolidation of modern-day Greece. “The Ottoman architectural traces,” the disembodied narrator tells us, “are removed by the new state, mutating the landscape into another fantasy.”
As Io mediates Skene’s attempts to capture a utopian vision of the new nation state—not at a moment of conflict or action, but one suspended in time—she touches on Greece’s reckoning with its post-imperial identity in the nineteenth century, efforts that carry into the present. The erasure of cross-cultural architecture may represent a flattened, Europeanized Greek identity, but the landscape holds onto these traces. It would be an oversimplification to dismiss Skene’s observations as merely a symptom of the western colonial gaze; Io instead takes Skene’s positioning seriously, interpreting his naivety to mark how this moment of transition between empires sits within the public imaginary. As Io interrogates the empires in question—the Ancient Greek, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman, as well as the British, using Skene as an avatar—she also demythologizes the notion of empire itself. Thebes was the site of numerous tragedies and divine encounters for Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus, and Heracles, mythologies recorded through another otherizing gaze, that of ancient Athenian writers. Somewhere between Skene’s paintings and the forward-backward view from Io’s lens is an empire at a moment of rupture, when a seemingly resolute structure teeters on the brink of collapse. Io uses after-images to point toward the systems and structures that linger after the collapse.
As we witness other global empires crumbling from within, Io’s work speaks to something that all empires share—a proximity to ruin. “Recording Angel” grapples with the notion of collapse, not as an event but as a series of transitions and repetitions over time, encapsulated within the landscape. While Io contends with the history of Thebes—with empire, and the balance between landscape and ruin—her works also meditate on the role of technology in not only recording history, but in comprehending its reverberations. As the driver navigates the Theban landscape, our attention is divided between text, image, and voice, as the narrator’s sentience of the driver’s (and by extension, our own) ecological encounters become increasingly clear. The medium becomes mutable, the message dispersed. A radio signal scattered and clipped across space and time.
