9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, “everything must change. RIS9”

It’s an uncanny feeling to visit the Thessaloniki Biennale in 2026, over a decade after an ambitious three-edition run that culminated in 2015, flush with a reported budget of one million euro each co-financed by the European Union and Greece fraught with the material conditions of a sovereign debt crisis.1 That year, as the Greek economic crisis intensified, a referendum against Troika-imposed austerity ended in capitulation to a harsher bailout despite a resounding “No” vote, and subsequent editions were shaped by a drastically reduced purse, with no invited external curator until Maria-Thalia Carras delivered a rigorously curated main show in 2023 amid considerable setbacks. Those pressures remain visible in Thessaloniki Biennale 9 (TB9). In the opening press conference, main-show curator Nadja Argyropoulou stated that she had refused to accept sponsorship linked to the Israeli state, the arms industry and fossil fuels, while also calling out funding and organizational issues endemic to Greece (but hardly unique to it). Across the contemporary arts, precarious labor and dysfunction persists amid deepening inequalities, rising living costs, and ongoing geopolitical crises. Cue TB9’s title “everything must change,” which confronts a “current, urgent, and plural demand” for transformation that sounds at once “like a revolutionary cry” and “empty slogan.”2

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s writings on waywardness—described in her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as  “the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity”—the exhibition takes place on the grounds of the state-managed Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF-HELEXPO).3 Inaugurated in 1926, this historic trade-fair complex, rooted in the national and world’s fair models, is a fitting frame for the “paradoxes of enclosure and escape” and “errant paths and improvisation” the curatorial proposes, bearing in mind the recently rejected bid by Thessaloniki’s citizens to hold a referendum on the multi-million-euro plans to redevelop the site and rectify chronic mismanagement of its social and cultural legacy.4

With that in mind, Argyropoulou plays with the context of the state-run MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art, part of the MOMUS museum cluster organizing the biennale, which is housed in the modernist Public Power Corporation (DEH) Pavilion built in 1960 to embody bygone aspirations for progress.5 Here, a salon-style hang installed like a graphic score for the section “Pan Daimonium. surrealism as a state of mind,” gathers alternative visions that percolated around that twentieth-century modernist turn. Greek avant-garde, beat, anarchist, and punk legacies are a vital influence: the section is named after a book of poems by radical multi-hyphenate Nanos Valaoritis, who published and edited the literary journal Pali in 1960s Athens. Early issues appear in a long vitrine alongside Greek Mythology (1963–75): Valaoritis’s collages pairing nineteenth-century prints with cryptic captions, including a three-picture column—a helmet, an equation, a diagram of an early laryngoscope in use—under which divination is described as the most ancient of arts.

Images arranged on the wall in rhythmically irregular clusters include drawings by Valaoritis’s contemporary Panos Koutrouboussis, an artist, writer, and comic-book illustrator, whose elegant lines built a cast of irreverent and satirical characters and scenarios including Afternoon Walk (1962), people in angelic robes walking off a cliff like lemmings. They share a sharp, chiaroscuro wit with figurative illustrations by Solomon Nikritin, a striking inclusion in a capsule of works by the Russian avant-garde from the storied Costakis Collection, including Anti-Composition, a 1930 gouache watercolor on paper of a yellow human-headed hydra suffocating the body of a bespectacled everyman. Each snake is inscribed with a word: “Kulak,” referring to landowning farmers, “Wrecked,” and “Bureaucrat.”

It’s an interesting trinity when considered alongside another section, co-curated with Vanessa Theodoropoulou, devoted to the ideas and actions of the Situationist International, including the anti-dualist concept of triolectics advanced by Asger Jorn, demonstrated on 24 May with a three-sided football match Jorn devised as a living diagram of theory in praxis. Not to mention the fulcrum between the gallery’s two halves: Wifredo Lam’s mahogany-scale oil on canvas L’Ombre (1953)—a bird in flight looming behind a horned figure and tall form with two Eleguá  heads, referring to the Yoruba god of the crossroads—which faces a lone eighteenth-century Greek Orthodox icon of an unusual Three-Faced Christ installed within an opposing enclave. “What a strange fascination to be several in one,” writes Greek surrealist Nicolas Calas about the image in his book Confound the Wise (1942), recalling Valaoritis’s instinct for the carnivalesque.6 This is the central thesis of “everything must change,” that emancipation is an ongoing process: polyphonic, imperfect, fragile, complex.

These conditions are amplified in Pavilions 2 and 3, where the show progresses like a snake eating its tail. A freestanding reflective wall leads into a long concrete warehouse at the entrance from Pavilion 2’s second floor, enclosing Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s live simulation of a virtual swamp Berl-Berl (2021–ongoing) on the other side. Produced from fieldwork in the Berlin-Brandenburg wetlands, the piece builds a bridge to Kalochori Lagoon on Thessaloniki’s western outskirts, which Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou’s film In The Wild (2026) frames as a concrete field of engagement. Screened within a sprawling wetland-garden installation, a weave of digital video, 16mm footage, archival material, and captures from a robot-dog camera, moves like a visual poem between the LIRES Robotic Lab at the University of Macedonia, the Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles, and Kalochori, where encounters between robot, human, animal, and environment are performed as innocent, curious, even tender. “Here, bodies of water and bodies without organs choreograph a refusal,” the artist writes: “What can wetlands teach us about intelligence, about holding without resolving?”

In keeping, works are positioned like islands with ample space between them, giving them room to breathe while drawing attention to the stripped-down halls of the building itself.7 Agnieszka Polska’s Red River (2026) presents a video-walk from Thessaloniki’s former Jewish ghetto to a volcano in Indonesia, at times narrated by scholar Muhannad Hariri’s Instagram posts, which turn images witnessed online of Israel’s genocidal military assault on Gaza into descriptive texts that begin with the phrase, “Today I saw.” The work is screened on a standing wall angled in the direction of Marina Velisioti’s immersive multimedia installation Last Resort (2026), named after the nightclub for marginalized mutants in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). Cocooned within an existing corridor maximized to invoke the gangplank of an intergalactic spaceship, metallic chain-link fencing coated in candy-colored enamel cut into the form of a temple frontispiece bears a neon sign reading “Last Resort” as its pediment. On a flatscreen below, a video collage of pop culture and images of Thessaloniki from the eighties depicts art, music, and dance as forms of interplanetary escape—“ritual space,” the artist writes, proposing “chaos as a cosmic principle”—drawing on Carl Jung’s interpretation of flying saucers as projections of the collective unconscious in times of crisis. The Errands Group’s U.F.O. lost in HEAVEN (The Journey of a Forgotten Future) (2025), a presentation of nine original architectural drawings from the 1960s for a house modeled on a UFO by Nikolaos Xasteros, aptly follows. Both echo Alexandros Anastasiadis’s iconic rocket-shaped 1970 OTE Tower outside, especially when considering the reported 750 million dollar agreement finalized in April 2026, for Israel to arm Greece with a munitions inventory over four years, plus ten years of “support and maintenance”—an encounter of futurisms where past aspirations collapse into present conditions.

The path feels bleak, as Dionisis Kavallieratos lays out in Pavilion 3, a cavernous gray cube on which installations by artists including Meriem Bennani and The Callas form something of a witches’ circle. Encapsulating what Argyropoulou calls “the incommensurability between our available vocabularies and that which we are asked to describe,” The Chivalrous Quest (2020–26) is a multimedia installation revolving around a thrity-minute silent film, save for an exquisite score composed by the artist to carry gibberish chamber vocals. Raising the spirits of Mike Kelley and Monty Python, this masterclass in sharpening rage into satirical form follows a triumphant gang of medieval knights seeking missions that crudely devolve into conquest. Ceramics and pencil drawings pull on that scenario, as does a monumental sculpture showing its village characters forming a line as they wait to literally get fucked by charging nobility. “The chivalrous quest is endless,” writes the closing caption: the absurdity is the violence.

Like an antidote, the soundtrack from Lewis Walker’s video Bornsick on Film (2026) nearby, a TB9 commission that adapts a live solo dance performance, bleeds into The Chivalrous Quest to ease its sting. Based on the compulsive referencing embedded in human behavior, revealing identity as a constantly shapeshifting negotiation between structure and transformation, Bornsick on Film is a collage of intensities: close zooms on gestures and textures animate the body as a mediator of life, as wild and enduring as the wetlands, on a monumental screen. It’s visceral, embodied, moving: an argument for other forms of chaos to re-order a dead-end status quo.