The Ferry to Hydra: DESTE’s 2026 Season Spans Two Islands of Art-World Gravity

Every summer, the contemporary art world performs the same quiet ritual: the boat out of Piraeus, the first glint of Jeff Koons’s golden Apollo turning above the harbor, and the walk uphill to a former slaughterhouse perched over the Aegean. This June, the building belongs to Nari Ward—and it anchors one of the most substantial Greek seasons the DESTE Foundation has mounted in years.

Dakis Joannou‘s foundation has spread its 2026 program across two registers of the country at once. On Hydra, the Slaughterhouse hosts Ward’s Until That Day. In Athens, Massimiliano Gioni dives into the Joannou Collection for Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation, while the Benaki Museum gives over two floors to the Polish painter Aleksandra Waliszewska. Seen together, the three shows trace a single arc—from a generation’s private mythologies to a present-day reckoning with who belongs in Greece.

The Pilgrimage to the Slaughterhouse

No private foundation has turned one small building into as durable a piece of theater as DESTE has on Hydra. Granted the island’s disused slaughterhouse by the municipality in 2008 and running it as a project space since 2009, the foundation hands the cliffside structure to a single artist each summer and asks, in effect, for a response rather than a résumé—often on a deliberately lean budget, always site-specific.

The lineage reads like a roll call of the era: Maurizio Cattelan opened the program in 2010, with Kiki Smith, Paul Chan, Roberto Cuoghi, Kara Walker, and Urs Fischer among those who followed. Jeff Koons staged Apollo in 2022; his wind spinner now lives permanently above the port, the gilded sentinel every ferry passenger sees first. George Condo took the space in 2024, Andra Ursuța in 2025. Openings here have drawn crowds in the thousands—an improbable scrum of collectors and curators on a car-free island—which is part of the point. The Slaughterhouse is where the season announces itself.

Nari Ward Turns the Slaughterhouse Toward the Afro-Greek Present

A building that once ran red with the island’s slaughter is, this year, given over to a meditation on who a nation chooses to embrace. Until That Day trains Ward’s attention on the African population that has lived in Greece across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a community the artist sets out to honor rather than catalogue.

The project is as much sound as sculpture. Ward has invited Aggelos Aggelou—a singer steeped in the Greek folk tradition of rebetika—and other Afro-Greek musicians to perform a response to Emperor Haile Selassie‘s 1963 address to the United Nations, the plea for cooperation between nations that Bob Marley later folded into his 1976 song “War.” The show takes its title from Selassie’s warning that lasting peace will remain a fleeting illusion until humanity recognizes one another across borders of nation and race. “Their presence in this country makes it stronger,” Ward writes; “we will sing of it ‘until that day’ it is embraced.”

It is characteristic of Ward, who was born in Jamaica in 1963 and has worked out of Harlem for decades, building meaning from found and gathered material—baseball bats, shoelaces, cash registers, shopping carts—until overlooked objects carry the weight of overlooked histories. On Hydra, that method meets a charged room and a pointed argument, at a moment, as the artist notes, when much of the world is tilting toward nationalism.

Gioni Reframes a Generation in Athens

In Athens, the mood turns reflective and a little wry. Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation, curated by Massimiliano Gioni with Calvin Wang and Taeyi Kim, draws entirely from the Dakis Joannou Collection to portray the cohort born between 1960 and 1980—outnumbered by boomers and millennials, raised in the long shadow of the 1980s, and the last to come of age before the screen swallowed everything.

The title borrows from Douglas Coupland‘s 1991 novel, and the show leans into the generation’s contradictions: the slacker irony, the lowbrow appropriations, the bodies marked by the AIDS years and the rise of identity politics, the early tremors of a globalized, multicultural future. The checklist is a who’s who of the period—Maurizio Cattelan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Barney, Gabriel Orozco, Urs Fischer—and it quietly knots the season together: several of these names have themselves taken the Slaughterhouse, and one of them, Waliszewska, is showing simultaneously at the Benaki.

Waliszewska Lets Antiquity Erupt at the Benaki

The season’s strangest, most atmospheric proposition unfolds inside one of Europe’s great encyclopedic collections. Irruption of Antiquity, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, sets sixteen paintings by Aleksandra Waliszewska against objects from the Benaki spanning Neolithic Greece, classical antiquity, Byzantium, and the modern era—antiquity treated not as heritage but as pressure, a reservoir of images that refuse to stay in the past.

The framework is borrowed from Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, his wordless map of cultural memory; the title is lifted from one of its chapters. It suits Waliszewska, who calls herself a contemporary heir to Symbolism and paints dense, allegorical tableaux where sex and death, gods and monsters, surface as unstable forces. Born in Warsaw in 1976 into a matriarchal line of four generations of women artists, she makes work that feels excavated rather than composed—an apt collaborator for a museum built on the long memory of Greek culture.

If You Go

Nari Ward: Until That Day — DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra. June 23–October 31, 2026. Daily 11:00–13:00 and 19:00–22:00; Tuesdays closed. Reached on foot from Hydra port; the island is car-free, with ferries from Piraeus via Hellenic Seaways and Alpha Lines.
Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation — DESTE Foundation, 11 Filellinon & Em. Pappa St., Nea Ionia, Athens. June 18–November 26, 2026. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 12:00–20:00.
Aleksandra Waliszewska: Irruption of Antiquity — Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, 1 Koumbari St. & Vas. Sofias Ave., Athens. June 3–September 27, 2026. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 10:00–18:00; Thursday 10:00–24:00; Sunday 10:00–16:00; Tuesday closed. Tickets €12 / €9.