EVGENIA GRIGORAKI

EVGENIA GRIGORAKI

ICON SHRINES AND TAMATA

On Thursday, April 2^nd, from 19:00 to 21:00, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Evgenia Grigoraki’s solo show.

The exhibition will run until May 09^th 2026.

The Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents a photography exhibition by Evgenia Grigoraki, focusing on the roadside shrines scattered along the country’s roads—an inherently Greek sight.

Having studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and Vakalo Art & Design College, and with many years of professional experience in graphic design, Grigoraki has cultivated a gaze particularly sensitive to form, composition, and the aesthetic presence of an image. Her engagement with photography began in the early 1970s, when she lived in Africa for two years. There, she started systematically photographing her surroundings and experimenting with printing her photographs in an improvised darkroom. Since then, photography has become a personal way of observing the world, through which Grigoraki seeks the beauty of the landscape and the small, unexpected moments of human presence within it.

The series Icon Shrines and Tamata was born almost by chance, during her numerous road trips across Greece. A small icon shrine dedicated to Saint George, in the middle of nowhere on the way to Mount Falakro in Drama, became the starting point for her closer observation of these distinctive constructions. From that moment on, every shrine she encountered along the road became an occasion to stop and take a photograph, documenting the variety, imagination, and often peculiar morphology of these unique structures.

For Greeks, roadside shrines are small sites of faith and memory: they may serve as votive offerings, expressions of gratitude, memorials to human loss, or silent invocations for protection and well-being. At the same time, they possess a strong aesthetic dimension that makes them interesting even to a casual observer, Greek or foreign. These constructions often fall within the realm of folk art; in the past, their form was shaped freely, without rules, by the artisan’s imagination and often using leftover materials. Today, however, these practices have largely been replaced by standardized, prefabricated forms.

Grigoraki’s photographs, shot with an everyday camera and without digital processing, function as a subtle yet meaningful record of an element of the Greek cultural landscape that is gradually changing. Many of the shrines she captured no longer exist. Thus, her work also acquires the dimension of visual memory: a retrospective journey through places, routes and travels, where personal experience meets a collective, deeply rooted folk tradition.

It is worth mentioning Ileana Tounta’s personal note on this exhibition:“A good old friend of mine, Evgenia, showed me some years back a small publication with her photographs from road trips she took with Stavros across Greece, focusing on roadside shrines and tamata. I was impressed by the sensitivity with which she connected the subject to the natural environment. From my perspective, her photographs form two groups: one includes the shrines and offerings she chose to photograph for their relationship with the landscape, while the other presents the imaginative, peculiar, and at times almost kitsch constructions that captured her attention. A few years later, Marilia Fotopoulou, a younger visual artist with studies in photography, presented me with a series of works on the same subject. This coincidence inspired me to exhibit their works simultaneously, as I was particularly interested in the meeting of an older amateur photographer with a young professional photographer through this very distinctive Greek tradition. And what better time for these exhibitions than the Easter period, when Greek customs and the spring landscape further highlight the presence of roadside shrines within the scenery.”