VASKOS
Difficult Shot, from the series Notes on Nelly’s, 2024

In their new series Notes on Nelly’s, VASKOS initiates a dialogue with the work of Nelly, the iconic photographer of 20th-century Greece. Nelly’s images, taken in the first half of the last century, celebrate classical antiquity, animate the Acropolis through the ethereal sensuality of the dancer Nikolska, and document the revivalist spirit of the Delphic Festival, orchestrated by Eva Palmer and Angelos Sikelianos. In 1936, Nelly attended the Olympic Games in Berlin, where she met Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, and presented him with an album of her photographs of ancient Greek monuments. Against the grim backdrop of our time, marked by the resurgence of the far right, nationalism, militarization, and the rise of anti-woke rhetoric, VASKOS chooses to reengage with Nelly’s legacy through joy, playfulness, and light, as a way of exorcising the ghosts of the past and dispelling the anxieties of the present.

Text from the artists, slightly modified.