The Athens Dialogues: Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist / Photographs by Ari Marcopoulos

Hans Ulrich Obrist often quotes the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, who once famously said that “the future is built from fragments of the past.” How these fragments accumulate is often a matter of historical inquiry as well as shared personal experiences. Here, 12 artists and an architect–Danai Anesiadou, James Bridle, Elizabeth Diller, Apostolos Georgiou, Isaac Julien, Jeff Koons, Ranjana Leyendecker, Charles Ray, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Christiana Soulou, Hito Steyerl and Adrián Villar Rojas–engage in conversation with Obrist, challenging history’s defining notions and offering diverse accounts of how the present is imagined in relation to the past. One of the conversations takes the form of a photographic essay by Ari Marcopoulos examining Athens, the ancient city and its contemporary life. The Athens Dialogues reveals how antiquity is a toolbox for shaping not only artistic and research practices, but present-day realities and the futures to come.