ARTISTS & EXHIBITIONS

DISCOVER ARTCINEMA HYDRA 2025

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HYDRA’S LEGACY AS AN ARTISTS’ SANCTUARY

Since the mid-20th century that Hydra emerged as a haven for international artists. It has attracted painters, poets, and musicians including renowned figures like Leonard Cohen, George Johnston, Charmian Clift, and Brice Marden, as well as notable Greek artists such as Michalis Oikonomou, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Kostas Vizantios, and Panayiotis Tetsis, among others.

ArtCinema Hydra welcomes its patrons to intimately explore the works, galleries, and studios of some of these artists via daily private tours, curated exhibitions (including the world-renowned DESTE Foundation Slaughterhouse exhibit), and more.

We also hope this experience inspires you - as a patron, collector or artist - to consider creating a bespoke program with us for 2026.

LOCAL ARTIST PRIVATE STUDIO TOURS

Local artist, teacher, and ArtCinema Art Coordinator Dimitris Fousekis deeply believes in fostering authentic artistic expression through collective efforts. Through residencies, public programs, and cross-border collaborations, our mission is to nurture creative synergy and spark transformative encounters between artists and audiences. This process begins with a meditative approach and evolves into exploring contemporary and technological ways of expressing human experiences and creativity.

With this vision, Dimitris invites many local artists, sculptors, and painters to kindly open their private studios, offering an intimate journey into their creative spaces. These exclusive studio tours are by appointment only and can be arranged for small groups. We will soon share which artists will be exhibiting and hosting these tours.

LOCAL HYDRA ARTISTS

INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS

Our visiting international Artists & Photographers

ANNU YADAV

“From New York to Hydra, Annu Yadav maps interruptions across body and land, turning flour into a language of fragility and survival”

MULTIMEDIA VISUAL ARTIST

Annu Yadav is a New York–based multimedia artist, born in Rajasthan, India. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, weaving Indian vernacular and mythologies with modern esotericism. Her work engages themes of interruption, ritual, territorial conflict, and corporeality, often staging symbolic figures and spaces that examine suppression, permeability, and the emotional weight of the gaze. Working with fabric, clay, found objects, and construction materials, she creates visceral environments that blur beauty, burden, and belief.

Her solo exhibition Gold God Meat at All Street Gallery, New York, investigated divinity and gendered violence through charged sculptural and painted forms. In 2025, she presented Interruption at Koik Contemporary, Mexico City, a conceptual installation solo show centered on division, permeability, and contested boundaries.

She has presented solo shows at All Street Gallery, JOHS Gallery, IIDR Gallery, Orveda, and Quiet Lunch (NYC); Casa Lu (Mexico City); Koik Contemporary (Mexico City); and Throckmorton Arts (California). Her work has been featured in ArtCurrently, Impulse Magazine, Artnet, and White Hot Magazine.

Interruption-II:

Solo show by Annu Yadav

ArtCinema Hydra 2025
Curated by Katharina Bosch

Interruption–II extends Annu Yadav’s exploration of interruption as it unfolds in both body and land. Where her Mexico City exhibition centered on walls and membranes, in Hydra the work turns to flour a substance at once ordinary and charged, sustaining yet precarious. Flour is promise and threat, nourishment and scarcity. In moments of conflict, it can be weaponized, rationed, withheld, or scattered in panic. Flour carries latency: a fine dust suspended between nothingness and form. Alone, it offers no shape or sustenance. It requires an encounter, water, yeast, heat for potential to become substance. Each addition shifts it along a spectrum, from austere nourishment to the ornament of sweetness, oils, and spices, where necessity tilts into excess.

A flour structure occupies the center, dense and precarious, a body without organs, suspended between collapse and stability. Around it, flour dust spreads across the stone floor, forming shifting rhizomes: unstable maps that can be stepped upon, erased, and redrawn. No pattern holds; each movement of the body reorganizes the constellation. These shifting constellations recall borders and displacements, impermanent and arbitrary. They remain unsettled, constantly rearranged as the body moves through them.
Flanking the flour piece, the paintings expand this visual language, transforming body into land and land into body, revealing how division and polarity mark both terrains. Violence scars not only soil or territory, but also inhabits flesh, eroding the borders of self and nation simultaneously. In these works, topography becomes anatomy, wounds become landscapes, and the gaze itself transforms into a threshold. The paintings open fissures, allowing the image to breathe through its own obstructions.
It is in the ruin itself that flour, paintings, and patterns come together, stone walls that endure and crumble in the same gesture, becoming the milieu that unites these elements. While concerns with fragility and unstable ground recall the work of artists such as Mona Hatoum and Doris Salcedo, Yadav defines interruption on her own terms, shaping her own language of precarious encounter. In Hydra, ruin, flour, and image converge in a precarious constellation: gathered and scattered, sustenance and scarcity, always poised at the edge of disappearance, where every surface carries both memory and the possibility of renewal.
Part of Interruption–II unfolded in collaboration with local youth in Hydra, who worked alongside the artist to create flour-based works. Guided with the support of Dimitri Fousekis, these sessions invited children to transform a material of survival into symbols of imagination and resilience. Their contributions extend the installation beyond individual authorship, rooting it in shared experience and in the rhythms of the island itself.
Curated by Katharina Bosch
Flour sponsored by Stefanos Akliros at "Το Στάχυ" ("To Stahi")

ANNU'S INSTAGRAM

STEPHEN APPLEBY-BARR

LONDON BASED PAINTER

Canadian painter Stephen Abbleby-Barr, currently based in London, England, approaches his art as storytelling. He explores museums and city streets in search of characters and settings to weave into his otherworldly universe. His dark, intimate scenes, rich colors, and dramatic lighting evoke the masterpieces of Baroque legends like Caravaggio. A passionate cat lover, Stephen returns to Hydra for a nine-day residency and studio exhibition inspired by his latest muse: Hydra’s cats.

This exhibition is dedicated to supporting the island’s much-needed veterinary clinic.

STEPHEN'S INSTAGRAM

DESTE FOUNDATION’S PROJECT SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector Dakis Joannou founded the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in 1983 to support emerging artists in Greece, Cyprus, and Switzerland. As the collection grew, so did DESTE’s mission. In 2009, Joannou expanded to Hydra, transforming a former abattoir into the Slaughterhouse, a summer project space perched above the sea. It has since hosted annual solo exhibitions from his collection.

This year, New York–based Romanian artist Andra Ursuța presents Apocalypse Now and Then, featuring new and existing works, including the debut of Desolation Ware (2025), a series of lost-wax cast bronze sculptures. Ursuța has installed sculptures inside and outside the Slaughterhouse, creating a viewing experience inspired by historical museums and archaeological sites across Greece and the Mediterranean.

Andra Ursuţa: Apocalypse Now and Then is on view at the DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, from 24 June to 31 October 2025.

LOCAL ART ATTRACTIONS

Explore local museums and historic locations

TOMPAZI MANSION (PART OF ATHENS SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS)

The Annex of Hydra is a 19th century building situated in the port of Hydra. The building is known as ” Tompazi mansion” because it belonged to Admiral Manolis Tompazis, member of an old naval family of Hydra that took part in the Greek Revolution of 1821.
The building represents an important historical and architectural monument constructed with walls of carved stone. The building consists of 3 floors with 1.100 m2 of total surface and a courtyard garden.
HYDRA LAZAROS KOUNDOURIOTIS MANSION

A truly imposing three-story building constructed in 1780, the Mansion of Lazaros Koundouriotis is one of the most important sights in Hydra! Koundouriotis, a great figure in the Greek War of Independence, the country’s naval forces, and the island of Hydra, helped the revolution by donating most of his family’s fortune to support the cause and used this space as a meeting point for Greek fighters.
A descendant of the Koundouriotis family decided to grant the mansion to the Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece in 1979, now operating under the auspices and the overview of the National Historical Museum! It houses lots of family antiques, including paintings, old furniture, and tableware, as well as traditional costumes and a grandiose knitting loom! Plus, there is a gift shop on-site, with posters, cards, and other souvenirs.
The Lazaros Koundouriotis Mansion is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 14:00 and 17:30 to 20:30, March to October!
HYDRA HISTORICAL ARCHIVES MUSEUM

The Historical Archives Museum of Hydra, founded in 1918, is housed in an elegant stone mansion that once belonged to local shipowner Ghikas Koulouras.
The museum holds numerous items donated by descendants of prominent families who shaped Hydra’s social structure in the 1800s and played a key role in launching the Greek War of Independence. Its distinctive nautical theme reflects Hydra’s strategic importance as a safe harbor and base for the Greek fleet during that period.
The Archives were originally classified and catalogued by Antonios Lignos, who served as both the island’s doctor and mayor. Ghikas Koulouras generously built and donated the original building for the Archives, intended for community use.
The current director, Dina Adamopoulou, is a historian and archivist who curates the museum’s activities and events.
HYDRA TETSIS MUSUEM

The fascinating Tetsis Museum of Hydra is housed inside the old residence and studio of Panayiotis Tetsis! Donated to the Historical and Ethnological Society by the late painter himself in 2007, this exciting structure was once a small grocery store, made evident upon entering the museum.
The museum features vivid, colorful walls, and its interiors are decorated with countless paintings and various artworks of Tetsis himself. Its ground floor also has a bedroom and a couple of dining spots. In contrast, the first floor has a hallway with awards and a collection of paintings on paper, a secondary bedroom, and the artist’s main workspace, hosting a plethora of stunning exhibits.
Tetsis Museum is open daily from 10:00 to 16:00 during the high season. Entrance to Tetsis Museum is granted with a ticket from the Mansion of Lazaros Koundouriotis.
Official website: www.nhmuseum.gr
HYDRA ECCLESIASTICAL MUSEUM

One of the most interesting places to visit in Hydra is the Ecclesiastical and Byzantine (or Agios Makarios Notaras) Museum. The museum is housed in the church of Assumption, which is also the Cathedral of Hydra. This cathedral was originally built in 1648 and was reconstructed in 1774. For a short period, it also operated as a monastery.
The Ecclesiastical Museum has rare Byzantine icons, clerk relics, and holy gospels.
From April 1 to November 15, the Museum is open every day from 10:00 to 17:00 except for Mondays.