Onecosystemsand the materials they ask us to keep.
A curatorial editorial on contemporary art that begins with material — olive netting, salt, soil — and ends with the rooms we choose to keep these objects in.
Read the journalIn this issue
On the discipline of staying with material.
There is a particular hour in the studio, just after the courtyard cools and before the lamps come on, when the materials seem to do the looking. A coil of olive netting on the bench, half-unwound; a tray of grey Aegean salt drying on muslin; a jar of soil from a hillside east of Markopoulo, labelled in pencil. None of these objects, on its own, is yet an artwork. None of them, on its own, is only a thing.
This is the threshold we have chosen to work at. Ecological art is a phrase that has begun to do quite a lot of work in the past decade, much of it tired. We use it, when we use it at all, in a narrow and quiet sense: art that begins with a material drawn from a living system, that respects what that material was doing before we found it, and that returns it — eventually — to a system that can still receive it.
On staying with the material
The discipline, if it is one, is patience. A length of olive netting picked up from a grove in November is not the same object three months later, when the dust has settled and the resin has hardened on its knots. The curator's task, in our reading of it, is to wait long enough for the material to declare what it wants the room to do. It is slow work. It is, frankly, often boring. It is also, we have come to believe, the only honest way to install an ecologically-minded exhibition.
Material is not a metaphor. It is a tenant we have invited into the room, and our job is to keep its lease honest.
What follows in this volume — three exhibition essays, a long-form review of the spring programme at five small spaces across Athens and Piraeus, and a curator's diary of the harvest season — is offered in that spirit. We are not interested in the spectacle of the ecological, nor in the easy moralism that has crept into so much writing about land and art in recent years. We are interested in what happens when you put a piece of olive netting against a wall and leave it there for a season, and then ask, as quietly as you can, what it has become.
A note on the season
Spring in Attica is a curatorial gift. The wild oats are already up around the city, the salt-pans south of Megara have begun to crust, and the olive groves that fed the autumn issue are quietly resting. This is the moment to install slowly, to leave doors open, and to let the rooms breathe between visitors. We hope you will visit.
An Athens-based curatorial practice on ecological materials.
01Contemporary art in Athens, written from inside the room
The contemporary art Athens conversation has, in the past decade, become one of the most generative in the Mediterranean. Public institutions, artist-run spaces, and the long shadow of documenta 14 have produced a city that is unusually hospitable to slow, material-led work. We write from inside that ecology, not above it. The exhibitions we cover are, almost without exception, ones we have visited at least twice — once during install, once after the doors have settled — and our reviews try to honour both moments.
The studio's editorial offices sit on the lower slope of Pangrati, a five-minute walk from the National Gallery and a short tram ride from Piraeus. We see, on average, four exhibitions a week between October and June, and we write about a fraction of them.
02Ecological art exhibitions, considered slowly
We publish two long-form essays per volume on the ecological art exhibitions question — not as a survey, but as a working conversation with the artists, curators, and small institutions doing the most patient work in this field. Our criteria are narrow: the show has to begin with a material drawn from a living system, the artist has to have spent meaningful time with the source of that material, and the installation has to leave the gallery in a state that can still receive the next exhibition without a six-month repair.
Ecological art, in our reading, is not a marketing category. It is a discipline of attention, and we treat it as one.
03Olive netting installations and the rural source line
The phrase olive netting installations has, almost by accident, become a quiet through-line of our work. The black and green polypropylene mesh laid out under olive trees during the autumn harvest is, by volume, one of the most ubiquitous agricultural materials in the Greek countryside, and one of the least visible inside the white cube. We have tracked roughly thirty artists working with this single material across the Mediterranean, and we publish a short essay on a new one in almost every issue. The material does an unusual thing in the gallery: it holds the memory of the grove, the harvest, and the labour, and it refuses to flatten into pure form.
04Material-led contemporary art as a curatorial method
The longer conversation, of which the three above are subsets, is material-led contemporary art — the slow, post-conceptual approach that begins not with an idea but with a substance, and lets the substance do most of the thinking. We are not the first journal to write about this; we are, perhaps, one of the few that insists on doing so at a curatorial pace, with the artist's process foregrounded over the critic's argument. If that sounds like the conversation you want to be inside, the archive is the best place to start.
Readers ask
01Can I visit the studio?
The studio receives visitors by appointment between October and June, usually on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Write to studio@hdkepler.net with a short note about your interests and we will reply within a fortnight to arrange a quiet hour together.
02When can exhibitions be viewed?
Our seasonal exhibitions are open Wednesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 19:00, and on Sunday afternoons from 14:00 to 18:00. The space is closed during installation weeks; subscribers receive the precise calendar in the opening letter of each volume.
03Do you accept artist submissions?
Yes, with patience. We programme a small number of artists each year, chosen almost always from people whose work we have already lived with for at least a season. Send a short letter, three images, and a paragraph about the material you are working with to studio@hdkepler.net — we read everything and reply slowly.
04How do press inquiries work?
For press, image requests, embargoed exhibition previews, and interview enquiries, please write to press@hdkepler.net. We try to reply within ten working days. High-resolution images and the current press release are available on request, under standard editorial terms.
05Do you sell works from the exhibitions?
HD Kepler is a curatorial editorial, not a commercial gallery. We do not hold inventory and we do not take a sales commission. Where a visiting collector wishes to acquire a work, we make an introduction to the artist or their representing gallery and step quietly out of the conversation.