Press Release
The Stoic concept of Oikeiōsis (loosely translated as kinship)
inspires a multi-sensory solo exhibition
of new work by artist Pavlina Vagioni,
presented by the Hellenic Diaspora Foundation,
on the occasion of the 61st Biennale Arte, Venice
6 May-25 October, 2026
Spazio Tana, Ramo de la Tana 2127/A, 30122, Venice
opposite the main entrance of the Arsenale
Oikeiōsis: the ancient Stoic concept of expanding the circle of care — from self, to family, to all humanity
Etymology: From oikos (οἶκος) = household, home → the act of “making something one’s own” or “recognizing something as belonging to oneself”
Meaning: kinship, affinity, co-belonging, connectedness
This May, the Hellenic Diaspora Foundation launches its first project beyond Greece, presenting Oikeiōsis, a solo exhibition of new work by Greek artist Pavlina Vagioni at Spazio Tana in Venice, on the occasion of the 61st Biennale Arte. Curated by Dr. Laura Augusta, Jane Dale Owen Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Oikeiōsis draws on Vagioni’s poetic and visceral visual and sonic language, which reimagines myth and philosophy as lived, embodied experience. Across two rooms, visitors move through a sensorial passage from isolation to kinship. Warm, immersive, and meditative, the exhibition pulses with light, sound, and the presence of other bodies, in direct dialogue with the Biennale’s theme, In Minor Keys, which calls for healing, resonance, and the radicality of joy amid a world in crisis.
Vagioni comments: “The world is loud with reasons to turn away from one another. I wanted to make a quiet work. Not a protest, not a commentary, but a space where strangers can sit together and remember that this, too, is real.”
Oikeiōsis (pronounced ee-kee-o-sis) offers a bold and timely reimagining of ancient philosophy through a distinctly contemporary lens. Unfolding as a two-room, multisensory passage that merges warmth, sound, visuals, and tactile encounter, the exhibition challenges the illusion that we are separate. Drawing on Stoic ethics and pre-Socratic cosmology, Vagioni reminds us of what the ancients knew: that we belong to one another and that our deepest nature is shared.
The artist, who is also a classically trained singer and composer, transforms the visitor from a passive observer into a participant. Her approach is both scholarly and intuitive, drawing from ancient wisdom, traditions, music, and scenography to create a fluid artistic language. In focusing on elemental materials, such as sound, light, reflections and salt, she resists the urge to offer spectacle or didactic resolution. Instead, she implicates the visitor in a process of co-presence.
In the first room, called Neikos, the ancient Greek word for strife or divisiveness, a cube of polygonal plexiglass reflects visitors in fragmented, multiplied form, confronting them with the geometry of separation. In the second room, six warm rock-salt seats surround a hexagonal structure embedded with mirrors. When someone sits, sound and light respond to their presence: a layered vocal soundscape, incorporating the artist’s own soprano voice, evokes the Orphic declaration “I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven.” Separation dissolves. Kinship becomes tangible.
The artist has composed a soundscape for the second room of Philotes, an ancient Greek word referring to the power of bringing harmony to separate elements. She uses her own voice, humming, heartbeats, and other sounds in a minor chord that gradually start from low to high. The sound will follow the visuals, slowly building up from low frequency to high, to create a minor extended chord, similar to those found in jazz, Ravel, and Debussy. When visitors are gathered together in the space, each activating the soundscape as they sit, she aims to create the “Tartini effect”: When two frequencies are heard together create a phantom third that exists only as resonance. Named for the Venetian baroque violinist Giuseppe Tartini, who first reported it, this psychoacoustic phenomenon is an auditory illusion where an additional tone is perceived when only two real tones are sounded.
Vagioni comments: There is a sound in music that no single voice can produce. Musicians know this. When voices converge, something else appears, a resonance that belongs to none of them and to all. You cannot will it into being. You can only create the conditions and listen. In a Biennale composed in the minor keys, this is the frequency I wanted to tune to: not a sound, but what the sound reveals. We carry a luminous knowing that precedes language. It is always there. It only needs a moment to surface.
Vagioni’s practice is devoted to restoring the numinous in daily life, beginning each project with etymological excavation of primary sources to unearth what the very word mythology conceals within itself: myo (to conceal) and logos (to reveal). What emerges are environments where visitors do not contemplate myth but physically undergo it. Her work moves fluidly across mediums, rooted in an alchemical process that transforms archetypes such as Medusa, Proteus, and the Sirens into agents of healing. With Oikeiōsis, presented during the Venice Biennale, Vagioni brings this practice to its most visible platform yet. The magic we have forgotten returns. We remember how to belong.
Curator Dr Laura Augusta comments: In alchemy, salt is the principle of memory, materialized. For this new installation, Pavlina Vagioni thinks about the tangible ways in which we are connected. Here, a group of salt seats will change shape over the course of the exhibition, holding the record of physical touch, their own memory of the visitors who pause for respite. If we imagine kinship as a kind of embrace, of shared space and gathering, of song, we might describe our entanglements with others as a series of overlapping, embracing circles, gently widening out from the self, to the beloved, to the known, to the unfamiliar. In a moment of extraordinary fragmentation, the artist understands the fundamental tenets of our social responsibility to be empathy, closeness, and warmth, even before information. And perhaps that is our most primordial memory: the feeling of being cradled in co-presence.
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