Dakis Joannou on Greece’s Contemporary Art Scene

Dakis Joannou, the eighty-six-year-old founder of the Athens-based DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, sailed past the slaughterhouse on the tiny Greek island of Hydra before it was decommissioned in the early 1990s. “I heard the screams of the animals and saw the blood washing into the sea,” he tells The Art Journal from Athens. “It was a traumatic moment.”

But this didn’t deter the Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector. Instead, the space stirred something inside him and he persuaded the island’s mayor to lease the building to DESTE, which Joannou founded in 1983 to create a space where artists could experiment and contemporary art could be discussed and shared. The foundation has since become known for supporting both emerging and established artists, particularly giving young Greek artists a platform on the international stage. When he got the new space, he named it the Hydra Slaughterhouse Project, and for the last 15 years, DESTE has hosted major exhibitions there.

In the summer of 2021, after Greece’s second COVID-19 lockdown, I visited one called The Greek Gift. It featured works from Joannou’s personal collection by the likes of George Condo, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Maurizio Cattelan, Louise Bourgeois and other heavy-hitters. As exhibition spaces go, the Slaughterhouse is special; the small, stark building overlooks the serene Saronic Gulf. It stands as a striking monument where grim industrial history meets cutting-edge contemporary art.

While the show offered an insight into Joannou’s taste as a collector, perhaps more importantly it pointed to his role in developing Greece’s contemporary art scene. He says the scene was “basically really nonexistent” when he returned to Athens after a stint in London in 1980.

“When I got back to Athens, I was doing shows with Greek artists, trying to really energise the scene with contemporary art,” he recalls. “That was my aim.”

One of Joannou’s early projects was at the Intercontinental Hotel in the Greek capital, which he filled with contemporary art. He remembers a newspaper writing that anyone who wanted to see contemporary art should visit the hotel. “It had an impact,” he says.

Dakis Joannou. Photo: Alexia Antsakli, www.artflyer.net

A lot has changed in Athens since then. During Greece’s economic crisis which reared its head in 2009, artists and curators made inventive use of empty shops, garages and other spaces for shows. As arts journalist Cathryn Drake wrote for Art Basel’s online publication in 2022, Greece was ‘never short of creative spunk’. The first Athens Biennale, Destroy Athens, was held in an abandoned gasworks in 2007, while a growing number of independent spaces emerged across the capital. The arrival of Documenta 14 in 2017 brought a new level of international attention, drawing artists, curators and collectors. A more established gallery network also developed, with new spaces opening, such as The Breeder, Kalfayan Galleries, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Hot Wheels Projects and Bernier/Eliades. The activity has also spread beyond Athens, with galleries, residencies and exhibition spaces appearing across the islands – such as Hydra.

Joannou’s own path into collecting began in New York in 1985, where he encountered Koons’s One Ball Equilibrium, featuring a single basketball perfectly suspended in the middle of a glass water tank. “I was just amazed with the piece,” he says. He bought it, began meeting other artists and acquiring more work from dealers such as Jeffrey Deitch. Within a couple of years, he realised that he had a collection.

His approach to collecting has changed over the years. At first he thought that “collecting was about collecting trophies”. But the deeper he became involved in the artworld, the more his understanding of collecting changed. He started developing relationships with the artists whose work interested him. Many of the works he acquired were by artists still relatively early in their careers, including Koons.

Now Joannou buys much less frequently, but his choices remain personal. “Each work has to connect with my mind, my heart, my feelings,” he says. “There is a thread that connects everything through my mind.”

When I ask him which work in his collection is his favourite, he baulks at my question: “I have four children and several grandchildren, none of them are my favourite… it’s the same with my art.”

DESTE is housed in a former sock factory in Athens, a 1931 building renovated by architect Christos Papoulias that has housed the foundation since 2006. Over the years, it has organised exhibitions and projects intended to give Greek artists greater exposure, including a series of collaborations with New York’s New Museum. For those exhibitions, a curator from the museum comes to Greece, researches the local scene independently and selects the artists.

The approach addresses what Joannou sees as a gap in Athens’s art infrastructure, which is a lack of sustained critical scrutiny. “One of the problems here is that there is no real kind of a critical base,” he says. “We don’t have Roberta Smith here… or an Artforum.”

He points to multidisciplinary artist Eva Papamargariti – whose practice focuses on digital space, technology, and material reality – and Christodoulos Panayiotou, who was awarded the 2005 DESTE Prize, as two artists whose international trajectories have risen in tandem with Athens’s art scene. A younger generation of Greek collectors coming up is another positive sign. “There are many young collectors that are trying to get in,” Joannou says. “And a lot of non-Greek people move here, so there is a lot of energy.”

DESTE has been part of this wider development, creating opportunities for artists to work outside conventional exhibition spaces and connect with audiences and institutions beyond their home country. “We are creating a platform so each artist can step on the platform, and with his own strength can move on,” Joannou says. He’s not interested in giving artists a free leg-up, though. “We have a saying in Greece: ‘If you want to help something, don’t give him fish. Give him a fish rod’.”