With works by Ileana Arnaoutou & Ismene King, Valentina Bartolini, Nicole Economides, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Yorgos Stamkopoulos, Nikolas Ventourakis and Paky Vlassopoulou; curated by Olympia Tzortzi

Opening day: 30 May 2025, 7 pm – 10 pm
30 May – 26 July 2025

Did we all measure our childhood summers by the number of ice creams we ate—or is that just a Mediterranean thing? I remember countless children scattered along the beaches of Greece, playing under the sun, chatting, counting, and “competing” over who had eaten the most ice cream. I was definitely winning against my brother. Looking back, I’m not sure if it was the innocence of that time, the carefree spirit of the early ’90s, or simply the fact that we were just children—but summer had a different kind of magic back then.

Callirrhoë is pleased to present Sunny Side Up, a group exhibition featuring seven contemporary artists represented by the gallery, each offering a personal and critical perspective on the Mediterranean summer drawing from intimate and embodied experience.

While the show draws on nostalgia—those memories of sun, sea and ice cream—it also acknowledges the shifting realities of the present. Through a range of practices, the works explore the tension between desire and fragility: the impact of over-tourism, the accelerating climate crisis and the fragile balance between pleasure and environmental precarity. Sunny Side Up invites viewers to linger in that duality—to feel the warmth of the sun while recognizing the heat.

Alongside the group show, One Work Show Series comes back again with a new body of work developed by Esmeralda Momferratou. Through moving images and sculpture, Where the Stones Were  is grounded in personal and family memory, using body and matter to reflect on how we carry stories within us.

The navel functions as a recurring motif, evoking the natural origin of life and the connection to the maternal body. At the same time, it is presented as a neutral mark left after birth—a trace of a relationship that has been severed, yet also a sign of autonomy. Through this motif, the work reflects on themes of bodily memory, origin and transformation.