UNTITLED (A COMMON STORY) / 25 LEMON TREES, NO GARDENERS

Closing Soon × Nitra Gallery

Exhibition period: 22.11.2025–28.11.2025, 18:00–21:00

Artists: Kostas Kapsianis, Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Curator: Orestis Mavroudis
Address: 20 Aristonikou St & 10 Gorgiou St, 116 36 Athens (Mets)
Photos: Nikos Katsaros

Closing Soon presents its first exhibition since adopting a nomadic format, hosted by Nitra Gallery in Athens. Untitled (A Common Story) / 25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners brings together photographic works by Kostas Kapsianis and the artist duo Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt that approach the Greek landscape as a site of memory, politics, and representation, shaped by constant crises.
The two Untitled photographs (2015) are drawn from Kapsianis’s series A Common Story, which explores ancestry and belonging in rural Greece. Taken in a small hut on the outskirts of the northern city of Drama, the works engage with a modest, improvised setting that bears traces of both collective and personal history. One photograph focuses on an A4 printout taped to the semi-transparent tarp of a makeshift window, recounting the three final wishes of Alexander the Great before his death, with his portrait placed in the middle. In the text, this ancient symbol of power and national pride reflects on the vanity of material possessions and the limitations of science, represented in his words by medicine, to overcome mortality. The other photograph depicts a miniature trophy cup, evoking anything but a victorious spirit.
In 25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners (2015–2020), Källström & Fäldt examine how the Greek financial crisis was constructed and circulated in international media. Centred on a fabricated story about Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, allegedly employing gardeners despite having no garden, the work addresses the mechanisms through which information becomes myth in a contemporary context. Produced during one of the most polarised periods in recent Greek history, in the midst of the financial crisis that led to widespread impoverishment, social upheaval, and a humanitarian emergency, the project traces the shifting focus of the European news cycle. Moving from the financial to the refugee crisis, to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, it reveals how attention, value, and meaning continually fluctuate across the image economy of a mediatised world.
The presentation of these works in Greece for the first time coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the 2015 bailout referendum, one of the most significant and contested events in the country’s recent history. Frequently described as the “sick man of Europe”, Greece becomes here both subject and metaphor, a reminder that the notions of wealth and health, material and moral, remain inseparably intertwined.

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Kostas Kapsianis is a photographer based in Athens. His work focuses on the Greek countryside, tracing inherent contradictions along the fine line between expectation and disillusionment, utopia and dystopia, the past and the present. He is a founding member of the collective Depression Era / KOLEKTIV8, which explores the urban and social landscapes shaped by the economic crisis in Greece. Kapsianis has exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions including Mois de la Photo (Paris), Athens Photo Festival (Athens), European Month of Photography (Budapest), Medphoto Festival (Rethymno), Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, and FotoIstanbul (Istanbul). He has also exhibited at the Benaki Museum (Athens) and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), as well as in galleries across Europe.

Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt have been working together since 2005 and are based in Gothenburg. Grounded in the medium of photography, their work focuses on the production of knowledge, exploring media structures, historical narratives, and the depiction and perception of political events. They are the founders of the publishing platform B-B-B-Books and the gallery project FG2. Källström & Fäldt have exhibited internationally at institutions including Unseen (Amsterdam), Hasselblad Foundation (Gothenburg), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow Photomonth), Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest), Le Bal and Photo Saint Germain (Paris), LACMA (Los Angeles), Aperture Foundation (New York), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), and CFF/Center for Photography and Fotografiska (Stockholm). They have received the Hasselblad Foundation Photobook Grant (2021), the Documentary Award from the Museum of Work in Sweden (2015), and the Scanpix Photo Prize (2012 and 2006).

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