ATHENS—As you walk around the labyrinth-like new architectural creation that connects the buildings of the Technopolis art center, site of the first Athens Biennial, you can practically feel the three organizers’ desire to stage an exhibition “the way we like it” rather than a by-the-book biennial. It’s a risky proposition that both succeeds and fails: The show is fresh, unconventional, and moving, but its structural concept has a superficial, one-dimensional feel. What this concept consists of is a story, and an overdetermined one at that. In “Destroy Athens,” as the show is titled, the curators—Deste Foundation director Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, artist Poka-Yio, and critic Augustine Zenakos—practically lead viewers by the hand through works by nearly 60 artists that are divided into six chapters, or “six days,” in reference to the book of Genesis. The exhibition catalog supports the story, listing the artists by chapter rather than in chronological or alphabetical order.

Idiosyncratic narrative aside, there is another side to “Destroy Athens,” which in the end is a very Greek affair. The usual European biennial suspects are missing, replaced by artists who reflect what’s going on locally. The Athens scene is shaped largely by the Deste Foundation, home to the collection of Dakis Joannou; New York-based Deitch Projects; local galleries such as the Breeder; and “guest” galleries like Los Angeles- and Berlin-based Peres Projects, which, given the scarcity of strong alternatives, has played an important role in shaping trends in the city.

Step outside Technopolis and you’ll find connections between the Biennial and these main protagonists on view elsewhere in the city. “ReMap KM” is a parallel project that installs gallery shows in unused buildings around Athens’s up-and-coming Kerameikos/Metaxourgeio district, while the Deste Foundation, the biennial’s creative adviser, offers further support with a concurrent major exhibition of the Joannou collection (Deste’s local influence is evident, with more than 10 percent of the biennial artists appearing in both shows). The exhibition, called “Fractured Figure,” curated by Jeffrey Deitch, aims to present a new approach to figurative art 15 years after his renowned exhibition “Post-Human.” The new show is visually provocative, but it fails to convincingly contextualize today’s artistic reality as “Post Human” did in the early 1990s. It does succeed as evidence of the Joannou collection’s strong direction, visual continuity, and evolving museum status.

“Destroy Athens”
The Biennial itself, on view from Sept. 10 through Nov. 18, thrusts you into a melancholic, expressionistic, inner world of ruptures, violent conflicts, and dead-ends from the very beginning. Even if you try to avoid the curators’ tale, which does give the show a kind of artificial coherence, the exhibition design forces your attention back to it. Thus, the curators are both storytellers and stage-designers; they create a succession of powerful images and occasionally stage visual games between the works and the different buildings of the venue—an old gas station—lending a site-specific aura even to older works.

Gregor Schneider’s found video of a cell at Guantanamo Bay is displayed in a prison-like cabin, which adds to its claustrophobic atmosphere. Meanwhile, Mark Manders’s three sculptural installations isolated in a derelict room provide one of the exhibition’s most poignant experiences, simultaneously unraveling the threads of the artist’s oeuvre and the poetics of the space itself.

In the first chapters of the show, reappropriated archival materials provide interesting explorations of Greek history and identity. The Otolith Group reframes Chris Marker’s little-known 1989 television series “The Owl’s Legacy,” which consisted of interviews with intellectuals reflecting on Greece’s cultural heritage. Here, the series is screened for the first time since its original producer, the Onassis Foundation, cut its distribution, claiming it was an insult to Greek identity. A more unconventional excavation of the past occurs in the work of Olaf Nicolai, who asks a psychic to help create a fictional video-portrait of Rodakis, a Greek craftsman whose only biographical trace is the house he built in the late 19th century, which has since become a well-known point of reference for architects.