ATHENS—As a stimulating antidote to this summer’s blockbuster art gatherings — the ongoing Venice Biennale, the debut earlier this month of the François Pinault Foundation’s hang at the Punta Della Dogana, and the recent Art|40|Basel — the new installation at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost,” featuring 15 artists from the Dakis Joannou Collection, affirms that collector’s world-class standing and unfettered ambition to make waves in the global art world.

Organized with the collaboration of New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni and artists Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, and Cecilia Alemani, the show, on view through the end of December, follows Joannou’s tradition of presenting his collection, with the help of friends, in a different way each summer.

This viewer was largely bowled over by the submarine-like depth of Joannou’s collection, seeing, for example, 12 major pieces by Robert Gober from 1978–2007, most likely the biggest slice of his work on view since the artist’s midcareer retrospective at the Schaulager in Basel in 2007. (If there were any lingering doubts about Gober’s stature after two of his pieces were bought in at the auctions in New York last month, they seem trivial now.)

Organized in a meandering maze of single-room vignettes, the exhibition presents some startling juxtapositions of cutting-edge artists, such as the pairing, on the second floor, of eight powerful gouache-on-paper works by Kara Walker from 1996 with Urs Fischer’s monumental, cast-aluminum grave, Untitled (Hole) (2007), which literally cuts a hole through the floor of the DESTE building.

On the first floor, the work gouges through the ceiling to disturbing effect — almost as if a meteor had struck — and makes and impact on the works nearby, including Jeff Koons’s large oil-on-canvas Liberty Bell (2007) and Andro Wekua’s bravura installation Wait to Wait (2006), a midcentury-modern-inspired vitrine containing a wax figure of a man seated in a lacquered aluminum armchair, staring into a corner, thinking about God knows what.

The ubiquitous Fischer seems unstoppable these days, from his installing Peter Brant’s collection at the collector’s new Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, which opened last month, to his highly anticipated survey at New York's New Museum, opening in late October.

And following the digging-through-the-floor trend is Cattelan’s untitled, partly submerged figure/self-portrait of his head sticking through a manhole cover, installed alongside Paul Chan’s series of haunting charcoal-on-paper portraits of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, “My Laws Are My Whores” (2008).

The exhibition, which takes its name from Marcel Duchamp’s 1953 mixed-media work, also included in the show, also boasts a big closet of scary and über-ambitious entries. Among those is Black Market (2007), a kind of tormented domestic scene fabricated by Polish artist Pawel Althamer from a long roster of ingredients — including PVC, ebony, swamp oak, various tools, and otherwise unidentified intestines — and addressing the diaspora of African immigrants, along with other disturbing subjects.

Even Cattelan gets deadly serious and ghostly with his pristine installation All (2007), another edition of which is on view at the Punta della Dogana. This one features nine covered bodies carved from white Carrera marble that could be representative of anything from civilians mistakenly vaporized by a Predator missile, to ambushed soldiers from somewhere in the world, to an ancient burial scene of Cycladic figures.

As the ultra-brief introduction states about the boundaries of the exhibition, “Each artwork turns into the ghostly reflection of its neighbor, making it impossible to distinguish hosts from guests, friendly creatures from menacing shadows.”

Cattelan, who was on hand for the summery party that opened the exhibition, also makes an appearance at Joannou’s art-filled villa, where visitors to a festive dinner celebrating the DESTE show met the ghost of John F. Kennedy in the form of Now (2004), a life-size rendering, in polyester resin, of the popular president in a casket.