RESTRICTED AREAS – Nikos Panayotopoulos and Penelope Petsini Exhibition
Nikos Panayotopoulos, Penelope Petsini
Restricted Areas, 2010-14
“Restricted Areas” focus on memoryscapes of the Cold War Era in Berlin and surrounding areas, depicting places that have been transformed into official or unofficial monuments through a proccess of constant renegotiation of the past. STASI and KGB remand prisons, military bunkers, nuclear shelters and facilities, the National Security Headquarters, the underground Soviet Military High Command in DDR: Restricted sites, once designated as top-secret and often omitted from the official maps, having lost their use are now transformed into mnemonic places, symbolic fields of memory performance, thus playing a key role in the production process of working memory. This process, which contemporary historians term “cultural memory,” is not limited to mere records, but implies and presupposes a constant reconsideration whose essential characteristic is about representation.
>> Nikos Panayotopoulos was born in Athens in 1945. He studied photography in London, earning a BA from the Polytechnic of Central London (1974–1977). He holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities from the University of Derby (2008). As an advisor to the Minister of Culture, he coordinated the institutional development and reforms related to photography in Greece (1994–2004). He has written extensively on photographic theory and criticism and has organized numerous photographic research projects, seminars, workshops, events, and exhibitions. Additionally, he has co-organized and participated in several conferences. His photographic work has been exhibited and published both in Greece and internationally. In 1986, he joined the Photography Department of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens, where he served until his retirement as an Associate Professor of Art Photography in 2012.
>> Penelope Petsini was born in Bucharest in 1973. She studied photography in Athens and the United Kingdom (University of London, Goldsmiths College – MA, and University of Derby – PhD) with a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY). She has exhibited and published extensively in Greece and internationally and has curated a significant number of photographic and visual art exhibitions. Since 2004, she has taught theory of photography and contemporary art at various university departments. Her recent publications include Sites of Memory: Photography, Collective Memory, and History (2016) and Capitalist Realism: Future Perfect| Past Continuous (2018). She has also co-edited the collective volumes Her Stories: Photographic Practices in Greece (2024); Censorship in Greece (2016), and Dictionary of Censorship in Greece: Cachectic Democracy, Dictatorship, Political Transition (2018) with Dimitris Christopoulos; as well as Photography and Collective Identities (2021) and Photography and the Anthropological Turn (2023) with John Stathatos.
