Opening: Friday, 31 October 2025, 18:00
The subject of plot twist for the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival as reversal also emerges from the organic dialogue of this year’s edition with the main theme of the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art of MOMus under the title “everything must change. RIS9”, curated by the independent curator and art historian Nadja Argyropoulou.
This dialogue is given visual expression in the exhibition “Plot Twist (the science fiction change)”, and is realized with works by Ben Rivers, Errands group and Kostas Sfikas, as a prelude of Biennale 9 and main exhibition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, curated by Nadja Argyropoulou and the Festival’s Artistic Director Orestis Andreadakis.
Nadja Argyropoulou, curator of Biennale 9, notes about the exhibition: “The concept of the plot twist, as it lurks in science fiction as premonition, openness and possibility, and as it is presented in this exhibition- preamble to the 9th Biennale, is perceived as revolutionary insight and a trigger of change. It is not a getaway but a necessity; it is resonance with a world of many worlds, hands-on imagination, radical futurism, as it reknits time (the entanglements of already with not yet) with the yarn of a structural understanding of unfreedom and the militantly joyful overturn of its deadlocks. The choice of this evocative exhibition for the soft opening of the 9th Biennale alludes to the importance of critical fabulation—as defined in Saidiya Hartman’s work, which serves as inspiration for the Biennale as a whole—while also presenting artistic practices of the “radical intelligence” that challenges what is established as proper and proposed, attuning to the possibility of a social otherwise, to what we elude and eludes us.
The exhibition “Plot Twist (the science fiction change)” begins with the installation of the triptych Urthworks (Slow Action [2010], Urth [2016], Look Then Below [2019]) by British artist Ben Rivers. In this trilogy, the artist engages both real and fabricated times and places (the real places comprising Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, Mendip Hills, Somerset) as well as an alternating use of 16mm film and digital imaging technology, to present the stages of an environmental collapse that is not merely a possible plot twist but a lived reality that we do not recognize as such.
From the ethnographic allegory and archipelagic Utopia of Slow Action, to the contemplative introspection stirred by the sealed environment experiment in Arizona’s Biosphere in Urth (which antedated the Covid global lockdown) and to his film, Look Then Below, which recalls the chthonic side of life as it inhabits the un-exotic caves of Somerset, in an almost eerily poetic manner Rivers reveals something crucial in the apocalyptic: the reality that is constantly occurring within imagination and vice versa, the familiar dimension of the epic narrative, the loose boundary between documentary and invention. The exhibition will also present the artist’s book Urthworks, which has been created with the contribution of sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegell and draws from the mythology of the Vikings and Urth, the goddess of fate, as well as from Brian Aldiss’s dystopian novel Earthworks (1965).
In parallel, the official program of the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival will feature, in collaboration with the Avant-Garde Film Festival (a Greek Film Archive institution), Rivers’s new film, Mare’s Nest, which draws from Don DeLillo’s work and challenges, as does all of the artist’s work, the classic form of plot-based narratives which is often nothing more than disguised predictability. The film unfolds in an unknown and ambiguous world where the only trace of adults can be seen in the surrounding catastrophe, while the presence of children is central as they gather in community, in a hopeful for the future move.
The exhibition further unfolds through a new work by the Errands, commissioned by Biennale 9 and titled U.F.O. Lost in HEAVEN (2025) – The Journey of a Forgotten Future. The work deals with the visionary work of Nikolaos Xasteros, the peculiar idea of retrospective futurism and the coming together of the two coeval Greek Biennales (Thessaloniki - Athens) in the dynamic field of science fiction, as a memory of the future.
Here, the Errands return to their work TRANSPORTING UTOPIA, which was presented at the 2nd Athens Biennale (2009), “AB2: ΗEAVEN.” In 2009, the Errands came upon a “UFO-house,” abandoned among trees in a coastal area of Loutraki; they bought it for 1 euro and transported it, piece by piece, to Flisvos beach. The UFO-house is one of the few surviving exemplars of the futuristic prefabricated dwellings made of fiberglass that were designed by Nikolaos Xasteros in the 1970s.
The Errands group re-displayed this peculiar residence that was left to abandonment and obscurity for decades – along with the name of Xasteros. Yet, one day, the UFO-house mysteriously disappeared from Flisvos, this time for good. No one knows or saw anything. Its whereabouts are still unknown, adding a new level of mystery and meaning to the work itself, but also to the wider history of prefabs, mobility, and the shuttering of the dream of mass portable habitation.
Now, at Biennale 9, the Errands return to their work, shedding light on its multi-layered trajectory: from Xasteros’s utopian vision to the collapse, artistic rescue, disappearance and, ultimately, the current fetishization of the architectural relic—how the unwanted became “exotic,” a collector's item, selling the future as memory.
Historic works by the great artist Kostas Sfikas (1927–2009) complement this brief exhibition tour of the concept of the plot twist through a different path. The cinematography precociously and prophetically introduced by Sfikas is an unconventional viewing experience, as the director grapples persistently and aggressively with “the snare of the eye” that holds the order of the world together, raising “a nightmarish mirror” in front of it, in the words of Christos Vakalopoulos. Sfikas grapples with the pitfalls of representation as an orchestrated cultural constant and authoritative imperative.
More relevant than ever, Sfikas’s films dissect the iconoclastic vampirism of dominant culture, the scenographic perception of the world, the shackles of narrative ritual, the time of the gaze, and all sorts of constructions including that of the “moving image” itself, the representation of time.
The critical reflection on eternal fiction and the ever-coming end of worlds, the leap into the depth of history and the dive into the New Times, are the connecting thread in Sfikas’s three famous allegories (Allegory I [1986]; The Enigmatic Mr. Jules Verne – Allegory II [1993]; The Woman of... and the Collector – Allegory III [2002]) that are featured in the exhibition. As Savvas Michail notes about Sfikas’s work, “the creation of such a space presupposes a simultaneous critique of the illusory representation of the epiphenomena and an Opening to the World / Opening of the World: a Denial of the Denial of Denial.” The works Prometheus Retrogressing (1998) and Paul Klee’s Prophetic Bird of Sorrows (1995) complete this installation in the building of the MOMus–Experimental Center for the Arts. In the universe of Sfikas, the beginning and the end of the world are the groundbreaking adventure, the vortices of images, and the search for truth in the spiral of the perpetual dialectic of power and rebellion.
Curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, in collaboration with Orestis Andreadakis
Coordination: Alexandros Diakosavvas
Production: Danis Kokkinos
Curator’s Assistant: Evelyn Zempou
Opening days & hours:
31 October – 9 November 2025 / daily: 10:00-22:00
10-16 November 2025 / Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 10:00-18:00 and Thursday: 12:00–20:00