TRAVEL ROOTS | OpenArtLink 2025 Piraeus
[Available in English and German]
The World Within Reach: Which Worlds Are Within Our Grasp?
How do we travel together? Who travels—and who flees?
Already in Vienna’s 19th-century Prater, showpeople used moving panoramas and peep boxes to transport audiences into distant and imaginary landscapes. The emerging entertainment industry’s “world viewing,” affordable for all social classes, was rooted in the colonial racisms and exoticisms of its time. Later, the petro-modern promise of freedom—drawing closer to the world, mile by mile, along the highway—and today’s habitual access to the world with a click of the mouse, have both inscribed faraway visions into the visual and linguistic framework of the West. Through which boxes do we look at the world today?
The exhibition project “Travel Roots” explores travel as a way of thinking and as a mode of dialogue. The participating artists gather perspectives along—and beyond—political borders, telling of the conditions of mobility and waiting, but also of the spaces of imagination and utopia that travel continues to evoke.
Where does the utopia of a place travel to?
Olaf Osten works from a drawing-based practice, often using materials that bear traces of time. Colors that have faded or migrated from an atlas leave gaps on the mapped surface and reassemble into new territories on freely hanging fabric. With every passerby, the perspective on these fragments of the former world shifts.
Pablo Chiereghin taps on the magical surface of capitalist everyday worlds, searching for alternative routes and sites of longing. Starting from his own entanglement in the script, the artist’s performative interventions and linguistic imagery point to transgressions already waiting just around the next corner.
Alberto Storari, working from a painterly practice, engages with the language of travel and the history of its media. By removing and layering surfaces, the artist maps the world with the world itself, developing an associative “new land” from postcard motifs, landscape paintings, and satellite images.
Charlotte Aurich explores the concept of the “long view” in everyday life through her visual and installation-based works. Using montages of personal photographic and film material, she places daily routines and paths into associative relationships. As a literal “long view” within the exhibition, a projection carries her sequence of images outward into the public space.
Peter Kraus investigates in his photographic practice the aesthetics of abandoned places. His images depict silent, uninhabited spaces—factories, housing complexes, in-between zones—as dystopian landscapes detached from time and history. Their formal reduction creates a contemplative atmosphere, inviting reflection on transience, memory, and future. These places appear as frozen moments of a world in decay—beautiful, unsettling, and poetic all at once.
Miriam Laussegger traces the journey of a wire spool in her work. Originally found at a flea market in Athens, the spools first served as templates for her screen prints. She then transformed them into autonomous sculptural objects. Hanging from the ceiling and newly arranged, the artist detached them from their original utilitarian function, while remaining faithful to the industrial forms and aesthetic language of the material. Now, returned to Athens, they symbolically complete a cycle of discovery, creation, and re-encounter.
By rearranging, repositioning, and photographing artists’ studios, Elisabeth Grübl translates creative processes into images. Her performative interventions in workspaces render these places tangible as reservoirs of creative identity, capturing poetic snapshots of environments marked by constant change and motion. Her photographs expand the Athens exhibition to include the idea of travel within one’s own room—a space of possibility.
Curated by: Charlotte Aurich, Pablo Chieregin
Artists: Charlotte Aurich, Pablo Chiereghin, Peter Kraus, Miriam Laussegger, Olaf Osten, Alberto Storari.
The exhibition is presented at OpenArtLink 2025 | Piraeus Project, an initiative organised by CHEAPART and keramikos_23, aimed to unite international artists from diverse disciplines to explore innovation and creative exchange.
OpenArtLink 2025
Piraeus-Project
Athinon 8-12, 185 40, Piraeus 185 40
22 - 26 October, 2025
Opening: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Organised by: CHEAPART, keramikos_23
Georg Georgakopoulos, Paolo Incarnato, Fotini Kapiris, Thalia Kerouli
https://www.openartlink.com
