The 365 Project: Nikos Markou

The 365 Project: Nikos Markou – Animal print

On Saturday, October 24, 2026 @ 12:30, the Vorres Museum presents Nikos Markou as part of “The 365 Project.”

Animal print

Landscape has been a constant and central axis in Nikos Markou’s photographic practice. Whether natural or man-made, place functions as a field onto which traces of a presence are inscribed. In the Animal Print series, this long-standing relationship is maintained, but its method undergoes a fundamental shift.

For the first time, Markou moves beyond the search for and documentation of an existing condition. He intervenes and creates the event that he is about to photograph. Paper replicas of wild animals are placed in different locations across the Greek landscape and temporarily integrated into them. Elephants, lions, rhinoceroses, giraffes and other animals appear in places where they could not naturally exist. The landscape shifts in relation to the constructed object and assumes the role of the photographic event. It becomes an unreal condition in which the relationship between the real and the invented, the familiar and the foreign, is put to the test. The intervention does not seek to create an illusion. The materiality of the forms remains visible, and the paper bodies do not attempt to convincingly impersonate real animals. Their artificiality is an integral part of the image itself.

The choice of wild animals, however, acquires a clear allegorical dimension. Wildness is not attributed literally to the animal world. The forms function as carriers of an idea that is transferred into the social realm. The period in which these images are produced is marked by violence, conflict, social tensions, insecurity, and a gradual desensitisation to forms of brutality that return daily to the public image. Within this context, the wild does not necessarily lie outside civilisation, but can be found within it.

The forms associated with power, threat, or the untamed are made of paper. They are fragile, temporary, and exposed to the conditions of the places in which they are positioned. They carry the image of the wild without possessing its power. The powerful appears fragile, and the threatening appears constructed. The title Animal Print encapsulates this process through the multiple meanings of the word print. The term initially refers to the familiar animal pattern, while at the same time evoking printing, imprint, and ultimately the photographic image. The animals in the series begin as printed, two-dimensional surfaces; they are assembled and temporarily acquire a three-dimensional form, introduced into a real place, and, through the photographic act, return once again to the flat surface of the image.

With Animal Print, Markou expands the terms through which he approaches landscape. Photographic observation now encounters a preceding act of construction, and place becomes a field of conscious intervention. It is through the encounter between the existing and the constructed that the creative tension at the heart of Nikos Markou’s practice takes shape.

O.D. 2026

Opening: Saturday, October 24, 2026 @ 12:30.

The 365 Project: Nikos Markou – Animal print

Dates: Saturday, October 24, 2026 
Opening hours: Saturday & Sunday 10:00-14:00

The program titled “The 365 Project”, in which an artist is invited every two months to present a new work among the Museum Gallery’s existing artworks, is organized and curated by Olga Daniilopoulou.