The Benaki Museum presents the exhibition (Here Lay Dragons). Mapping the Unknown: A project by Rick Lowe in the context of establishing dialogues between contemporary artists and the Museum’s historical collections.

The title of the exhibition refers to the way cartographers during the Middle Ages used to represent unknown territories by using dragons, monsters, and fictional creatures, for instance in lands or waters considered dangerous or unfamiliar. These creatures adorn maps on spaces that are usually left blank or in spots where the geography of the world was still unknown.

The American artist Rick Lowe became known in Greece from Victoria Square Project, a “social sculpture” installed in 2016 in Victoria Square, Athens, in collaboration with Maria Papadimitirou, as part of the international institution documenta 14. During the past seven years VSP has been a unique example of socially engaged contemporary art, which contributes to sustaining and developing synergies between artists, refugees, immigrants and local communities.

A series of social projects developed by Rick Lowe led the artist to explore and further expand his political and social concerns, including aesthetic and subjective terms. The artist turned his attention to the iconographic and allegorical tools of mapping and cartography, bringing (back) to the center fundamental human experiences, such as traces of inhabitation and appropriation of the space in destabilized metropolitan areas and/or zones of conflict.

Rick Lowe’s micrographic patterns and mappings constantly negotiate the “unknown”, the “unseen” and the “unmapped” by mixing forms of physical and social mapping, imaginary and psychical mapping, forms which do not exclude the unconscious, whose “socially symbolic acts” the literary theorist Fredric Jameson called “political unconscious”.