An Evening Botanist
at
Alkinois, Athens
6 Alkinois Street, Athens 11852
Opening: Friday, December 5, 2025, 19:00
Duration: December 6, 2025 – January 17 2026
Curated by: Panos Giannikopoulos
In An Evening Botanist, Andreas Mallouris examines how practices associated with healing, desire, and pleasure activate materialities and, through them, the social body. The exhibition unfolds at the threshold between the surgical and the erotic, translating clinical procedures into a sculptural vocabulary. Mallouris presents sculptures, installations, drawings, and a video. His materials include steel, bronze, plaster, soap, rose canes, wooden shafts, and grafting supports. These elements articulate paradoxical forms of proximity and reveal the structures that hold relations in place, forming a material syntax in which vulnerability and care become visible.
The title derives from the early twentieth-century euphemism “evening botanist,” a term used to describe men who sought encounters in public gardens. Mallouris reclaims this figure as a researcher of bodily intimacy, an observer who cultivates knowledge through attention and risk. Cruising emerges as an epistemological and political practice, a way of mapping space through movement, anticipation, and recognition. Observation mobilises the body and shifts the gaze from distance to proximity. The methods of the “evening botanist,” including coded communication and sensory alertness, form an embodied counter-archive that resists architectures of surveillance and control.
Mallouris’s dual background in visual art and plastic surgery shapes his understanding of the body as a continuous process. In reconstructive surgery, the graft initiates a condition of dependency in which one tissue nourishes another until a new circulation forms. In the exhibition, the graft operates as a structural principle of relation, a system of coexistence where matter learns to adapt without being assimilated.
Within the exhibition, care functions as both a central axis and a formative force. Mallouris’s works assemble fragments into circuits of interdependence that remain flexible and alert. Railings evoke surgical devices, urban infrastructures, and the fenced architectures of public gardens, forming structures that choreograph access, regulate movement, and determine what remains visible. Thorned plants weave through these systems and occasionally undermine them or push against their order, creating openings.
Text by Panos Giannikopoulos
