"Exposure" Athens, guest of honor for its tenth session, is celebrated with 140 works of art

Sharjah, December 17 / WAM / The International Photography Festival “Xposure”, which will be held from January 29 to February 4, 2026 in the Greek capital, Athens, will celebrate a guest of honor in its tenth session through a visual experience titled “The Space of Athens,” which includes more than 140 artworks by six visual artists and presents a pictorial narrative that captures the city’s features and stories and evokes the cultural memory it stores.

The Athens Pavilion is part of the “Spaces” corner dedicated to graphic storytelling, through which the festival re-presents exhibitions as integrated cultural systems that the visitor reads and experiences as a single story, not as separate works of art displayed side by side.

During the days of the festival, which is organized by the Sharjah Government Media Office in the Aljada area in Sharjah, “Athens Space” presents works that have gained international recognition for the profound humanitarian issues they present, documenting the lives of marginalized communities, highlighting the efforts of identity preservation practices, and monitoring the humanitarian repercussions of social transformations.

This trend intersects with the slogan of Exposure 2026: “A Decade of Visual Storytelling,” affirming the festival’s position as a global meeting point for visual culture and creative ideas.

The six exhibitions in the “Athens Space” highlight the social and emotional diversity of the Greek people, from families of nomadic shepherds and migrant neighborhoods to communities shaped by religious rituals, customs, faith and shared memory.

In the “Diava” exhibition, which is the name given to the traditional path taken by shepherds in seasonal travel, Dimitris Tousidis presents a vivid visual documentation of the centuries-old tradition of herding and traveling in northern Greece, a practice that UNESCO has included in the list of intangible cultural heritage.

Toussidis focuses on photographing the last families who still cling to this seasonal migration on foot, as his lens captures the spirit of steadfastness in the face of the acceleration of modernity and evokes questions of memory, loss, and the changing lives that were passed down through generations. Toussidis’s works have received recognition from international awards, including the “Migration Media Award” and the “Athens International Photography Award.”

In the “Little Homelands of Diversity” exhibition, photographer Marou Kouri turns her lens to the immigrant communities in Athens, revealing how people formulate the meaning of belonging within the city and how multicultural neighborhoods form and transform over time. The portrait works published by Marou Kouri in prominent international media address issues of coexistence, identity, and the reality of the daily lives of people who have made Athens their home.

As for the “World Religion” series by photographer Athanasios Malukus, it explores emotional states within religious rites and rituals, highlighting mourning, the intensity of spiritual experience, and moments of spiritual uplift and transcendence. His work, which has won international photography awards, documents traditions and rituals that still embody the identity of societies around the world.

In the “The Athenians” exhibition, Socrates Baltagiannis presents portrait works of Athens through the faces of its communities, documenting the details of daily life shaped by a city undergoing a stage of social and economic transformation. This series of photographs was completed during a period of radical transformation experienced by both the photographer and the Greek capital, Athens, to reflect the intertwining of individuals’ personal stories and their ability to adapt to conditions in the urban fabric of the city, in a way that honestly and quietly documents the lives of people in contemporary Athens.

Artist Antonis Passavantis presents a decade-long study of the Evros River, which forms the natural border between Greece and Turkey. His work, titled “Evros: Life on the Two Banks,” monitors the details of life along the border, tracing communities whose stories are affected by geography, history, and political transformations.

His project also highlights images of coexistence between Christians and the Sunni Muslim minority alongside the last Alawite community in Greece, documenting their rituals, celebrations, and daily challenges.

In the exhibition “Methos: The Thread of Greece,” photographer Michael Pappas documents traditional costumes and clothing across the various regions of Greece, revealing cultural narratives embodied in dress, rituals, and identity. The project explores fashion as a living archive of social, historical, economic, and cultural meanings. Photographer Pappas’ work is regularly published in international magazines and he expands his practice through photography books.

Reflecting the new identity-based structure of the festival, “Athens Space” will not be limited to fixed performances, but will also include speeches, sessions, and dialogues examining the role of photography as a tool for documenting memory, heritage, and truth.

Among the most prominent events is a key session held on “Platform

The 2026 edition of “Xposure” brings together more than 420 photographers, filmmakers and visual artists in more than 570 events, including 95 exhibitions that include 3,200 works of art, 126 speeches and sessions, 72 workshops and 280 art evaluation sessions, in addition to a trade exhibition for the most prominent pioneering brands in photography techniques. Purposeful art.

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