Valinia Svoronou’s exhibition The Birdwatcher’s Vigil unfolds in an interplay of new and existing works – sculpture, moving image and publication – that use materiality, gesture and narration to approach diasporic memory, temporal ruptures and feminist forms of attention. The exhibition understands fragmentation, repetition and embodiment not as an expression of loss, but as a survival strategy – as an alternative historiography that is not fed by archives, but by texture, proximity and care.
The title evokes a form of seeing that unfolds over time – not characterized by control or domination, but by intimacy. To remain vigilant – like a birdwatcher or a witness – is to be attentive to what flickers at the edge of time. The exhibition draws from stories, literature and narratives – both personal and familial – of the Greek (Rum) population of Istanbul and Asia Minor, a diasporic community to which the artist’s family also belongs.
Taking her solo exhibition Clocks of the Tides at CAN Gallery Athens as a starting point, Valinia Svoronou deepens an artistic practice at Künstlerhaus Bethanien that deals with forms of transgenerational memory – through shared touches, resistant gestures and strategies of embodied return. The works presented in parallel in Berlin and Athens – video and publication – form a cross-border ecology of forms: two complementary parts of a single gesture that spans time and space.
The video L’amour dérobe les heures (2025) unfolds less as a linear cinematic narrative than as a polyphonic reading. Valinia Svoronou interweaves her own texts with fragments of the autodidact and historian of the Rum community, Akylas Milas, who migrated from Istanbul to Greece in the 1960s. Embedded in his works, his poetic prose catalogs gestures, voices and places that have largely disappeared from the prevailing historiography. While the words dissolve into lines, the memory eludes narrative coherence – it remains fluid and relational. The swallow, which runs through the entire exhibition as a symbol of return, appears illustrated in the rhythmic structure of the video, as a flying movement that swings back cyclically.
The Tide Observer, a flipbook, transforms the forms of observation into a different medium. Composed of shadow plays and changes in light in the artist’s grandparents’ living room, the publication transforms standstill into a form of temporal geography. Like tides, breath and heartbeat, it brings the static to life. Drawings, texts and atmospheres trace a diasporic space: places such as Imvros, Istanbul and the Princes’ Islands do not appear as fixed coordinates, but as interwoven time zones – characterized by cyclical return and a perpetual arrival.
At the center of the exhibition is Later (2023), a sculptural work that functions as a transitional space and takes up a key scene from Tatiana Stavrou’s novel Secret Springs (1940), in which a woman looks at her aged reflection. Tatiana Stavrou – a hitherto little-noticed author of Greek modernism and a migrant who came to Athens after the population exchange of the 1920s – works with a literary technique that sensitively captures the flow of consciousness and the multi-layered perception of time and inner life. In Later, this fleeting moment becomes an anchor: a mirror in a steel frame, accompanied by ceramic elements in the form of notes and ribbons, some with delicate traces of chamomile. A lecture performance activates the work by interweaving Stavrou’s text with reflections on the crisis-ridden Athens of the late 2000s and speculative images of the future. Chamomile – a recurring material – runs through the work as a common thread and develops a poetic language of care and healing.
This language is continued in the work To Clothe Herself, To Wash Her Face (2025), which was developed especially for the exhibition. The title picks up on the gestures after the mirror scene: Acts of Caring and New Beginnings. The work consists of swallow-like nests made of unfired clay, Posidonia oceanica and chamomile. It evokes rituals of soaking and bonding, acts of reassembly. Installed at eye level, the nests invite you to come closer. Their construction is based on the architecture of birds’ nests, in which organic material is layered to create temporary shelters. Posidonia, a slow-growing species of Mediterranean seaweed that has stabilized coasts for thousands of years, brings an ecological temporality into play: resilient, decelerated and beyond human standards. As a diptych, Later and To Clothe Herself, To Wash Her Face combine care with confrontation. They ask how an encounter over time is possible – as the care of a body, a landscape, a narrative marked by change.
A drawing of the mythical figure Baubo appears on the back of the Later mirror sculpture – as an incantation. Baubo, a figure from Greek mythology, embodies a knowledge that interrupts and redirects linear narratives. Often associated with the archetype of the triune goddess – virgin, mother, old woman – Baubo disrupts every form of chronological order with her gestures. Her appearance opens up a counter-reading of ancient narratives that eludes colonial and patriarchal patterns of thought – in favor of a feminist mythology based on cycles, care and the small, inconspicuous strategies of survival.
The recurring motifs of the exhibition – mirror, nest, tides, plants, light – form a shared vocabulary. The works do not illustrate the past, they intervene in it. Sisterhood is not conceived here as genealogical descent, but as a form of solidarity – a practice that relates fragmented times, gestures and lives across spatial and temporal distances. The works refuse the grand gesture and instead propose lingering: a quiet persistence that defies geographical and generational divisions. The Birdwatcher’s Vigil is not a passive act, but an expression of a feminist ethic of proximity, a practice of pausing for what flickers, interrupts and reassembles at the edge of time.
