Valinia Svoronou’s exhibition The Birdwatcher’s Vigil comprises a constellation of new and existing works—sculpture, moving image, and publication—that approach diasporic memory, temporal rupture, and feminist forms of attention through material, gesture, and narration. Across the exhibition, acts of fragmentation, repetition, and embodiment function not as signs of loss but as techniques of survival—an alternative historiography composed not through archives but through texture, proximity, and care.
The title evokes a durational mode of looking: one shaped not by mastery but by intimacy. To keep vigil—like a birdwatcher or a witness—is to remain present to what flickers at the edges of time. The exhibition draws on the histories, literature and narratives—both personal and familial—of the Greek (Rum) population of Istanbul and Asia Minor—a displaced community to which the artist’s family belongs. Building on her recent solo exhibition Clocks of the Tides at CAN Gallery in Athens, this new constellation at Künstlerhaus Bethanien deepens a methodology that engages with transgenerational memory through shared touch, resistant gesture, and embodied return. Both the moving-image work and the publication are presented in both exhibitions, forming a cross-border ecology of forms—two parts of a single gesture across time and space.
The video L’amour dérobe les heures (2025) unfolds more as a reading than as cinematic narration. It interweaves Valinia Svoronou’s writing with fragments from Akylas Milas, a self-taught historiographer of the Rum community who migrated from Istanbul to Greece in the 1960s. His poetic prose is embedded in his books and catalogues gestures, voices, and places now largely erased from dominant histories. As words dissolve into lines, memory resists narrative cohesion—remaining fluid and relational. The swallow—recurring throughout the exhibition as a symbol of migratory return—appears here too, directly illustrated in the video’s rhythmic structure like a form of flight that loops back to its point of departure.
The flip-book publication The Tide Observer further elaborates this method of noticing. Composed of shifts in light inside the artist’s grandparents’ living room, the work renders stillness as a form of temporal geography. Like tides and breath and heartbeat, it animates the stationary. Through drawings, text, and atmosphere, it sketches a diasporic space: places like Imvros, Istanbul, and the Princes’ Islands emerge not just as historical coordinates but as entangled temporal zones—layered with return and suspended arrival.
At the heart of the exhibition is Later (2023), a sculptural threshold anchored in a scene from Tatiana Stavrou’s 1940 novel Secret Springs, in which a woman regards her aging reflection in a mirror. Stavrou—an overlooked figure of Greek modernism and a migrant arriving in Athens after the population exchange of the ’20s—wrote with a sensibility attuned to stream-of-consciousness temporality and embodied interiority. In Later, this fleeting moment becomes an anchor: a steel-framed mirror accompanied by ceramic elements shaped like notes and ribbons, some bearing the delicate traces of chamomile stalks. A text-based reading performance activates the installation, layering Stavrou’s writing with reflections on late-2000s crisis-stricken Athens and speculative futures. Chamomile—a recurring material—threads the work into a language of maintenance and repair.
This same language is carried into the new sculptural work To Clothe Herself, To Wash Her Face (2025), whose title echoes the gestures that follow the mirror scene: acts of care and reinvention. Composed of swallow-like nests made from unfired clay, Posidonia oceanica, and chamomile, the work evokes rituals of softening and binding—acts of reassembly. Installed at eye level, the nests invite proximity. Their construction follows the architecture of birds, layering matter into forms of temporary safety. Posidonia, a slow-growing Mediterranean seagrass that has protected coastlines over millennia, introduces ecological scales of time: resilient and beyond the human. Together, Later and To Clothe Herself, To Wash Her Face form a diptych of care and confrontation. They explore what it means to meet one’s image across time—to tend to oneself as to a landscape, as to a history marked by transformation.
On the reverse of the mirror in Later, a drawing of Baubo appears—as an invocation. A Greek mythological figure, Baubo offers a form of embodied knowledge that interrupts and reroutes linear narrative. Often aligned with the archetype of the threefold goddess—maiden, mother, crone—Baubo disrupts chronology with gesture. Her appearance here suggests a counter-reading of antiquity, bypassing colonial and masculinist interpretations in favor of a feminist mythology rooted in cycles, care, and minor acts of survival.
Across the exhibition, recurring gestures—the mirror, the nest, the tide, the plants, the light—form a shared vocabulary. Rather than illustrating a past, the works intervene in it. They propose sisterhood not as lineage, but as structural affinity: a way of holding together fragmented times, gestures, and lives across distances. Across geographies and generations, these works enact a kind of refusal: not to monumentalize, but to remain with. The Birdwatcher’s Vigil is not a passive act. It is a feminist ethic of closeness. A practice of holding space for what flickers, interrupts, and reassembles at the edges of historical time.