Exhibition Private Tour - Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands

About this event

Join us for a tour of the exhibition, led by curator Katerina Hadji. Revisiting: Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands brings together 15 international artists and 17 artworks from the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection, spanning sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, collage, video, lightboxes, and books, and dating from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, to explore Greece as a symbolic construct of both past and present, escaping fixed notions of place. One year after its debut in Athens in 2025, where it inaugurated the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection Space, the exhibition Fernweh, or Nostalgia for Unknown Lands comes to the Hellenic Centre in London with a renewed perspective, shaped in part by the spatial parameters of the venue. At its conceptual axis lies Fernweh - the German word for a "longing for distant places", first recorded in 1835 by the German Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau to describe the melancholic longing he felt for places he had never visited. The term frames an exhibition that draws on the legacy of Romanticism to explore humanity's enduring desire to pursue the unattainable and to reinterpret reality through the intertwined lenses of knowledge, memory, and imagination. The artists assume the role of observers, navigating between experience and reverie, romantic projection and historical consciousness. They reflect on Greece not only as a geographical territory but as a cultural and symbolic landscape - one long defined by journeys, myths, memories, and perceptions shaped over time. Curated by Katerina Hadji and presented by the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection in collaboration with the Hellenic Centre. Image: William Nelson Copley, Homeric Emblem, 1961, Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection The exhibition will be open 8 October - 7 November. Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11:00–17:00 Thursday: 11:00–20:00 Frieze London 2026 Hours: Monday 12 – Sunday 18 October: 11:00–17:00 with extended hours on Thursday 15 October: 11:00 – 20:00