site.btaGreek Photographer John Demos to Present Panigiria Exhibition in Sofia

Several meetings with the Bulgarian public are on the agenda of Greek photographer John Demos. He will personally open the Panigiria exhibition on July 31 at the Synthesis Gallery in Sofia, and will then present a recently published portfolio of hand-printed photogravures from France, according to the event organizers.

In early October, Demos will return to Sofia to present a selection of photobooks published by his publishing house Apeiron, as well as several of his own series, the team announced. The exhibition will be on display until October 11.

The team added that, created between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, the series has been presented in museums and at festivals such as Rencontres d'Arles in France and The Photographer's Gallery in London. They noted that this exhibition, created especially for the Synthesis Gallery, includes over 50 photographs printed at the PhotoSynthesis Print Center using black-and-white printing technology - piezography - under the supervision of the author.

“Since the dawn of humanity, the identity of a community and the place to which it belongs have been inextricably linked to ritual acts. The Greek ”panigiria" – a celebration with feasting and dancing in honor of a saint – is a direct descendant of these ancient rituals. The subject of Demos' photographs in this series is specifically the panigiria in Zagori – a group of small mountain villages in Epirus, northwestern Greece," said the organizers.

This is John Demos' fourth exhibition at the Synthesis Gallery. In 2014, he showed one of his most famous projects, Shadow of Silence, in 2018 he visited with the series Albania on the Edge of Change (1990–1991), and in 2019 with the project Pnoe Dendron.