When you get inside the Medieval City of Rhodes, one feels the time to loosen its grip. The stone corridors and solid walls still carry the memory of the Knights Hospitaller, while souvenir shops and summer crowds press against that weight with a more familiar kind of immediacy. Into this loaded setting comes the second iteration of the Biennale of Contemporary Ceramics, an itinerant project that treats ceramics not as a small art, but as a language of history and communication.
The “K” in Keramics refers back to “kéramos,” the ancient Greek word for pottery. It’s a simple typographic change, yet it sets the tone for a show that wants to engage with classic media without leaving it inactive. Founded by Loukia Thomopoulou, the biennale started in Santorini in 2024 and now resides in Rhodes, a large Greek area with its deep relationship with ceramics and art production. Thomopoulou envisions the format as a recurring festival held on different islands, each program shaped by the identity of its host.
Co-hosted by Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos and Anissa Touati, this year’s show is titled “When the Day Begins.” The speech takes Rhodes as its point of departure. Situated on the eastern tip of Greece, this island is linked in legend to the place where daylight begins. Rather than using that reference as decoration, the three curators built a framework around the light and exchange of the Mediterranean. Dimitrakopoulos notes that the exhibition unfolds in historical places in the city, collecting the works of 42 artists from 18 countries, selected by open call and invitation. Touati emphasizes the Mediterranean as a place of diffusion, where beliefs and objects have crossed borders for many years.
What makes the whole route so appealing is its refusal to split the way into the landscape. Places are not neutral containers. It is in previous churches, hospitals, courtyards and collections that have been marked with political remains. Ceramics, which are often associated with domestic scale or decorative culture, find a changed temperature here. The plate can improve the dispute about inheritance. A ship can hold a migration issue. The block can talk about housing and maintenance. The real success of the exhibition lies in this expansive register, where the touch is always visible even when the subject expands towards the kingdom and the loss of nature. Rhodes expands that reach because it has never been traditionally one. The rocks there absorb the pressures of conquest and tourism, making the island a very precise social stage for the art of change and the fragility of value.
This route leads mainly to Our Lady of the Castle, the oldest surviving church in the Central City, which dates back to the 11th century. Restored during the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese, this monument bears many symbols of Rhodes’ cultural past. Inside, Etel Adnan’s Parmi les tilleuls (2021) serves as an emotional anchor. Created in the last year of the life of the Lebanese-American artist and writer, the large ceramic composition combines landscape and memory in an image that seems direct and shared. It can belong to any coast touched by the light of the Mediterranean.
Nearby is Elysia Athanatos Echoes (2024), the bowl has a gilded interior. The Cypriot ceramist described his long-standing engagement with the sense of space, where fullness and emptiness depend on perception. Here, that idea turns bright. Echoes‘ the interior light speaks quietly to the Byzantine sculptures around it, suggesting a passage between matter and heaven.
Across the street, the Archaeological Museum houses the former Hospital of the Knights of Saint John, one of the most important Gothic monuments in Greece. Built to cater to pilgrims and knights during the Crusader era, it now offers a place for contemporary and antiquities. In the upper hall, the ships of Darien Arikoski-Johnson, Fatima Mohisen, Mauro Fariñas and the map of Elina Belou differ in different ways in terms of cultural heritage. Nearby, GianMarco Porru shines Tirso (2026) and Dionisis Kavallieratos Hoplite (2026) bring the power of theater to the display.
However, the most intense moments happen outside, where the pieces are placed among the architecture and museum pieces. David Scanavino A gift from Giovanni (2026), made of burnt stone material, explores clay as a body capable of holding absence. Its negative spaces preserve what is no longer visible, while its shape refers to the sea routes through which empires once transported culture and power.
On destroyed paper, belonging to Lucile Littot Change #3 (2025) hangs like a baroque chandelier after a fever dream. Ceramic elements combine with polyurethane foam, a construction material that transforms comfort into something unstable and almost edible. The piece is reminiscent of a tiered cake, with areas that appear to drip. The sky-colored aquamarine meets the black roses as if with petroleum, evoking a wild nature scorched by summer fires. The destruction here is not romantic. It’s fleshy and bruised, but strangely alive.
One of the best acts is that of Madrid-based Greek singer Terpsichore Savvala. Mounted on a tree, Oscilla (2025) includes small suspended ceramic forms inspired by archaic Greek loom weights. These items were once functional for women’s textiles, but they also had symbolic value when engraved or presented in ritual contexts. Savvala draws on their basic silhouettes, recalling instruments that were sometimes marked with the faces of children or goddesses. Hanging from the sun and the wind, its pieces move between tool and charm, chore and sacred protection.
A garden path leads to Lucille Uhlrich’s Helios in Reflection (2026), with gold-plated clay coins scattered from the well. Based on the historic coinage of Rhodes and its association with the sun god Helios, this arrangement envisions a coinage of the sun. Its bright spot invokes the myth of King Midas when he asks what gives value to an object, what desire distorts and what always exceeds exchange.
The Rhodes Decorative Arts Collection offers another type of discussion. Established in 1986, it holds ceramics, furniture, textiles, sculptures and more from the 16th to 20th centuries, revealing the links between the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. Greek singer Atalanti Martinous answers The Quatrefoil (2026), a set of hand-painted and glazed clay plates from the permanent collection. His project combines the cultures of Iznik, Çanakkale and Kütahya, capturing their floral syntax and intricate plant patterns in a personal visual language.
The most ambitious installation of the biennale was shown in Kleovoulos Square, near the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. The House is Waiting (2026), by Algerian-born architect Meriem Chabani in collaboration with Gorbon Ceramics, collects 100 glazed building blocks in a fragile environment. Gorbon, an Istanbul atelier and factory founded in 1957 by architect Rebii Gorbon, brings an industrial experience to this piece. The block itself is common, inexpensive and common throughout the Global South, often used to quickly raise walls or mark a room. With the glaze, its rough body is sealed and exposed. The resource turns into memory.
That change is important in the face of the Castle, which was first established in the 14th century as an administrative and ceremonial center for the Knights Hospitaller, then changed by destruction, reconstruction and competing kingdoms. Chabani’s blocks sit on the floor as a base and a piece. They suggest a house that might rise, while being caught suspended between permanence and permanence. In their iterative approach, they evoke collaborative work and propose building as a moral act, not just a technical one.
The biennale lasts five months and goes beyond its exhibitions with residencies, performances, screenings and workshops with local partners, including the University of the Aegean. This period gives the project a community aspect. It doesn’t simply place modern ceramics within contrasting heritage settings. At its best, it listens to those reminders and allows the clay to reveal unfinished histories. For Rhodes, the hand-formed medium becomes a way of thinking about movement and presence. Ceramics here do more than define the field; explores how a major cultural event can redirect attention to an island that has become familiar.
More on Art Fairs, Biennials and Millennials
