Hydra has no cars. Getting there requires a ferry for just over an hour across the Saronic Gulf, or a helicopter to a rocky islet off the coast followed by a water taxi into the harbor. Either way, once you arrive, your luggage travels by donkey.
Yet every June, the moment Art Basel closes in Switzerland, some of the most influential figures in contemporary art make exactly this journey. Museum directors, major collectors, gallery owners, curators, and artists from around the globe. It has become, over the years, one of the art world’s most cherished summer rituals.
The reason, largely, is Dakis Joannou. The Greek Cypriot industrialist and collector founded the DESTE Foundation in 1983 (deste means “to look” in Greek) and has spent four decades building one of the world’s most significant private collections, more than 1,500 works deep. In 2008, the Municipality of Hydra granted him the island’s old slaughterhouse building, a raw stone structure on a cliff above the Aegean. He restored it, turning it into a project space and, since 2009, each summer has invited a single artist to make something inside it.
Over the years, some of the most significant artists of our time have shown here. The list includes Kara Walker, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, George Condo, Urs Fischer, and Maurizio Cattelan. This year, that artist is Nari Ward.
Until That Day, Ward’s exhibition on view through October 31st, takes its title from a 1963 address by Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, delivered before the United Nations. Selassie’s speech was a plea for global cooperation across national and racial lines. His refrain, “until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained,” became the backbone of Bob Marley’s 1976 song “War.”
Ward takes that lineage and extends it into the present, and specifically into Greece, where African and Afro-Greek communities have lived throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their presence largely unacknowledged by the cultural mainstream.
Photo by George Skordaras
For the exhibition, Ward invited Aggelos Aggelou, a singer rooted in the traditions of rebetika, together with other Afro-Greek musicians, to create a performance responding to Selassie’s speech. “It is my hope,” Ward writes, “that this project will shine a light not only on the struggles of the Afro-Greeks but also on their vibrant and varied cultural contributions. Their presence in this country makes it stronger. We will sing of it ‘until that day’ it is embraced.”
The exhibition also feels deeply connected to the Slaughterhouse itself. For more than three decades, Ward has transformed objects gathered from the streets of Harlem (baby strollers, shoelaces, shopping carts, bottles, baseball bats, etc.) into meditations on memory, migration, loss, and resilience. Here, security blankets, an anchor, and found materials occupy a building that still bears the physical traces of its past. The sea remains visible through its openings, while the original slaughterhouse hooks continue to hang from the stone walls. Ward’s intervention highlights the space’s history, creating a dialogue between Harlem and Hydra, between communities shaped by displacement.
Portrait of Nari Ward. Photo: Axel Dupeux; courtesy of the artist
Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, which has represented Ward for years, sees the exhibition as one that speaks equally to Hydra and to the wider world. “Nari’s exhibition captures both the spirit of Hydra and the urgency of the present moment,” she says. “He positions the island’s beauty within a broader spiritual meditation, posing a timeless and profound question: Can we, as nations, come together? It is a question that has echoed across generations, voiced by figures such as Bob Marley and Haile Selassie. Through the security blankets, we glimpse the eternal expanse of the sea and the setting sun, symbols of continuity and renewal. The anchor serves as a grounding force, anchoring our shared values, our fundamental beliefs, our guiding principles.”
By the time their luggage is loaded back onto a donkey, visitors leave with an invitation to look beyond the surface, toward histories left untold, communities pushed to the margins, and the subtle yet powerful ways in which memory survives. In Ward’s hands, DESTE’s name takes on renewed significance: to look, and then to look again.
Photo by Pinelopi Gerasimou
