THE UNFINISHED LANDSCAPE: CHRONICLES OF PLACE
A Solo Exhibition by Venia Behraki

Curation and Text by Dr. Sozita Goudouna

Maliotis Cultural Center, Brookline, MA
May 1 – September 1, 2026
Opening Reception: May 1, 2026, 7:00–9:00 PM

The Maliotis Cultural Center in collaboration with the non-profit Greece in USA which serves under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture and EKKOMED are pleased to present “The Unfinished Landscape: Chronicles of Place,” a solo exhibition by Athens- and New York-based painter Venia Behraki, curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. Running from May 1 through September 1, 2026, the exhibition brings together large-scale works on canvas and paper that reframe landscape not as a static, scenic view, but as a dynamic, relational field—one shaped by duration, movement, and the artist’s own respiratory rhythm.
In an era of ecological precarity and accelerated image circulation, Behraki’s practice proposes an alternative temporality. Her paintings unfold slowly, bearing the visible traces of gesture, breath, and the flow of watercolor across expansive surfaces. Working with fluid media, she treats painting as a durational act—a process in which the landscape is never completed but continuously formed through the artist’s embodied engagement with the materials and time. This approach resonates with contemporary theories that reposition landscape as a site of entanglement between human and non-human forces, challenging the notion of nature as a passive object of viewing.
Behraki’s work engages deeply with the structural grammar of classical Chinese landscape painting (shanshui), yet she does not seek to imitate historical styles. Instead, she inherits its core principles—layered spatial distance, the choreographed gaze that guides the viewer’s movement through the image, and the meaningful use of empty space (iubai 留白)—and translates them into the medium of contemporary painting. The resulting works construct what might be called a “travelling gaze,” inviting viewers to traverse the image as one would walk through a physical environment, moving between foreground and background, solid form, and atmospheric void.

This temporal-spatial dimension of Behraki’s work finds resonance in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally “time-space”), which asserts that time and space are not separate coordinates but are fused into a dynamic whole. For Behraki, landscape functions as a chronotope: a site where temporal experience—cycles, shifts, dissipations, emergences—becomes legible through spatial arrangement. Her horizontal compositions unfold like visual narratives, while sequences of smaller works create rhythmic continuities across the gallery walls. The installation itself becomes a field of unfolding images, what the artist describes as “chronicles of place.”
Here, the poetics of space as articulated by Gaston Bachelard find their visual counterpart. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard argues that space is not merely an empty container but is invested with lived experience, memory, and the imagination’s most intimate reveries. He writes of “the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul” and, more broadly, of how inhabited space transcends geometric measure to become a site of daydream and ontological resonance. For Bachelard, the imagination does not simply represent space—it reverberates within it, setting off interior resonances that connect the intimate immensity of the inner world to the vastness of the external cosmos. Behraki’s landscapes operate in this Bachelardian mode: they are not topographical depictions but “felicitous spaces” that invite reverie, where the viewer encounters what Bachelard called “the vast world of the intimate.” The horizon here is not a limit but an opening—an invitation to what the philosopher described as the “intimate immensity” that lies at the heart of the imagining consciousness.
This intimacy with the elemental is further developed through Bachelard’s later writings on the imagination of matter. In Water and Dreams, he writes that water is not simply a subject for representation but a “material cause” that conditions the very activity of the imagining psyche. The fluid media of Behraki’s practice—watercolor flowing across paper, pigment dissolving into liquid—embody this Bachelardian insight: the element becomes a co-participant in the act of creation. The painter does not merely depict water; she thinks with water, allowing its tendencies toward diffusion, sedimentation, and dissolution to structure the work from within. As Bachelard observed, “The material imagination seeks the substance of the image,” and in Behraki’s paintings, that substance is the flow itself—the continuous becoming of form as pigment meets liquid meets surface.
Central to this process is the role of respiration. In Behraki’s practice, breath is not merely a biological given but an active aesthetic medium. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of her lungs, the pause between inhalation and exhalation, the controlled release of air across wet paper—all leave material traces that structure the work from within. This attention to respiration as both technique and metaphor situates her practice within what art theorist Sozita Goudouna has termed the “respiratory turn” in contemporary aesthetics, where breath is recognized as a critical nexus where embodiment, temporality, and ecological awareness converge. In Behraki’s paintings, the landscape breathes: light and atmosphere appear gradually, dissolving and re-emerging in cycles that mirror the rhythms of organic life.

The exhibition title, The Unfinished Landscape, speaks to this temporal openness. For Behraki, landscape is never a fixed image but a process of becoming—an invitation to perceive time itself. Her work offers a counterpoint to the immediacy of the digital image, proposing instead a slower, more contemplative mode of engagement. The Maliotis Cultural Center becomes a space where viewers can inhabit the work, moving through its surfaces as one might traverse a physical landscape, discovering not a singular view but a succession of perspectives that unfold in duration. This is what Bachelard, reflecting on the temporality of dwelling, called “the dialectic of inside and outside”—a continuous exchange between the viewer’s interiority and the world the painting opens.
Rather than depicting nature from a distance, Behraki’s paintings evoke its inner temporality: the slow shifts of light across a hillside, the movement of water, the dissolving of form into atmosphere. Her approach aligns with contemporary currents in ecocriticism that reframe landscape as a “more-than-human” field, co-produced by the actions of humans, weather, geology, and the artist’s own body. The landscape here is never complete; it is continuously formed through movement, duration, and the act of looking.
‘The Unfinished Landscape: Chronicles of Place’ reflects an ongoing investigation into how we inhabit and perceive space—a question that has become increasingly urgent in an age of environmental transformation and mediated experience. Through her sustained engagement with the materiality of paint, the temporality of breath, the structural principles of shanshui aesthetics, and the elemental imagination that Bachelard called “the direct rapport of the human being with the world,” Venia Behraki offers a mode of landscape painting that is at once deeply rooted in tradition and resolutely contemporary.
This articulation of the unfinished situates Behraki’s practice within a broader art-historical and philosophical discourse on incompletion as an aesthetic and epistemological condition. Major art surveys have demonstrated how, from the Renaissance to the present, artists have strategically withheld resolution—leaving passages sketchlike, contours indeterminate, or narratives suspended—not as a mark of technical failure, but as a deliberate provocation to the beholder’s perceptual and imaginative labor. As curator Kelly Baum has argued, the unfinished in art functions as a “resistance to closure,” an operation that substitutes the closed work’s claim to totality with an open field of possible completions. Behraki’s landscapes extend this lineage beyond the merely sketchlike or fragmentary; rather, she embeds incompletion into the very temporal structure of her medium. Watercolor continues to drift after application, pigment settles unpredictably, and the boundary between form and atmosphere remains deliberately porous—what Umberto Eco, in his The Open Work, would recognize as a deliberate “openness” that delegates interpretive agency to the viewer. In Behraki’s practice, the unfinished is not a cosmetic effect but an ontological claim: the landscape is never identical with itself, never fully present, always in the process of becoming other. This refusal of closure aligns her work with what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has termed the “inoperative” work—one that does not complete a meaning but instead exposes the very condition of meaning as perpetual deferral. The viewer thus enters not as a consumer of a finished image but as a co-performer of an ongoing event, inhabiting what Bachelard might call the oeuvre as a site of reverie rather than resolution. In this way, Behraki’s “unfinished landscape” becomes a chronotope not only of place but of the act of looking itself: a temporal-spatial field where perception remains active, duration becomes visible, and the image never arrives at its end.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Venia Behraki is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Athens working across photography, performance, and large-scale painting. She holds a BFA in Painting from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MFA in New Media from New York University as an Onassis Foundation Scholar, and has received the Gerondelis Grant and the Jack Goodman Award for Art & Technology. Her work spans from staged photographic and video performance works exploring female identity, private and public space, to recent large-scale scroll paintings. Her work has been exhibited internationally at MOCA Shanghai, Open XII & XVI in Venice, The Hospital Club London, Real Art Ways, The Museum of Photography Thessaloniki, The Theocharakis Foundation, Thessaloniki Biennial, Opening Gallery New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete. She lives and works between Athens and New York.

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ABOUT THE CURATOR
Dr. Sozita Goudouna has been recognized for her impactful role in promoting contemporary art and facilitating cultural exchanges between Greece and the global community. In 2022, she received the British Council’s Culture and Creativity Award at the Study UK Alumni Awards. Based in New York, she is a professor and curator. She is the author of “Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts” (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism/Oxford University Press) and co-author of “Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance.” As a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, she initiated the MA in Breath Studies, focusing on breath in the performing and visual arts. She is editor of the scientific journal “Performance Research” on Breath and Iconologies, as well as ‘On the Mundane.’ Her research has been published in prominent scientific journals. In 2015, she was selected by RoseLee Goldberg as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Performa Biennial and a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, while working at the Onassis Foundation in New York. She holds a PhD in American High Modernism from the University of London, an MA from King’s College London/RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), and a BA in Philosophy and Theatre Studies from London Met. She has taught art and theater history, including the course “From Renaissance to Modernism” as an adjunct professor at CUNY, as well as at NYU, The New School, SUNY, Roger Williams University, the University of the Peloponnese, and Pace University. She has also served as treasurer of the Board of Directors of AICA Hellas (International Association of Art Critics) and as a member of the Board of Directors of ITI (UNESCO). Her curatorial practice has been featured in numerous media outlets, including “The New York Times,” “Wall Street Journal,” “Artforum,” “Brooklyn Rail,” “Vogue,” “Artnet,” “Artnews,” “The Art Newspaper,” “Whitehot,” “Vanity Fair,” “Ocula,” “Fine Art Globe,” “Harper’s Bazaar,” “Cult Bytes,” and “Huffington Post,” among others.

ABOUT THE VENUE
The Maliotis Cultural Center is a hub for Hellenic culture in the greater Boston area, presenting exhibitions, performances, and educational programs that connect contemporary artistic practice with historical traditions.
ABOUT GREECE IN USA
GREECE IN USA is under the Auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture and EKKOMED. Its ongoing mission is to foster international cultural cooperation and bring contemporary Greek artistic practice to American audiences. Since its founding in 2020 by Dr. Goudouna, the organization has produced and presented innovative, socially engaged programs featuring over 150 Greek artists in partnership with leading cultural institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), and John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York (CUNY). Under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports and EKOMMED, GREECE IN USA has established itself as a vital bridge between Hellenic cultural heritage and contemporary artistic production.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Dates: May 1 – September 1, 2026
Opening Reception: May 1, 2026, 6:00–8:00 PM
Location: Maliotis Cultural Center, Brookline, MA
Admission: Free and open to the public

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