Hydra School Projects Presents Hydor/Onar (Water of Dreams) on Hydra

Hydra School Projects presents Hydor/Onar (Water of Dreams), curated by Dimitrios Antonitsis, through September 6, 2026.

As the second edition of Hydra School Projects’ three-year trilogy, the exhibition follows last year’s Lithos/Lethe (Stone/Oblivion), shifting from stone to water.

A year ago, this exhibition asked visitors to stand still with stone. Now the ground gives way.

If permanence needs solid matter to hold its shape, dreaming needs the opposite, something that moves, absorbs, and forgets its own edges by morning.

Water does not just illustrate this shift, it enacts it. It reflects a face back distorted, cools a body it barely touches, and drips through a form built to hold it before disappearing into the stone floor. Nothing here stays dry for long.

The exhibition again occupies Hydra's former high school, its white stairwell folding down into an amphitheatre courtyard that doubles as stage and drain.

Water does not hold a shape long enough to become a monument. That may be the reason to choose it after stone.

Three classrooms and this courtyard hold the works this year, cooler indoors, hotter where marble catches direct sun. The building was built to teach, not to display, and still shows it in chalk ledges and low ceilings.

In the courtyard, Styliane Philippou sinks two blocks of green Tinos marble into a shallow mirror of standing water, their fractured profile somewhere between a rock formation and a reclining body.

Up close, the veining doubles in the water's surface until stone and reflection trade places. The piece asks to be lain on rather than only looked at, and during the opening someone did exactly that, turning a sculpture about self-recognition into one that had to hold a person's weight to complete itself.

Further inside, a row of school chairs carries the show's plainest and hardest image, white bowls of water, a folded coat, a knife laid across the rim, and in each bowl a single living goldfish turning in tight circles. The work does not explain the knife. It leaves it there, next to a creature that is, for now, still swimming.

Joe Bradley gives that unease another body. His Schrodinger’s Car sits somewhere between toy, wreckage and small funeral vehicle, assembled from spare parts and the leftover materials of city life.

It feels almost comic at first, until its wheels and coffin-like box start to pull the room toward another kind of passage, less liquid than stranded, but still caught in transit.

Nearby, Daniel Silver casts two heads in a crumpled, foil-thin metal that catches the room's blue curtain light rather than a face.

They hold their shape only barely, closer to the moment before a portrait collapses than to a finished likeness, an idea Silver has carried since a conversation about a house that could no longer contain what happened inside it.

Elsewhere, Despina Charitonidi's commissioned fountain drips through barnacled, rust stained petals modelled on a whale's feeding motion, Ashley Bickerton seals coral-like growths under sheets of green resin, and Hussein Chalayan lets a garment disintegrate into stitched, water marked scales. 

Brice Marden enters more quietly, but with particular force on Hydra, where his lines and fields of colour are inseparable from the island's light, rhythm and repeated returns.

Beside him, Jannis Kounellis brings another kind of gravity, a material language of wood, stone and found objects that keeps the exhibition tied to physical weight even as it turns toward water.

Together, they give the show its deepest undertow, not water as image, but water as the slow pressure behind abstraction, memory and touch.

Other works pull the dream inward or outward. Ayumi Paul turns messages and dreams into stitched movement, Fokion Zissiadis brings landscape into the room as a record of remote geological terrains, and Dimitrios Antonitsis carries water into the body through Shrouds, a series shaped by mourning, release and energetic shifts.

None of this arrives as ecological message, exactly, though the urgency sits close to the surface. Charitonidi is explicit about it, industrial hardware pushing through ceramic in a piece about oceans crowded by human infrastructure.

But the show's quieter argument is that reverie is not a luxury opposed to real problems. At a moment when water is mostly discussed as a resource to be measured and argued over, dreaming through it reads as a different kind of attention.

By the time the light drops low enough to turn the black reflecting pool gold, the marble in the courtyard has stopped looking like stone at all. It looks like something caught mid thaw, holding a shape it may not keep past the season. Lithos asked what survives. 

Hydor/Onar asks what happens to memory once it stops resisting the current and starts moving with it instead.

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