YOU ARE INVITED: JUERGEN TELLER

THROUGH DECEMBER 30, JUERGEN TELLER’S YOU ARE INVITED IS ON VIEW AT ONASSIS READY

By Morgan Becker

you are invited is the title of Juergen Teller’s latest show, which he took from a letter he received around Easter: “It was an invitation from the church,” he explains. “And I invite everybody to look at [the exhibition] and to experience it. It’s about my way of seeing things, my way of experiencing life, and what can be done, and all the heaviness, the tragedies, the beauty.”

A collection of series, videos, and individual photographs both unpublished and iconic (i.e., those portraits of Iggy Pop, Kate Moss, and Charlotte Rampling), you are invited expertly shows off the one-of-a-kind breadth of Juergen’s practice. Staged in collaboration with his creative partner Dovile Drizyte, it’s on view at Onassis Foundation’s new Onassis Ready space in Athens—a venue Juergen was drawn to, before all else, for its grandeur. It was a massive blank canvas.

Soon after meeting with Afroditi Panagiotakou, Onassis’s Director of Culture, Juergen and Dovile dove headfirst into a massive curatory undertaking. “Whenever I create an exhibition,” explains the photographer, “I always consider the place and the culture of that location. It is important to me that it is site-specific, tailored to the building, the city, and the country. I do not want a bunch of identical framed photographs traveling from city to city. That is not my way of working or dreaming. It would be boring.”

Here, Juergen Teller takes Beyond Noise through the finished product of that dreaming.