The artist takes great pains to design and manufacture a Byzantine archbishop’s mitre, for example, and to adorn it with gems and gold, only to end up dropping it unceremoniously into a dirty army sucksack. It’s only the wireless television set of the house that we see, with its four simultaneous screens. These ambiguous domestic appliances, and the radical furniture that doesn’t remotely remind us of the neatly designed, hi-tech furniture of the ideal homes we see in the cinema, create the essentially epic atmosphere to which Charalambidis subjects his visitors.

Backing all this up is the social activity inside those nomadic urban refuges, which travel around inside the Rumbling Museum or Social Gym and offer multi-dimensional humanistic programs to the citizens of the world, who wish to join forces as active members.

The work of Nikos Charalambidis, from the beginning of his artistic career to the present, explores the consequences of political crises, the fluid nature of contemporary socio-political reality, and critiques the processes of establishing institutions and systems of power. His work is characterized by a belief in the necessity of social engagement and the political action of the artist.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, his work addresses a broad, ambitious range of issues such as the question of cultural identity, multiculturalism, the consequences of globalization and capitalism, the concepts of nation and national consciousness, and the emergence of transnational identities, the issue of the legacy of colonialism, ideological conflicts, religion, and the impact of consumer culture and Western materialism.

[Excerpt from a publisher or edition presentation text]