George Tourkovasilis

a Daybed presentation by Julie Peeters

September 26 – November 29, 2026
Opening: Friday, September 25, 19:00

Daybed begins with a piece of furniture. At home, graphic designer Julie Peeters uses a daybed as a surface for arranging documents and printed matter, for sitting, and for gathering around what has been laid out. She takes this way of working as the starting point for a recurring format that can continually change its shape and use. At Kunstverein München, the daybed becomes a larger modular structure: in its extended form, a generous surface; taken apart, a set of platforms for exhibitions, performances, screenings, readings and conversations. Its configuration changes according to what it is asked to host, allowing the structure to move with the purpose of each presentation.

The first episode of Daybed extends from George Tourkovasilis: Strange Switch. Spent. The Night, Sleep (BILL, 2025), a publication devoted to the Greek photographer and writer George Tourkovasilis (1944–2021) that Peeters recently co-edited with Maya Tounta and Helena Papadopoulos. Tourkovasilis photographed the people and situations that surrounded him: friends and lovers, models, actors, musicians and performers, as well as the streets, television screens, and cultural scenes he moved through. Portraiture, reportage, and everyday observation continually rub up against another in his work. In 1984, he published The Rock Diaries, combining photographs with an oral history of the rock, punk, and new wave subcultures in Athens. Across his practice, he remained attentive to the fleeting moments in which a face, a gesture, or an encounter suddenly assumes the clarity of an image.

This presentation is an occasion to return to the publication’s source material and look beyond what entered the book. At the center of the presentation is a group of contact sheets, shown here for the first time. They move across different periods and subjects in Tourkovasilis’s work, from nude studies and portraits to television, theatre, and moments when he himself enters the frame. Usually kept as undisclosed material—a space of sequence, repetition, selection, and omission—the contact sheet reveals what a single published photograph excludes. Here we can follow how the photographer approaches a subject and continues looking; how an image is not simply taken, but gradually found.

Daybed was first developed in 2021 for MACRO, Rome, in collaboration with Luca Lo Pinto, and is continued at Kunstverein München in a new edition. The structure is designed by Alice Babini.

Daybed is realized with the generous support of Flanders State of the Art. The presentation of George Tourkovasilis is realized in collaboration with the Estate of George Tourkovasilis, represented by Akwa Ibom, Melas Martinos, and Radio Athènes, all based in Athens.