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A family story, carried in faces
Lineage of the Future
Read the history through the family
From Smyrna to Athens to New York
The exhibition begins with a family’s departure from Smyrna in the 1920s and follows its rebuilding in Athens and a later generation in New York. Migration, settlement, work, and continuity are seen through the lives of particular people.
Lineage as a record
Six sculptures are modelled on members of George Petrides’s family. Historical film and archival footage place the figures within a wider century. The family provides the narrative thread; the exhibition does not ask a single face to stand for an entire historical period.
What is passed on
Families carry memories through stories, habits, photographs, and silences. Each generation receives something of the lives before it and changes it in turn. The exhibition asks what travels from grandparents to grandchildren, and what takes a different form along the way.
An invitation to Gulf audiences
The exhibition is conceived for cities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, with interpretation in Arabic. This website also offers English. The story is rooted in one Greek family, while making space for visitors to consider their own experiences of belonging, movement, and change.
Exhibition enquiries
Bring Sulala to your institution.
The six sculptures and the exhibition’s interpretive materials in Arabic and English are complete. We welcome discussions with institutions interested in hosting Sulala. Presentation requirements, dates and responsibilities are agreed with each venue.
Contact the studio
Six themes across the family story
Migration and dignity
A displaced person’s life extends beyond the moment of loss. The grandmother’s portrait brings dignity and rebuilding into the story of migration.
Care and continuity
The grandmother and mother bring women’s often unrecorded work into view: care, continuity, and the preservation of family memory.
Responsibility and provision
The father’s voyages connect work and movement with changing circumstances, and with a family’s search for stability between home and the wider world.
Inheritance and renewal
The self-portrait explores art as a way to give form to inherited tensions and to reflect on healing.
Family cohesion
The wife’s portrait brings partnership and mutual support into the family’s story.
Responsibility to future generations
The daughter opens the question of what we pass on: how to become good ancestors and leave room for the next generation to shape its own life.