BIOGRAPHY

In 1996 Athens and Sparta signed a peace treaty to end the Peloponnesian War, 2,400 years after Athens’ surrender in 404 BC. This Greece—where the past is just as present as the present—was Constantine’s childhood home and remains his creative crucible.
Constantine is a mixed-media artist, currently based in New York City. In his art he works with stories, images, Greek Bronze Age hieroglyphs, and languages thought to be lost to time. He is among the last speakers of Arberishte, a Greek sister language of medieval Albanian. Among his subjects are the lost words and sounds of Arberishte, as well as other forgotten languages of Greece, his work breathing life into ancient cultures and systems of knowledge that have faced erasure.
Constantine’s art has toured the world, visiting galleries in Moscow (Gallery «СОЛЬ»), Berlin, Tokyo, and across Finland. His series of works based on the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, is part of the permanent collection at the State Museum of Urban Sculpture in St. Petersburg. His most recent individual exhibition took place at Galerie Robert Art Room in Paris, November, 2022.
Constantine—known in the literary world as Peter Constantine—has had a decorated career as a writer, translator, and activist for a diversified linguistic ecosystem in our world. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, as well as national literary prizes from Kosovo and Greece.


ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In the mountains next to Corinth, where the Greek side of my family is from, we speak – or rather spoke – Arberishte, an indigenous language of Greece that is related to Medieval Albanian. The village legends maintain that we are a pre-Greek Pelasgian people, who in the time of the Iliad gave two ships to Troy. Mycenae is an eight-hour walk down the mountain path, and Agamemnon, the dark and murderous king who threw Bronze Age Greece into turmoil, controlled the rich plains at the foot of our mountains.
In our villages, time and history have a different value, ages mix and mingle. In our legends Christ and Alexander the Great march out on military campaigns together, Homer sits on the stone by Muhammad Pasha’s fountain singing with his pupils, and the Virgin Mary allies herself with the Turks against our people, for we have sinned. The days of the week and months of the year bear the names of Bronze Age and pre–Bronze Age Greek gods. 
I have spent my life immersed and involved in language, and it is deeply and personally painful to me to see the autochthonous non-Greek languages of Greece lost and disappearing, joining the many languages of the world that are dying every year. We are facing a mass language extinction. Gone forever will be their words and their cultures. In my works I reach back to the pre-alphabet Greek hieroglyphs, seeking what we have lost, and with image and color reach out for the forgotten words of my homeland.