Earlier this year, the British artist Michael Landy was dining outside at a restaurant in the Athens neighbourhood of Exarcheia – where the streets, home to anarchists, are thick with graffiti – when he was tear-gassed. “One moment, I was enjoying some vegetarian food,” he recalls. “The next, there were all these guys with masks and wheelie bins, and a riot was taking place. It came out of nowhere.” 

Concerned and confused, Landy and his companions jumped up and tried to flee; in their haste, they forgot to settle the bill. “But the streets were barricaded,” he continues, “and then the police started tear-gassing everybody. I couldn’t see anything for five minutes. Tear gas affects your throat as well: you find it hard to breathe.”

It sounds frightening – yet, when we speak by phone, Landy is at an airport, waiting to board a flight back to the city. He laughs. “Yeah, Athens is slightly lawless. But that’s one of the nicest things about it. It’s a really exciting place.”

Since February, Landy has been spending time in the Greek capital to oversee his ongoing exhibition, Breaking News – Athens. This is being staged at the Diplarios School, a former vocational school in the city’s centre, by the non-profit organisation Neon.

For the duration of the show, Landy is inviting the Greek public to submit images that encapsulate their experiences within the city via Neon’s website, almost a decade on from the beginning of Greece’s government debt crisis.

Read more on bbc.com.