2023-12-24 09:00:00
The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens is dedicating a cycle of exhibitions to female artists for 10 months, a first in Greece.
“What if women ruled the world?”: the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) dedicates a cycle of exhibitions to female artists, a first in Greece, a Mediterranean country with patriarchal structures, and a rare initiative even at the World level.
«For ten months, the entire museum will be in the hands of women artists», Welcomes Katerina Gregos, the artistic director of this museum, one of the main ones in the Greek capital. The permanent exhibition installed in a former brewery has been redeveloped to highlight 25 women artists of all generations and origins: painters, sculptors, photographers like Diana Al-Hadid (Syrian), Eleni Kamma (Greek), Annette Messager (French) or Cornelia Parker (English). And 15 other temporary exhibitions will follow.
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Until now only 37% of the artists represented in the permanent exhibition were women. “This is the very first time, it seems to me, that a major public museum has dedicated its entire programming for ten months to women artists.», explains Katerina Gregos. «Women artists are still underrepresented in most aspects of the art world“, she continues.
“Reverse”
«We wanted to reverse the trend and see what a museum would look like if, instead of a few symbolic pieces, works by women artists made up the majority», she adds, contemplating one of her favorite works in the exhibition, two paintings by the Iranian Tala Madani, exiled in New York and who questions masculinity and dysfunctional families. In the collections of the 18 major museums in the United States, 87% of the works were created by men. In Greece, no statistics exist.
Throughout the visit, we discover works questioning stereotypes of female beauty, questions of violence against women, and poverty which affects them more harshly. In a first phase, three Greek women are exhibited. Among them, Leda Papaconstantinou, 78 years old, one of the most important contemporary women artists who had never had an exhibition dedicated to her work in a museum in Greece.
Alongside her achievements are those of Chryssa Romanos (1931-2006), known for her collages with political messages denouncing consumerism and inequality, and Danai Anesiadou, a contemporary artist from the Greek diaspora, who grew up in Belgium and devotes herself particularly in collage and sculpture. “In a country like Greece, where there has never been an organized feminist movement in the visual arts and where women artists have been systematically marginalized for decades, this initiative is an important message and the repair of a great inequality», underlines Katerina Gregos.
At the start of the permanent exhibition, a frieze traces the progress made for the cause of women in Greece and reminds us that women only had the right to vote in the early 1950s and that the dowry at marriages was not was abolished until 1983. The title of the museum’s exhibition cycle, “What if women ruled the world?», is inspired by a play by Israeli Yael Bartana (2017). “Most wars and destruction are orchestrated mainly by men», tranche Mme Gregos. «Maybe there would be less violence, more compromise, more fairness if women led. It wouldn’t be a perfect world but it would certainly be different».
The exhibitions were considerably enriched during this cycle thanks to a very important donation from entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who made his fortune in the agri-food industries and finance. The contemporary art museum was initially scheduled to open in 2012, but it was not fully inaugurated until 2021.
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