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The Grand Promenade | | |
THE GRAND PROMENADE
17 JULY - 29 SEPTEMBER 2006
Curated by: Anna Kafetsi
The Grand Promenade is the first of two large scale international exhibitions organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in the framework of the Pre-Opening Events 2006-2008, in view of the completion of its permanent premises in the middle of 2008.
The idea of the exhibition was born from the close proximity of EMST to the archaeological sites and monuments of Athens that offers us a possibility of various transcultural communication networks between antiquity and contemporary international art.
The title of the exhibition refers to The Grand Promenade of the Unification of Archaeological Sites, a huge urban intervention around the Acropolis and creates an "open" museum where the rich cultural heritage is intersected with the capitals daily life and its multicultural reality.
As experience and metaphor The Grand Promenade allows unexpected encounters and ties, stories within History, new relationships between the local and the universal, and an open conceptual narrative incorporating the Elsewhere and the Others.
In the exhibition participate 44 artists from around the world with recent works or with in situ commissions of the Museum, which will be presented along the archaeological Grand Promenade and adjacent public and private buildings.
THEMES
The works that are presented in the various exhibition venues are in dialogue with the natural and architectural beauty, with mythology, history and the contemporary social reality of sites and buildings, and in harmony with the atmosphere that each one of these radiates.
Some of the notions touched upon by the works in the exhibition, are the relations between the public and the private, fiction and reality, memory, the landscape and history, the dream and the journey, the community, democracy, utopia, multiculturalism, migration, the City.
WORKS
Opposite the New Acropolis Museum, the visitor will encounter the first work of the exhibition, of the Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah. Rabah's installation represents a museum, the New Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. Its building, like a real Museum in miniature, consists of rooms of permanent collections, a room of documentation and projections. It's a nomadic museum, which was presented for the first time in 2004 in Ramallah, in 2005 in Rome and Istanbul and in 2006 in Amsterdam and Athens, this time under the title The New Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. With basic theme and concept the sacred olive tree, this monumental work opens a dialogue with the memory, the history of the Attic land and the common anthropological background of the people of the Mediterranean.
Along The Grand Promenade, the visitor will discover the sound installations of Steve Roden, Susan Philipz and Pavel Büchler, sculptures like those of Ulrich Rückriem and Anish Kapoor, as well as the work of the Iranian artist Y. Z. Kami, in the Roman Agora, which refers to the sufism of the 13th century mystic Iranian poet Rumi. ?n Ermou pedestrian walkway, opposite Kerameikos, Vana Xenou's installation Axis Mundi, Eros-Thanatos, Nymph Cemetery is presented, referring to the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Axis of the world is a symbol and intermediary of a transition.
Dimitris Pikioni's historical formation of the archaeological sites around Acropolis, during the 1950s, is also presented as an exhibit of the Grand Promenade. Pikioni's work is based on the architecture of motion and memory, which the visitor experiences as he/she walks amidst a giant "collage" of marble and clay pieces that retrieve memories of 19th century demolished Athens.
In the strongly imbued by the political and artistic personality of Melina Mercouri, building of the Melina Mercouri Foundation, political and social documents appear as fictional, in the works of the Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa and the Lebanese Fouad Elkoury, while in the familiar artistic venue of the Graduate Association of Fine Arts Students, fiction is displayed as historical reality in the work of Michael Blum. In other rooms, the Polish artist Pawel Althamer will reconstruct, in a daily performance, the relationship between the artist and his model. Next, on the façade of the building of the University of Indianapolis, Athens Campus, (former Goulandri Horn Foundation), the visitor will come upon Per Barclay's photographic installation For Dionysos (Laura and Tomo - Montalcino). Farther away, a series of new ethereal paintings by Silke Otto-Knapp and a serene sound installation by the American Steve Roden elevate the intrinsic and full of memories space of the Turkish Baths.
Another in situ installation that has been positioned in Thisseio, near-by the ancient road of Panathenea, is Neen Plateau, a collaboration between three Greek artists, Andreas Angelidakis, Miltos Manetas and Angelo Plessas, members of the international group Neen. The artists will display three different works put together, creating a platform for discussion, laying questions such as what is a city in the internet era, what is a promenade in an age of continuous communication, what is an exhibition and what is the Neen movement.
Right across, in front of Thisseion park, has been installed the mystic work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Falling Angel.
Next, the visitor will come across the building of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, where the in situ installation of Christian Boltanski, the installations of Janine Antoni and George Hadjimichalis, the sculpture and the drawings of Wolfgang Laib deal in a poetical and reflective way with ancient and contemporary myths, and notions like death, time, human fate, light and darkness.
In the last section of the exhibition, at the "Technopolis" of the City of Athens, will be displayed, in four of the buildings of the former industrial complex, works by Thomas Hirshchorn and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, that deal with subjects like philosophy, politics, democracy and community. Swiss Thomas Hirshchorn presents an installation titled U - Lounge, using in the title only the initial letter of the word Utopia and creating a space for poetry, philosophy, art, for a mutual universal prosperity. His aim is to connect utopia with reality and to create a space in which any distance between these two concepts will have been eliminated. The German Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, with his film the Cave of Memory, motivated by the myth of the platonic cave, penetrates into great moments of the European civilization, referring to the works of Goethe, Mozart, Kleist, Beckett. In the works of a great number of artists that are hosted in the "Technopolis", such as Ghada Amer, Santiago Sierra, Andrian Paci, Vlassis Caniaris, Yu Hong, Julie Mehretu, Lina Theodorou and others, are investigated subjects that are related to socio-political issues such as the female identity, the city as a multicultural metropolis, migration, xenophobia, the contemporary reality of Greece etc.
Andreas Angelidaki's video installation Walking Building could be the last work of the exhibition. On the opening night the work will be projected upon the Fix building, on Syngrou Avenue.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
1.Pawel Althamer
Born in Warsaw in 1967. Lives and works in Warsaw.
2.Ghada Amer
Born in Cairo in 1963. Lives and works in New York.
3.Andreas Angelidakis
Born in Athens in 1968. Lives and works in Athens and New York.
www.angelidakis.com
4.Janine Antoni
Born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. Lives and works in New York.
5.Kutlug Ataman
Born in Istanbul in 1961. Lives and works in Istanbul and Buenos Aires.
6.Per Barclay
Born in Oslo in 1955. Lives and works in Oslo and Paris.
7.Michael Blum
Born in Jerusalem in 1966. Lives and works in Vienna.
www.blumology.net
8.Christian Boltanski
Born in Paris in 1944. Lives and works in Paris.
9.Pavel Büchler
Born in Prague in 1952. Lives and works in Manchester.
10.Vlassis Caniaris
Born in Athens in 1928. Lives and works in Athens.
11.Fouad Elkoury
Born in Paris in 1952. Lives and works in Paris and Beirut.
www.fouadelkoury.com
12.George Hadjimichalis
Born in Athens in 1954. Lives and works in Athens.
13.Gary Hill
Born in Santa Monica, California in 1951. Lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
14.Thomas Hirschhorn
Born in Bern in 1957. Lives and works in Paris
15.Yu Hong
Born in Beijing in 1966. Lives and works in Beijing.
16.Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1933. Lives and works in New York.
Emilia Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk Ukraine in 1945. Lives and works in New York.
www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com
17.Y.Z. Kami
Born in Teheran in 1956. Lives and works in New York.
18.Gülsün Karamustafa
Born in Ankara in 1946. Lives and works in Istanbul.
19.Anish Kapoor
Born in Bombay in 1954. Lives and works in London.
20.Toba Khedoori
Born in Sydney in 1964. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
21.Jannis Kounellis
Born in Pireaus in 1936. Lives and works in Rome.
22.Wolfgang Laib
Born in Metzingen, Germany in 1950. Lives and works in Hochdorf, Germany.
23.Luisa Lambri
Born in Como, Italy in 1969. Lives and works in Milan.
24.Miltos Manetas
Born in Athens in 1964. Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
www.manetas.com
25.Julie Mehretu
Born in Addis Ababa in 1970. Lives and works in New York.
26.Ernesto Neto
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
27.Silke Otto-Knapp
Born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1970. Lives and works in London.
28.Adrian Paci
Born in Shkodër, Albania in 1969. Lives and works in Milan.
web.tiscali.it/adrianpaci
29.Susan Philipsz
Born in Glasgow in 1965. Lives and works in Berlin.
30.Dimitris Pikionis
Born in Athens in 1887. Died in Athens in 1968.
31.Angelo Plessas
Born in Athens in 1974. Lives and works in New York and Athens.
www.angeloplessas.com
32.Khalil Rabah
Born in Jerusalem in 1961. Lives and works in Ramallah.
33.Steve Roden
Born in Los Angeles in 1964. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
www.inbetweennoise.com
34.Ulrich Rückriem
Born in Düsseldorf in 1938. Lives and works in Cologne.
35.Santiago Sierra
Born in Madrid in 1966. Lives and works in Mexico City.
www.santiago-sierra.com
36.Nedko Solakov
Born in Cherven Briag, Bulgaria in 1957. Lives and works in Sofia.
37.Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Born in Nossendorf, Germany in 1935. Lives and works in Munich.
38.Lina Theodorou
Born in Athens in 1970. Lives and works in Athens.
www.linatheodorou.com
39.Evanthia Tsantila
Born in Thessaloniki in 1963. Lives and works in Berlin.
40.Rachel Whiteread
Born in London in 1963. Lives and works in London.
41.Amelie von Wulffen
Born in Oberpfalz, Germany in 1966. Lives and works in Berlin.
42.Costis Velonis
Born in Athens in 1968. Lives and works in Athens.
43.Zafos Xagoraris
Born in Athens in 1963. Lives and works in Athens.
44.Vana Xenou
Born in Athens in 1949. Lives and works in Athens.
Catalogue
The Grand Promenade
Editor: Anna Kafetsi
260 pg, 21 X 16 cm, Athens 2006
Bilingual (Greek / English)
With texts and rich iconography
ISBN 960-8349-17-6
Available for sale: price 15 euro
The catalogue of the exhibition as well as all of EMST's publications are available for sale at the museum shop in Techonopolis (The Museum shop is open from Wednesday to Sunday 12.00-20.00).
The catalogue is also on sale at the Turkish Baths and the Melina Mercouri Founcation (during the opening hours of the exhibition) as well as at the IANOS bookshop (Athens and Thessaloniki), the art store of the Benaki Museum and the bookshop of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation.
It can also be purchased from the offices of EMST (14 Amvr. Frantzi street, 1st floor) or by writing to protocol@emst.gr
USEFUL INFORMATION
Exhibition Venues
The Grand Promenade (Pedestrian walkways Dionysiou Areopagitou - Apostolou Pavlou - Ermou)
Melina Mercouri Foundation (9-11 Polygnotou street, Plaka)
Graduate Association of Fine Arts Students (19? Tholou and Panos street, Plaka)
Roman Agora
Cultural Centre University of Indianapolis, Athens Campus (5 Markou Avriliou -2 Kirristou and Lysiou street, Plaka)
Turkish Baths (8 Kirristou street, Plaka)
?ssociation of Greek Archaeologists (134-136 Ermou street)
"Technopolis" of the City of Athens (100 Peiraios street, Gazi)
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday: 11.00-22.00
Monday: Closed
THE ENTRANCE TO THE EXHIBITION VENUES IS FREE
A MAP OF THE EXHIBITION WITH ALL THE USEFUL INFORMATION IS DISTRIBUTED IN THE EXHIBITION VENUES.
Communication
National Museum of Contemporary Art
14 Amvr. Frantzi street, 117 43 Athens, Greece
Tel: +30 210 9242111-2, Fax: +30 210 9245200
protocol@emst.gr
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