The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) presents the first major museum retrospective in Europe of the work of Penny Siopis, one of the most important artistic voices of her generation  (photo by Mario Todeschini). The exhibition For Dear Life. A Retrospective, curated by the institution’s director, Katerina Gregos, is the flagship event of What If Women Ruled the World?, a year-long cycle of exhibitions centered on women artists and artists who identify as female. The exhibition has been extended until 16.2.2025.

Born in South Africa in 1953 to Greek parents, Siopis came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with her historically and culturally charged paintings that exercised a fierce critique against colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism. She went on to experiment with other media such as installation and film, creating a rich, incisive and poignant body of work that has consistently engaged with the persistence and fragility of memory, notions of truth and accountability, the rights of women and the disenfranchised, the issue of vulnerability, and the complex entanglements of personal and collective histories. For 50 years Siopis has explored the politics of the body, grief and shame as they play out in her home country, South Africa. In the process she has established herself as one of the most important artistic voices of her generation on the African continent and beyond.

Penny Siopis has an MFA and an Honorary Doctorate from Rhodes University, and is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She has presented numerous institutional solo exhibitions and has participated  in major group exhibitions. Siopis is the recipient of many awards.  Her work is in the collections of major art Institutions worldwide.

The exhibition at EMST features work from each of Siopis’ major series, including the Cake (1980–1984), History paintings (1985–1995), Will (1997–), and Pinky Pinky (2002–2005), as well as a number of her celebrated experimental films.

Penny Siopis, Charmed Lives, 1998-99, Installation of found objects, 3 panels, 200x150x50 cm, Collection of the artist, Photo by Paris Tavitian, EMST. Inspired by having to pack away her mother's personal belongings after she became critically ill, Siopis became aware of how objects can and do come to 'stand in' for a human life; what should be kept, for sentiment or posterity, and what is disposable? As she says, it is the "raw intimate archive gone public". (Source: Artthrob - Contemporary Art in South Africa)

Frieze magazine reported that the excellent retrospective dedicated to Penny Siopis, left a number of visitors wondering why they were unfamiliar with her work despite the fact she was born to Greek parents and many of her contemporaries, including William Kentridge, are household names in Europe (In Athens, Female Artists Have Taken Over the National Museum of Contemporary Art).

Furthermore, Frieze magazine has included the exhibition in the top ten list of shows in Europe in 2024. According to Chloe Stead, associate editor of Frieze, “Writing about the all-woman takeover of EMST earlier this year, I was shocked that I hadn’t previously been aware of the work of Penny Siopis, a South African artist who has been critiquing colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism for more than four decades … I hope this show – the artist’s first major European solo – will result in more institutional attention for Siopis in the Northern hemisphere” (The Top Ten Shows in Europe in 2024).

Penny Siopis, Patience on a Monument: ‘A History Painting’, 1988, Oil and collage on board, 180x200 cm, William Humphreys Art Gallery, South Africa (left), Restless Republic: Groundswell, 2017, Newspaper cuttings, glue, ink and found object on canvas, 300x200 cm, Collection of the artist (right). Penny Siopis produced what is probably her most emblematic body of work, the History Paintings (1985-1995), during one of the most transformative decades in late twentieth century South African history: the fall of apartheid, the establishment of a democratic state, and the run-up to the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These paintings, which make reference to and subvert the grand tradition of European history painting of the eighteenth century, present colonialism on its last legs, as a visually gluttonous, excessive and decadent ‘feast’ as well as highlighting the trauma inflicted on black people collectively and individually. (Source: EMST). In Patience on a Monument: ‘A History Painting’, a black woman sits on a pile of western cultural debris. Her position and the classical drapery revealing her breast allude to heroic imagery European history painting epitomised in Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People.’ At the same time her posture and the act of peeling a lemon are anti-heroic. The landscape around her is constructed from collaged illustrations torn and photocopied from old history text books presenting the colonial point of view on South Africa’s past. (Source: EMST)

Penny Siopis, Obscure White Messenger, 2010, Single-channel digital video, 15’ 7" (left), She Breathes Water, 2019, Single-channel digital video, 5’ 12" (right) © Penny Siopis, Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam. Siopis’ experimental films combine found footage with personal archives and texts to produce poignant meditations on the political, personal and historical cornerstones that marked her life, and that of her home country also, during a time of socio-political change and rights-based struggles in South Africa and beyond (Source: EMST).

Penny Siopis, Will, 1999-, 95 objects, texts by the artist, Variable dimensions, Collection of the artist, Photo by Paris Tavitian, EMST. Will (1999- ) is a monumental, autobiographical conceptual work-in-progress which will only be completed on the artist’s death. As part of this work, Siopis bequeaths a diverse collection of objects to beneficiaries of her choice: friends, family, collaborators from all over the globe. Will is an installation that includes over 700 objects that provide insight into the artist’s collecting habits and interests – artistic and vernacular  –  but also into her own personal history and experience, rooted in its own particular time, place and circumstance. (Source: EMST).

Penny Siopis, Shame, 2021 (detail), Installation, 182 paintings, Mirror paint, oil, enamel, glue, watercolour, paper varnish and found objects on paper, 18,5x24,5 each, Collection of the artist. Siopis' Shame series was born because of the shame that was felt during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of apartheid. 'When shamed, we lose our dignity and integrity in full view of others', writes Siiopis. […] As much as shame is pain, it also offers the grounds for empathy, encouraging us to recognise shame in others and empathise with situations not immediately our own'. (Source: EMST catalogue of the exhibition)

Penny Siopis, Cake paintings, 1982,Installation view at EMST, Photo by Paris Tavitian. Siopis first garnered attention for her Cake paintings (1980–84), rooted in her early experiences in the family bakery in Vryburg. These feed on cakes as symbols of celebration and commemoration, but also on their ephemerality: elaborate confections are destined to grow stale or be devoured, suggesting the intimate horror of aging and decay. (Source: EMST catalogue of the exhibition)

Penny Siopis, Pinky Pinky, 2002-2004, Installation view at EMST, Photo by Paris Tavitian. Pinky Pinky is an urban legend in South Africa that speaks to the uncanny cultural and sexual tangle of female adolescence: a half-human, half-animal creature that prowls on prepubescent girls in restrooms. Here, the artist plays with the limits of form at its most visceral, “dragging it to the verge of formlessnes”, as she notes. (Source: EMST catalogue of the exhibition)

Penny Siopis, History Lesson, 1990, Pages torn from South African history textbooks, photographs, 127,5x96 cm, private collection, Installation view at EMST, Photo by Paris Tavitian. Pages from apartheid-era South African history textbooks are combined with a pictogram shaped by identical photographs of the artist as a child performing in a school concert. She appears to dance on the white male history that frames her. (Source: EMST catalogue of the exhibition)

Penny Siopis, Wringing Hands, 2002, oil and acrylic on canvas (left), Stranger, 2008, Glue and ink on paper, 36x43,5 cm, Private collection (centre), Atlas, 2020-, Glue, ink and oil on paper, Installation of 84 paintings, Dimensions variable, Collection of the artist (right), Installation view at EMST, Photo by Paris Tavitian.

Read also: What if Women Ruled the World? Women Artists Take Over the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens

I.A.

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From December 2023 until the end of October 2024, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST-ΕΜΣΤ) will showcase "What if Women Ruled the World? ," a three-part exhibition series exclusively dedicated to the works of women artists or artists who identify as female.

With the re-hang of one entire floor of the museum’s permanent collection and a series of twelve solo exhibitions of Greek and international artists of different generations, over the course of the next months, the entire museum will gradually be taken over by women artists. "It is the first time," emphasizes τhe museum’s artistic director, Katerina Gregos, "that a public museum exclusively exhibits works by women creators, not only in the exhibition of its permanent collection but also in all the spaces of its periodical exhibitions." Despite recent advances, as women artists and cultural practitioners are still underrepresented in most aspects of the art world, this project, initiated by the museum’s artistic director, aims to radically reimagine what a museum would look like if, instead of a few token pieces, works by women artists were the majority.

Katerina Gregos continues: "Our intention and goal is to go beyond the dominant narrative and symbolically -and not only symbolically - overturn the reality of the chronic underrepresentation of female creators in all fields of art." The exhibitions provide an opportunity for women to reflect on their positions, rights, achievements, and demands. What would happen, really, if women ruled the world? And what form would museums have if women had understood their rightful place in the history of modern art?

In an even broader context, the exhibition cycle posits an oft-repeated hypothetical question: Would the world be a better place if women led governance and were key decision makers? Would it mean the end of political and armed conflict and deadlock? And, ultimately, would the world be a more caring and compassionate place? Or would we bear witness to the same human flaws, corruption and abuses of power engaged in by those in critical decision- making positions?

At a time when we are seeing the rise of male-driven authoritarian rule in Europe and beyond, leading to social and political polarization and heightened geopolitical tensions, it seems a timely moment for reflection.

Parts I, II and III of "What If Women Ruled the World?"

Part I of "What If Women Ruled the World?" opened December 2023 with the re-hang of the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition, entitled WOMEN, together, includes the first comprehensive presentation of a number of works from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Gift to ΕΜΣΤ and showcases a  total of 49 works by 25 artists of different generations; the solo exhibitions Chryssa Romanos: The Search for Happiness for as Many as Possible; DANAI ANESIADOU: D POSSESSIONS; and Time in my hands. Leda Papaconstantinou. A Retrospective.

From 20 January 2024, visitors to the museum were confronted by the question, What if Women Ruled the World? by way of Yael Bartana's iconic neon work of the same title, which also served as the inspiration behind the title of ΕΜΣΤ's exhibition. The two installations, one in Greek and the other in English, each 10 meters in height, are presented on the north and south exterior façades of the museum, interrogating passers-by along one of Athens' main thoroughfares, Syngrou Avenue.

Openings on International Women's Day

Part II of What If Women Ruled the World? opens on 8 March 2024 on the occasion of International Women's Day, with six solo exhibitions of works by Lola Flash, Bouchra Khalili, Tala Madani, and Malvina Panagiotidi, as well as special projects by Yael Bartana, Claudia Comte, and Hadassah Emmeric.

On International Women's Day, the exhibitions will kick off with a performance by Claudia Comte and performer Andrea Tortosa Vidal at 7:30 PM and 8:30 PM in the museum foyer, as part of Comte's installation. Following that, at 9:30 PM, there will be a musical performance by Jeanna Criscitiello at the ground floor exhibition space

Part III will inaugurate three further solo exhibitions of work by Bertille Bak, Penny Siopis, and Eva Stefani on 11 May 2024.

Current exhibitions

Chrysa Romanou - The pursuit of happiness for as many as possible

Chrysa Romanou (1931-2006) is one of the most important Greek artists who emerged in the 1960s. She belongs to the group of Greek intellectuals of the diaspora who lived and worked in artistic centers of the West and for the first time in the history of Greek art actively participated in shaping international currents of their time.

The twenty years that Romanou lived in Paris (1961-1981) were decisive for the development of her artistic identity. From her first steps, the motif of the labyrinth, travel, criticism of consumer society, political interest in social inequalities and injustice, the democratization of art, the osmosis of art and everyday life return as central thematic axes and evolve as the artist matures and the social and political environment changes.

Danae Anesiadou - D POSSESSIONS

This is the first solo exhibition in Greece of the artist Danae Anesiadou, who for the last fifteen years has instilled a wide range of metaphysical and personal concerns in a captivating and multi-prismatic set of works, with references to cinema, the occult, Greek antiquity, surrealism, as well as current affairs. She has been described as "the most characteristic European voice of the crisis of the 21st century".

Anesiadou, seeking to understand and think critically about the present, finds connections between things that on the surface seem completely unrelated to each other: from fake news and conspiracy theories, the entertainment industrial complex of Hollywood and the American Pentagon, reality television and the fashion industry, along with references to ancient Greek sculpture, surrealism and B-movies.

Time in my Hands Leda Papaconstantinou A Retrospective

Time in my hands represents the first ever major retrospective exhibition for Leda Papaconstantinou (b. 1945), one of the most important artists in the history of contemporary art in Greece. For over almost five decades, Papaconstantinou developed a diverse body of work that took on a range of forms – performance, sculpture, video, site-specific installations, painting, etc. – in order to explore issues of gender, sexuality, collective and personal memory, history, politics and ecology, centred always on the body. As a trailblazing feminist artist and one of the most important artists of her generation, Papaconstantinou’s work is a seminal reference point for the Greek art scene and serves as an inspiration for subsequent generations of artists.

From the 1960s onwards, at a time of social and cultural radicalism, Papaconstantinou was one of the first artists to experiment with the then-emerging medium of performance art. Her first iconoclastic performances, carried out during her studies in England, investigate the construction of gender, identity and the female subject, through a feminist perspective that challenges patriarchal structures and other hierarchical relationships of power. The exhibition includes her films and performances from the 1968–1971 period, her first installations in Greece in the 1970s and 1980s, the 1975–1979 community theatre group “Spetses Players”, and her large-scale video installations of recent years. It aims to showcase and reframe pertinent issues within her art practice concerning gender, identity, the social dimension of the artwork, memory, and the relationship between discourse and corporality.

WOMEN, together

This collective exhibition WOMEN, together represents the first re-hang of the museum’s collection since 2019 and makes a bold statement by showcasing only work by women artists. There are a total of 49 works by 25 artists of different generations, ten of which are Greek. Twelve artists and 24 works are from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Gift, while thirteen artists and 25 works are from the existing collection of ΕΜΣΤ. The exhibition also includes seven new acquisitions, as well as a new long-term loan of a major work by Etel Adnan, courtesy of the Saradar Collection.

While there is no single thematic narrative, rather several intertwining threads, there are many common points of reference and dialogue as well as conceptual and aesthetic affinities between works. The artists are preoccupied with a variety of issues, both related to gender and identity, as well as to social and political issues, and the entanglements between them, although what they mostly share is an interest in materiality and the handcrafted, existential or humanistic issues, and the ephemeral nature of all things.

Finally, there are artists who probe issues regarding history, memory and collective/cultural identities centering around the critical geopolitical position of Greece and its immediate geographic surrounds in South East Europe, the Mediterranean, and the former Levant. These are the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, and with them come a multitude of suppressed or marginalized histories that lay dormant in the wake of new nation building in the twentieth century. The legacy of this history and the current history of the wider region with its rich historical, cultural, and socio-political narratives lie at the heart of EMSΤ’s renewed collection policy.

I.L.

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Supporting music as well as theatrical education since 1871, the Athens Conservatoire is the oldest institution for the performing arts in Greece and has played a significant role in the advancement of music studies in Greece.  The Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA), was founded in 2016 with the aim of preserving, curating and bringing to the spotlight the valuable archives and library of the Conservatoire.

From June 2023 until January 2024, KETOA is collaborating with EMSΤ (National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens) for the exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece, held at EMST from June 1 2023 until January 7, 2024.The exhibition explores the iconic composer’s controversial relationship with his ancestral homeland.

The exhibition “Iannis Xenakis and Greece” draws from the extensive historical archive of and CMRC (Contemporary Music Research Centre), an organization that was founded by Xenakis himself in 1979, along with the composer Stefanos Vassileiadis, the musicologist, teacher and architect-urbanist John G. Papaioannou, and 22 others, now hosted at KETOA. Rare documents and items, including original handwritten letters and texts by Xenakis, articles, music scores, event programmes, photographs, recordings, videos, and various objects, such as the UPIC (the electronic composition system he invented), cast light on his multi-faceted relationship with Greece, testifying to the fact that contemporary, avant-garde music in Greece has a longer and more sophisticated history than is widely believed.

Visitors are able to follow Xenakis as he takes his first steps into the world of music and architecture, and through his letters, gain insight into his thoughts, concerns, and nostalgia for his homeland and his dreams for the future of the arts in Greece. His relationships with prominent figures in the musical milieu of Greece, such as John G. Papaioannou and composer Manos Hatzidakis, who valued and promoted Xenakis’s work during his period of self-exile in France, are set against Greece’s musical and cultural background of the time. Featured prominently are the five “Hellenic Weeks of Contemporary Music”, an initiative for pioneering musical creation that became a context for presenting Xenakis’s work as early as 1966.

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Xenakis’s activities after his return to Greece in 1974, through the presentation of the Mycenae Polytope (1978) and the founding of CMRC (1979). Both are regarded as integral for the realization of his musical and pedagogical vision. Through the archives of the CRMC collection, many items from which are on display for the first time, the exhibition Iannis Xenakis and Greece engenders a new reading of the tumultuous and often contradictory relationship between Xenakis and the cultural and political environment of contemporary Greece.

EMST is also hosting another exhibition on Xenakis - co-produced with Philharmonie de Paris, under the title Iannis Xenakis - Sonic Odysseys. The exhibition focuses on the most important and ground-breaking work of Xenakis’s visual, literary, architectural, and musical output, while illuminating his personal history by contextualizing the composer in his times, and the political and cultural movements that defined him as an artist.

The Athens Conservatoire Centre for Research and Documentation (KETOA)

The material held at KETOA is relevant not just to the history of the Athens Conservatoire itself, but also the history of musical life in Greece and, in some cases, the political history of modern Greece. The research conducted at the Archives aims also at challenging the still dominant perception that art music never actually existed in Greece.

Besides the historical archive of the Conservatoire, other archives and collections that have been donated or granted to KETOA. Among these are: the archive of the Chormouzios-Papaioannou Foundation, which includes the aforementioned archive of the  Contemporary Music Research Centre (CMRC or ΚΣΥΜΕ in Greek) founded by Iannis Xenakis, the Archive - Collection of Stathis Arfanis, the music archive of composer of the Hellenic National School Dionysios Lavragas, and the archive of the great Greek avant-garde composer and thinker Jani Christou. A large part of the material has been classified and digitized and is available to researchers and anyone interested upon consultation. This valuable material, up to now largely unknown and underutilized in research, has fueled numerous exhibitions, lectures and concerts organized by KETOA in recent years.

Since September 2013, the Hellenic Music Research Lab of the Ionian University has undertaken the responsibility of classifying and digitizing the Archive of the Conservatoire, a work still in progress.

Publishing Activity

KETOA has embarked on as series of publishing projects, focused on Greek musical creation, among which is the magazine Neos Mousikos Hellinomnemon. The magazine’s issue 11, which has just been released, includes a research article on Maria Kallas and her studies at the Athens Conservatory, based on the relevant material of the Conservatory's archive, as part of KETOA's activities for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the former student of the Athens Conservatory.

The most important publishing project for promoting musical creation and activity in Greece, is however, the three-volume History of Music in Modern Greece) edited and written by a large team of distinguished scientists and researchers. The edition, tracking the history of Greek music from as early as 1453 going up to the year 2000, is accompanied by six compact discs with unknown or rare recordings of works of classical Greek music. The first volume has already been released and is almost sold out, and the other two are to be released soon.The Centre believes that his edition will decisively change the concept of what Greek music is on an international level, putting it on the map of musical studies where it belongs, among other European countries.

Future Projects

Among the immediate plans of KETOA are the organization of an event in memory of esteemed composer Dionysios Lavragas and his work - on the occasion of the recent grant of his music archive to the Athens Conservatory, as well as a publication for the archive - collection of Stathis Arfanis, who also generously donated his collection to the Athens Conservatory.

KETOA's future plans include the creation of a Greek Music Repository, dedicated to preserving the country’s rich musical heritage. Although in recent years many uncollected works of Greek musical production have been identified, a great number of them remain lost or forgotten. KETOA considers of the utmost importance the effort to collect as many works as possible (scores, recordings, etc.) to be stored and managed in this future Repository. Finally, the creation of a Museum that will house all the treasures kept at KETOA and make them accessible to the general public, is another project that the Centre considers essential.

I.L.

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