In the frame of periodical presentations, series of exhibitions are being inaugurated featuring selections from the permanent collections of Museum, that are renewed every month.
AUGUSTAnton Chekhov The Cherry Orchard Athens, Kedros publications, 2005 (artist of the month)
Rainer Maria RilkePrimal Sound, (work of the month)
JULYSylvia PlathThe Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962.London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2000 (artist of the month)
Duration: 6/7/2009-7/9/2009
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 and committed suicide in 1963 suffering from depression. The detailed journals she kept since she was 11 years old constituted for her an inspirational source for her extremely personal and confessional literary work.
Even Ted Hughes himself, who edited the first publication of the journals in 1982, was accused that he omitted extracts which characterized him negatively.
The failure of each effort of complete crisis seals the history of two lost journals.
Roland BarthesFragments d`un Discours Amoureux.Paris: Editions du Seuil,1977 (work of the month)
Duration: 6/7/2009-7/9/2009
JUNENils Vigeland, False Love True Love (work of the month)
Duration: 11/6/2009-5/7/2009
Nils Vigeland’s “ False Love True Love» room opera in two parts is based on two acts from Charlotte Brontë’s Jayne Ayre. The work has only two characters and is comprised of two important scenes between the two protagonists: their meeting right after their incomplete wedding ceremony and their first meeting after a long term separation.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (artist of the month)
Duration: 11/6/2009-5/7/2009
Conrad wrote a book that on a first level is a simple adventure from the ones that sailors narrate. Through it, however, the story of another trip is woven, a journey to “the heart of darkness”…By reading the book you discover how the American author managed to converse this feeling, by painting flawless stills that preserve and expose the text`s whole strength.
APRILStefanos Tsivopoulos, The Land, 2006
Video installation
Video, duration 8΄, colour, with sound, Pal, 2 CH audio
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Inv. No. 603/08The protagonists of the single-channel video installation
The Land by Stefanos Tsivopoulos are three persons of unknown identity who pose questions about the inhospitable rocky place where they find themselves, its geographical location, its borders, its name. Each of these persons speaks a different language. As the questions they pose never find an answer, the spectator is in effect watching three monologues. The artist based the script for these monologues on national and international law excerpts considering the determination of geographical borders as well as on migrants’ testimonies. At the unexpected conclusion of this piece the “true” land is revealed, along with the physical limitations and impasses it imposes on the characters. The video invites us to meditate on the contemporary territorial disputes and geopolitical conflicts, also evoking a universal and timeless investigation of geographical borders and national identities.
Walid Ra`ad & The Atlas Group, The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, 1999
Videotape
Νational Museum of Contemporary Art, Inv. No. 213/02
©Foto: Courtesy of Video Data BankThis piece investigates the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991). The tapes offer accounts of the fantastic situations that beset a number of individuals, though they do not document what happened. Rather, the tapes explore what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about the wars.
© Video Data Bank
Walid Ra`ad & The Atlas Group, No, Illness is neither here nor there, 1976–1999
15 digital prints
42X32 cm each
Εdition 4/7
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Inv. No 543.1-15/05 The Atlas Group is a project by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad aiming at researching and documenting the recent history of Lebanon, especially the 1975-1990/1 civil war period. The photographic documents on which the digital prints entitled
No, Illness is neither Here nor There were based come from the archive of a fictional figure, the Lebanese historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, who appears as the historian par excellence of the civil war in Lebanon.
In the series of the works on display, business advertising signs in Arabic, French and English of doctors, dentists, surgeons, psychiatrists – practices which flourished during the war – reveal the daily reality of life in Beirut at the time.
MARCHShirin Neshat, Turbulent, 1998
Two-channel synchronised video installation
duration 10`, black and white with sound
Courtesy: Gladstone Gallery, New York
Venue: Ground floor-Project Room
Duration: 18/3/2009-18/4/2009Shirin Νeshat’s Turbulent (1998) is being presented as part of the series Work of the month. This poignant film was first screened in 1999 at the Venice Biennale, in which it received the 1st International Prize, thus establishing Neshat as one of the most prominent international contemporary visual artists.
Turbulent represents Shirin Neshat’s first experimentation with multiple projections. It is also the first part of a trilogy that, with Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000), investigates the relations and respective positions of the sexes in an Islamic social structure. Turbulent refers to the exclusion of women from any form of artistic activity and expression in public life. A man singing in front of a large audience a love song based on verse by 13th-century mystic poet Rumi and a woman, Sussan Deyhim, singing in an empty auditorium, are shown on two projections opposite each other, the spectator located between them. In this fascinating work, the juxtaposition of the man and the woman is accentuated by the contrasts of black and white, motion and stillness, empty and full. In Turbulent, Neshat worked for the first time with the Iranian-American composer and singer Sussan Deyhim, the Iranian director of photography Ghasem Ebrahimian and the Iranian artist Shoja Youssefi Azari.
Eleanor Antin, The King, 1972
Black and white videotape duration 52’, silent
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
Inv. No.639/08
Venue: Mezzanine
Duration: 18/3/2009-18/4/2009FEBRUARY
Joseph Kosuth, No number #1 (not on color, blue), 1990
Neon
Courtesy of D.Daskalopoulos collection
Venue: Mezzanine – projection room
Duration: 2/2/2008-31/5/2009No Number #1 of Joseph Kosuth emanates from a series of works that is constituted by phrases written with neon.
Kosuth selects maxims of known philosophers and intellectuals and visualises them with neon. In the particular work it has selected a known utterance by Wittgenstein
“We interpret the conundrum that is created by our misapprehension as conundrum of incomprehensible process.”
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933.
Lawrence Weiner, Selections from the permanent collection, 2001-2007
Duration: 2/2/2008-31/5/2009Lawrence Weiner was born in 1942 in New York where he now lives and works. One of the most important conceptual artists, known mainly for his aphoristic quotations presented in various forms, he questions with his work the nature of art and the artistic object. As he stated in 1969, the subject matter of his art is art. He utilizes a variety of art kinds and artistic media, like drawing, film, sound and video. With “Blue Moon Over”, 2001, “Deep Blue Sky”, 2002, “Light Blue Sky”, 2002, “Sink or Swim”, 2003, “Turning Some Pages”, 2007, recent acquisitions of the EMST collections, that consist of animated drawings and text, the artist transfers his linguistic pursuits to the field of digital images.
Turning Some Pages, 2007
duration 5 `, colour, sound
Inv.No 619/08
Blue Moon Over, 2001
Duration 5:14 `, colour, sound
Inv.No 620/08
Light Blue Sky, 2002
duration 4:45 `, colour, without sound
Inv.No 621/08
Deep Blue Sky, 2002
duration 6:35 `, colour,without sound
Inv.No 622/08
Sink Or Swim, 2003
duration 18 `, colour, sound
Inv.No 623/08
Chryssa, Cityscape Times Square # , 1988Chryssa captures the romantic imagery and poetry and she feels is present in "the vulgarity of America, as seen in the lights of Times Square", and has created a striking and eloquent body of work...
Douglas Schultz
JANUARY
Bevery Semmes, Kimberly, 1994
Sculpture
Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection, Greece
Venue: Mezzanine – Gallery Μ
Duration: 17/12/2008– 25/01/2009Beverly Semmes makes extensive use of clothes that are grossly distorted and enlarged representations of the human form. She stretches the dresses beyond the woman’s body and presents them on gallery walls extending the cloth throughout the space.
Pipilotti Rist, I am not the girl who misses much, 1986
Video duration 7’46’’, colour, sound
National Museum of Contemporary Art
Venue: Mezzanine – projection room
Duration: 17/12/2008– 25/01/2009Rist`s classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop`s repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece`s title (a line adapted from The Beatles` song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist`s manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis Rist exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the "real" song.
© Electronic Arts Intermix
NOVEMBER
Yorgos Gyparakis, Nocturnal Landscape (1998)
Venue: Mezzanine – Gallery Μ
Duration: 4/11 – 30/11/ 2008OCTOBER
Stephen Antonakos Journey, a drawing in 72 units, 1998
Venue: Mezzanine – Gallery Μ
Duration: 30/9 – 2/11/2008Journey, a drawing in 72 units (1998) by Stephen Antonakos (1926) comprises 72 small paintings featuring geometric forms, in which prevail the colours green, purple, fuchsia and white. The square and the cube, which are repeated in all the works in the series, are shapes predominantly used throughout the artist’s oeuvre. The artist invests this work with symbolic meaning, as he associates the 72 paintings with the 72 years of his life at the time of its creation. This visual journey was completed on November 1, 1998 on the day of his birthday.
Steve Roden, Moon (both receiver and transmitter... there now remained), 2008
Venue: Mezzanine – projection room
Duration: 30/9 – 30/11/2008The inspiration for the audio installation
Moon (both receiver and transmitter... there now remained) was provided by the invention of the phonautograph by Edward Leon Scott in France in 1850, which made it possible to record sound on paper. These “drawings” might have been the first recordings, if the reverse process of turning them into sound had been invented at the time. When, very recently, scientists managed to reproduce the sound recorded on these drawings using lazer and special software, it turned out that it was an excerpt of the French lullaby
Au clair de la lune. Listening to this audio segment, the artist, using a needle and with his eyes shut, made incisions on 16 colour strips of 16 mm film and then made a musical composition using the outcome. The work title comes from Ur-Geräusch (1919) by Rainer Maria Rilke. Sound pieces by Steve Roden were presented in the exhibition “The Grand Promenade” by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006.
Vadim Zakharov, Black Birds, 2007
Duration: 30/9 – 30/11/2008
Venue: PeristyleConceived for the 1st Biennale of Thessaloniki in 2007, the sound installation Black Birds is a long term loan to the State Museum of Contemporary Art – G. Kostakis Collection. Zakharov places 16 identical life size male figures in a series; they are dressed in black, wear hats and hold briefcases. These depersonalized and speechless figures are reminiscent of the black characters floating in Magritte’s
Golconda. Black Birds is reminiscent of a parade of contemporary businessmen, while the evocative sounds of ancient Greek hymns underpin the silence of the figures, clad in black.