The National Museum of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣT) transforms its rooftop into one of the most impressive summer cinemas in Athens, named CineFIX, recalling the name of the former brewery in which it is housed. With panoramic views of the entire city, including the Acropolis, the rooftop of EMΣΤ creates ideal conditions for the screening of audiovisual artworks and alters the viewers’ relationship with artists’ films and their usual context.
JUNE
EMΣT’s summer cinema will begin on Friday, June 21 at 21.30 with a screening of all of Penny Siopis’ films, currently featured in her retrospective exhibition For Dear Life at the museum. It is a unique opportunity for viewers to watch Siopis’ multi-layered work in flowing dialogue with the city that is one of their fictional reference points.
Penny Siopis combines found 8mm and 16mm home-movie footage with text and sound, to shape stories about people caught up, often traumatically, in larger political and social upheavals. The stories are usually from South African history but, for complex political reasons, they do not figure in the official historiography of the country. Τhe films probe issues of colonialism and apartheid, madness and modernity, migration and globalisation and, more recently, interrogate environmental issues and human/non-human relations.
All in all, Siopis’ filmic oeuvre is an immersive and gripping meditation on migration, exile, diaspora, political turmoil, and the intermingling of public and private lives, constituting a gripping portrait of a world in flux and providing insight into Siopis’s Greek and South African roots and experiences. From the 1919-1922 Greco Turkish war which marked the fate of millions of Greeks and changed the map of Greece, to colonialism, apartheid, and African liberation, Siopis weaves a series of intricate allusive narratives that paint a highly evocative portrait of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a world in radical transformation especially on the African continent.
The works that will be screened as are as follows:
My Lovely Day, 1997, 21′ 15″
Obscure White Messenger, 2010, 15′ 1″
The Master is Drowning, 2012, 10′ 5″
The New Parthenon, 2016, 15′ 26″
She Breathes Water, 2019, 5′ 12″
Shadow Shame Again, 2021, 6′ 16″
Τotal screening time: 75’
The artist will be present for a Q&A after the screening.
The next screening will take place on Thursday 4th July.
The summer screenings will run throughout the summer until the beginning of October and will take place every second Thursday of the month.
JULY-AUGUST
THURSDAY 4 JULY
21.30
Lynn Hershman Leeson, !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History (2010)
For the 2nd screening of the newly inaugurated open air cinema programme, on the Museum’s rooftop, ΕΜΣΤ will be presenting the seminal film by Lynn Hershman Leeson, !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History (2010), 83 min. Through intimate interviews, art, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !Women Art Revolution reveals how the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times.
For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics such as Judy Chicago, the Guerilla Girls, Martha Rosler, Nancy Spero, Hannah Wike, Alannah Heiss, Cornelia H. Butler and others who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures.
!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art and perceptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Carrie Brownstein composed an original score to accompany the film. Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 are some of the musicians who contributed to the soundtrack.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a pioneering multidisciplinary artist who has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. She is widely recognized for her innovative work that investigates issues including identity, surveillance, the relationship between humans and technology and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. For over six decades, her practice has run the gamut from filmmaking and collective art initiatives from producing one of the first interactive video art discs and an artificially intelligent web agent to coding her work into strands of DNA. Hershman Leeson’s career has extended the frame of culture across a host of new media and has laid the foundations for a generation of artists.
Awards include a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Honorary Doctorate from Pratt. Her work has been exhibited internationally at, among others, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), New Museum, New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, MoMA PS1, New York and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and is featured in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Tate Modern, London.
!Women Art Revolution – A Secret History (2010), 83 min.
Written, directed, edited and narrated by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Distributed by Zeitgeist
“The definitive history of the Feminist Art Movement” Holland Cotter, New York Times
!WOMEN ART REVOLUTION elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions.
In English, with Greek subtitles.
In case of rain, the film will be presented in the screening rooms of the Museum.
THURSDAY 18 JULY
21.30
THE RUINS BEHIND OUR BACK
The Ruins Behind our Back is a screening programme where the selected artists’ films and videos are presented in dialogue with the surrounding site – that is, the museum’s rooftop open air cinema CINEFIX – and the paradoxical situation whereby the viewers turn their backs on the spectacular Acropolis hill. The selected films and videos share an anti-monumental interpretation of the city of Athens, focusing instead on the quotidian: its terraces, pavements, antennas and other every day urban details.
The screening programme includes works by Kostas Bassanos, Catriona Gallagher, Marina Gioti, Daphné Hérétakis, Aspa Stasinopoulou and Eva Stefani.
Programme Curator: Stamatis Schizakis
The programme includes the following works:
Kostas Bassanos – The Age of Solitude, 2005
Video, colour, with sound
Duration 2’ 36’’
Donated by the artist
Collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Aspa Stasinopoulou – Athens, Omonoia & Athens, Military Camp [c.1970]
Super 8 milimetre film, colour, silent
Duration: 4’ & 4’30’’
Loan from Christoforos Marinos
Catriona Gallagher – Perdikaki, 2018
High-definition digital video, colour, with sound
Duration 36’
Courtesy of the artist
Eva Stefani – Manuscript, 2017
High-definition digital video, colour, with sound
Duration 12’
Courtesy of the artist
Marina Gioti – As to Posterity, 2014
High-definition digital video, colour, with sound
Duration 11’ 40’’
Collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
Daphné Hérétakis – The Seaweed in your Hair, 2016
Digitised 16 millimetre film, colour, with sound
Duration 7’40’’
Courtesy of the artist
Total duration 78’
In English and French, with Greek and English subtitles
AUGUST 1
A TRIBUTE TO BILL VIOLA
21.30
Bill Viola, who died last month, was a pioneer in the fields of new media, video, and installation art. For over 50 years his visionary environments, defined by immersive video and soundscapes, focused on the fundamental human experiences of birth, death, and the unfolding of consciousness. Viola’s decelerated moving images shifted viewers’ sense of perception and awareness to reveal the inner states of awareness.
Coming of age alongside the development of video, Viola experimented with the new technologies to explore expressive possibilities of this new medium. At the same time, through his study of the history of art and great masters, as well as research into cultural rituals all over the world, he came to realize that art can express true compassion striving to make work that embodied the concept of transformation. Viola played a key role in assuring video became a vital form of contemporary art.
In five decades as a practicing artist, Viola participated in countless exhibitions including Documenta 6 in 1977, the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 (where he represented the US) as well as at museums all over the world such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, LACMA, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and many more, drawing record-breaking visitors for a contemporary artist working in moving image.
Apart from video, was also an important part of Viola’s life and work. From 1973-1980 he performed with avant-garde composer David Tudor as a member of his Rainforest ensemble, later called Composers Inside Electronics. Viola also created videos to accompany music compositions including 20th century composer Edgard Varèse’s Déserts in 1994 with the Ensemble Modern, and, in 2000, a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails’ world tour. In 2004 he collaborated with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, which was presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic the same year, receiving its world premiere at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille in 2005.
The tribute presents the following works:
Angel’s Gate, 1989
Colour videotape, with sound
Duration 4΄50΄΄
Commissioned for the series “El Arte de Video”, produced by IMATCOATANOR with Television Española, SA, Madrid
Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers, 1977
Colour videotape, with sound, total duration 29΄
The tape includes the following videos:
The Wheel of Becoming, 1977
The Morning After the Night of Power, 1977
Sweet Light, 1977
Four Songs, 1976
Colour videotape, with sound, total duration 33΄
The tape includes the following videos:
Junkyard Levitation, 1976
Songs of Innocence, 1976
The Space Between the Teeth, 1977
Truth Through Mass Individuation, 1976
Anthem, 1983
Colour videotape, with sound
Duration 11΄30΄΄
Produced in association with WNET / Thirteen Television Laboratory, New York
Total duration 78’
SEPTEMBER
THURSDAY 26 SEPTEMBER
20.30
BOUCHRA KHALILI
THE TEMPEST SOCIETY
The Tempest Society. 2017. Video installation. 60′.
Commissioned for documenta 14, Athens/Kassel.
Sound. Color and black&white. Greek, Arabic, French, with English subtitles.
With Isavella Alopoudi, Elias Kiama Tzogonas, Giannis Sotiriou, and their guests.
On the occasion of Bouchra Khalili’s solo exhibition Lanternists and Typographers at EMΣT and her participation in the group exhibition Space of Togetherness, organized by NEON, the Μuseum is pleased to present her film The Tempest Society (2017) which was commissioned for and premiered at documenta 14 and filmed in Athens. The Tempest Society is Khalili’s first work of a long series devoted to the Movement of Arab Workers (MTA) and its theatre groups, Al Assifa (‘The Tempest’ in Arabic) and Al Halaka (‘The Circle’ or ‘The Assembly’ in Arabic). This long-term investigation is evidenced in the film The Tempest Society and subsequent works.
The Tempest Society starts from the forgotten legacy of Al Assifa, a theatre group comprising North African immigrant workers, members of the Movement of Arab Workers, and their French allies. The theatre group was active in Paris from 1973 to 1978. With performance and street happenings, Al Assifa invented a “theatrical newspaper” that addressed racism and inequality in France.
Forty years later, a group of young Athenians, Isavella, Elias and Giannis gather in an abandoned factory turned into a theatre stage. They name themselves “The Tempest Society” and reactivate Al Assifa’s heritage and methodology. On stage, they invite guests, including Ghani, a spokesperson for a group of three hundred immigrant workers who conducted a hunger strike in 2011 for equal rights at work; Aikaterini, born in Greece but still undocumented; and Malek, a young Syrian refugee who engaged with theatre in Athens to turn “sadness into beauty.” Together, they meditate poetically on performance as a civic practice.
BIOGRAPHY
Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist who lives in Vienna and works itinerantly. Encompassing film, video, installation, photography, printmaking, textile, and discursive and editorial platforms, Khalili’s multidisciplinary and meticulously researched work develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizen membership. Combining the performativity of oral traditions with rigorous visual and sonic forms informed by post-independence avant-gardes and conceptual practices, Khalili eventually suggests poetical hypotheses meditating on newer imaginations of emancipatory community. Her work has been featured in many international solo exhibitions, including recently at MACBA | Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2023); Luma Foundation, Arles (2023); Bildmuseet Umeå (2021); Oslo Kunstforening and Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2020); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2018); MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); among others. She has participated in major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale (2024, 2013), The Sharjah Biennale (2023, 2011), Documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel, 2017), the Milan Triennial (2017); La Triennale (Paris, 2012), among others. She was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute (2017), Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2019), and The Vera List Center at The New School in New York (2011–2013). She is a founding member of La Cinémathèque de Tanger, an artists-run non-for-profit organisation devoted to promoting film culture in Northern Morocco.
THURSDAY 19 SEPTEMBER
20.30
HOMAGE TO CAROLE ROUSSOPOYLOS
A PUBLIC WRITER
ΕΜΣΤ is pleased to present four films by the acclaimed Swiss filmmaker and feminist Carole Roussopoulos (1945-2009) who was primarily known for her radical, pioneering early documentary films of the Women’s Liberation Movement in France and beyond. The programme is selected by artist Bouchra Khalili, whose solo exhibition Lanternists and Typographers is currently on view in the museum, on the third floor. Roussopoulos is a returning reference in the work of Khalili, including in the centrepiece of her exhibition, “The Magic Lantern” a film which expands the artist’s research into post-independence emancipatory movements in the Global South and its Diasporas and which takes its inspiration from Roussopoulos’ “The Nero of Amman”. With this film programme Khalili and the museum wish to honour the work of a pioneer of video-making and her outstanding legacy.
Programme
Genet Parle d’Angela Davis, 1970. 7′
On October 16, 1970, at the Hotel Cecil in Paris, Carole and Paul Roussopoulos filmed Jean Genet’s statement recorded after the announcement of the arrest of Angela Davis, activist of the Black Panther Party and teacher of philosophy in the United States.
Young Lords, 1970, 13’30’’
A young woman speaks of “young lords”, Puerto Ricans living in the United States but who do not have the necessary diplomas to find work. The film quickly retraces the history of the movement, born in 1969.
Christiane et Monique, LIP V. 1976. 30′
Monique (an advertising assistant) and Christine (a semi-skilled worker) talk about how difficult it is for a woman working in a struggling factory (LIP), about issues of internal democracy within the trade union and the end of work in the current situation.
Le Juge et les Immigrés, 1980. 40′
This militant film follows the struggle of migrant workers who are on strike over the rent of the Sonacotra hostels, with the support of judge Bidalou, nicknamed the “Red Judge”.
Total running time: 90 minutes
In French and English with Greek and English subtitles.
In case of rain, the film will be presented in the screening rooms of the Museum.
Carole Roussopoulos: A Public Writer
Text by Bouchra Khalili
Throughout the last ten years, Carole Roussopoulos and her video camera often appeared in my works such as in the mixed media installations Foreign Office (2015), Twenty-Two Hours (2019), and The Magic Lantern (2019-2022) that is currently on view at EMST. With this evening, I wish to honor the work of a pioneer of video-making and her outstanding legacy.
One of the first woman videomaker, Carole Roussopoulos (1945-2009) was born in Switzerland and moved to Paris in 1967 where she met her life-long companion and major collaborator Paul Roussopoulos, a Greek mathematician. In 1968, the couple met Jean Genet during the events of May. And in 1969, after Carole lost her job of editor at Vogue Magazine, Genet advised her to purchase « a revolutionary machine that just came out and that will make you a free woman ». She purchased the newly released handy video camera ‘portapak’ and dedicated the rest of her life to documenting movements for social justice and transformation, locally and globally led by feminists, queer, revolutionary groups, immigrants, workers on strike, and sex workers’s rights activists.
With this film program, various aspects of Carole Roussopoulos’ interests in social transformations in the first 10 years of her career are connected, starting with Jean Genet and his support to Angela Davis who was incarcerated in the U.S ; the Puerto Rican struggle in New York for access to medical care and the leading role of women ; female workers on strike in France ; and immigrants’ struggle in France in the early 1980’s.
Throughout the four decades of her practice, Roussopoulos built an invaluable archive of intersectional and feminist struggles. With her work, she also offers us to meditate on the civic position of the artist based on an ethics and a poetics of relation. Just as a public writer, which she often referred to for defining her practice, Roussopoulos did not speak on behalf of her subjects. Instead, through her camera we see them speak in their own words about their own lives and struggles. Eventually, and even after having produced nearly 150 films, she always stated ’my images belong to you’.
Biography
”What’s important to me is others’ words, those words you never hear.” Carole Roussopoulos
Carole Roussopoulos was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 25 May 1945. She her began studies in literature in Switzerland, then Paris, where she met Paul Roussopoulos, a Greek political refugee, physicist and painter who became her companion in life, political activism and video art, and the father of her two children. At first, she worked for Vogue as well as Jeune Afrique in her spare time. In 1970, she left journalism and, at the urging of Jean Genet, and bought the first portable video camera, the Sony Portapak. Roussopoulos quickly grasped all of the machine’s potential and began to make good use of those possibilities, its lightweight body, mobility and low cost with respect to film. With Paul in 1970, she organized a small video group in Paris called Video Out. The same year, she made Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis (Jean Genet Talks about Angela Davis) and a video shot in the Palestinian camps, Hussein, le Néron d’Aman (Hussein, the Nero of Aman—all copies of the video have since been lost).
She also filmed in the traditional May Day Parade on 1 May 1970 the first homosexual parade in Paris, and followed the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action during its historic meetings in the University of Vincennes’s Department of Philosophy, simply turning her camera on and filming the exchanges and debates without interruption. With rare clear-sightedness, she has managed to reconcile the arts of listening and seeing, in a glance sizing up the audience and the reactions of those who are listening.
Roussopoulos put her knowledge in the service of militant feminists by organizing forums and video workshops that drew many women, notably Delphine Seyrig the French actress and film director, whom she met at one of these encounters. Thus began a long collaboration with her, the two realizing in 1976, for example, a remarkable little pamphlet called the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.
Roussopoulos has closely followed and filmed women’s struggles (abortion, rape, contraception, violent abuse, and professional equality) and rights-based activism. Her subjects include: the fight for abortion and open and free contraception, women workers’ rights, various international struggles, the struggle of the excluded peoples, the homeless, and prisoners. In 1982, she founded with Delphine Seyrig and Iona Wieder the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center, the first audiovisual center devoted to women’s history.
Listening to others without ever commenting on what they have to say, the filmmaker is constantly questioning viewers’ preconceived ideas about subjects that are controversial or the least covered by mainstream media. Her cassettes have been passed around and become an educational tool and the starting point for discussion and debate. Roussopoulos also works for and/or with militant groups as well as associations, foundations and ministries.
Roussopoulos made over 120 films. In 1992, Roussopoulos was named Knight of Arts and Letters and in 2001 Knight of the Legion of Honor, recognizing “her 32 years of artistic activity as a filmmaker.”
Source: Nicole Fernandez Ferrer | https://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu.php?ID=9000000000083169&LG=GBR&ALP=R&DOC=bio&NOM=Carole%20Roussopoulos
THURSDAY 12 SEPTEMBER
20.00 & 21.30
Johan Grimonprez
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
EMΣΤ is pleased to present the acclaimed 1997 film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, by renowned Belgian director Johan Grimonprez, one of the seminal documentary/art films of the last quarter of the 20th century. The work unfolds as a chronology of airplane hijackings in the world during the 1960s to the 1980s, constituting -at the same time- a study of pre-September 11 terrorism. It is the result of a long-term research in several TV and video archives and is composed of a collage of found archival material -interspersed with reportage shots, clips from science fiction films, found footage, home video, reconstituted scenes, and excerpts from Don DeLillo’s novels Mao II and White Noise. These textual references also form the philosophical- ideological backdrop of the work. According to Grimonprez, “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y‘s narrative is based on an imagined dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist where the writer contends that the terrorist has hijacked his role within society.”
The director’s films have been shown at many film festivals across the globe, winning numerous awards. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was awarded Best Director at San Francisco International Film Festival, among others. His work has been exhibited at museums worldwide, including MoMA, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate, London, among others, and was a highlight of Documenta 9 in Kassel (1997). The Guardian selected Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) as one of 30 works that tell the history of video art.
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997
68’, colour, with sound
Collection of ΕΜΣΤ | Gift of theThe Dakis Joannou Collection
In English with Greek subtitles
THURSDAY 5 SEPTEMBER
21.00
FEMINIST CLASSICS: VIDEO ART FROM THE ΕΜΣΤ COLLECTION
On the occasion of the ongoing What if Women Ruled the World exhibition cycle, ΕΜΣΤ is pleased to present a screening of seminal and early feminist video works from the 1970s to the 1990s (from its collection) which have had a significant impact on how we understand gender, representation and the body. The availability of affordable and portable video equipment towards the end of the 1960s marked the birth of video art and numerous female artists adopted the medium and participated in its development. Video had a sweeping impact on the introduction of the moving image into the artworld, opening up a new universe of experimentation. In these early films we can see how the image could now be shaped, manipulated and erased; how painting and film merge, and how complex compositions of images and sounds were created for the first time. Both a medium of creation and protest, video became a key element in the development of feminist art in the 1970s, making the female body and identity a place for visual and political exploration. The programme presents some of the most iconic and influential early feminist artists who made a historical contribution in this direction, both from Greece as well as further afield.
Programme
Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, Requiem for the 20th century, 1994
Dara Birnbaum, Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-1979
Lina Theodorou, Hippodrome, 1997 – 1999
Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973
Pipilotti Rist, I am not the girl who misses much, 1986
Steina, Violin Power, 1970 – 1978
Carolee Schneemann, Up To and Including her Limits, 1976
SUPPORTERS
