The Sea Garden , curated by Danai Giannoglou and Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, is the winning proposal resulting from the second Open Call issued by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMΣT) for the curation of a group exhibition. Launched in 2023, this initiative has become an important way for the museum to support curatorial research and to create new opportunities for emerging curators in Greece. The Open Call underscores the polyphonic character of EMΣT’s exhibition programme, inviting proposals that engage, among other things, with the Museum’s Collection and Archive. Opening on Saturday, 8 November, and presented in Project Room 2, Sea Garden is part of EMΣT’s autumn 2025 temporary exhibitions programme.
With its title alluding to the 1916 poetry collection Sea Garden by the American poet H.D. (1886–1961), the exhibition brings together works that materially incorporate and depict natural landscapes and the subtle but decisive human interventions they reveal. Landscapes seen through watery reflections that resemble human bodies. Landscapes suffused with the toxic, industrial pledges of progress. Landscapes worn to shelter bodies. Landscapes sucked dry from burning suns. Landscapes throwing us questions and responses at once.
Taking as its starting point the practice of Athena Tacha (b. 1936), specifically her works belonging to the EMΣT Collection, the exhibition partakes in a timeless conversation that prolongs an open dialogue around landscape as a category under pressure. Although transcending Greek borders, it constantly returns to the complexity of the Greek and Mediterranean geopolitical context. Sea Garden follows Tacha’s understanding of landscape’s sculptural potential, as well as her engagement with nature in relation to the body, human and non-human. Using natural materials such as pebbles, petals, and shells, Tacha creates works that are radically open in their use and interpretation: at times they are sculptures, at others performance props, spaces, or clothes.
Within the exhibition, Tacha’s approach to landscape resonates with different artistic practices. It enters into dialogue with the ecological sensibility of German artist Margaret Raspé (1933–2023) and especially her series of works created at her holiday home in Karpathos in the 1970s and 1980s. The dry garden of Sparoza, which has been flourishing in Paiania since the 1960s under the care of women volunteers, becomes the actual and symbolic material of visual artist and filmmaker Catriona Gallagher. Dora Economou “collects” distinctive features of landscapes and natural organisms from different corners of the planet in order to create her own sculptural mutations, blurring the boundaries between hosts and parasites. Claude Cahun (1894–1954) wears nature itself to resist rigid understandings of gender and identity, reclaiming the right to fluidity. Finally, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), whose work is also part of the EMST collection, imprints traces of her own body onto the landscape only to directly erase them through the four natural elements.
Sea Garden explores the contradictory yet structural coexistence and alternation between conditions of dryness and wetness: too much water, threatening inundation, or too little water, auguring unforgiving heat. The exhibition combines existing and new works that highlight that transient point at which land meets sea. The idea and the image of a sea garden invite us to imagine the edge as a setting, a symbol, and a system, to think through thresholds and borders – of environments, labour, gender, and migratory movements.
The exhibition is accompanied by the public programme I even lost my shadow, featuring contributions by Stefanos Levidis, Danae Io, Margaret Raspé, Catriona Gallagher, and Fredj Moussa.
Artists: Claude Cahun, Dora Economou, Catriona Gallagher, Ana Mendieta, Margaret Raspé, Athena Tacha
Learn more about the exhibition’s public programme here.
Curated by Danai Giannoglou,
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou
BIOGRAPHIES
Danai Giannoglou is a curator, writer and editor currently living and working independently between Athens and Amsterdam. She studied Theory and History of Art at the Athens School of Fine Arts, as well as Cultural Management and Curating at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme 2019/20, Amsterdam. Danai was awarded the 2nd SNF Artist Fellowship Program (2019, Curating), the Onassis AiR Emergency Fellowship 19/20, the Onassis AiR Tailor-Made Fellowship 2022, as well as the inaugural ArcAthens NOLA/NYCBX Research Fellowship in 2023. She has held curatorial positions at de Appel, Amsterdam and served as exhibitions archive coordinator at Deste Foundation, Athens. She has curated exhibitions and public programs for museums and organisations in Greece and abroad such as: Piet Zwart Institute, Sandberg Institute, The Breeder Gallery, B&M Theocharakis Foundation, Art Athina, Hotel Maria Kapel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, de Appel, Enterprise Projects and Galerie Michel Journiac. Her texts have been published in exhibition catalogues, artists’ books and magazines. Her curatorial practice focuses on issues concerning language and landscape using visual art and poetry as vehicles for their exploration. At the same time she researches the history, legacy and stakes of independent art spaces and practices. Danai is the co-founder and curator of Enterprise Projects, a project space in Athens that has been functioning independently and periodically since September 2015, as well as the editor of Enterprise Projects Journal, a publishing initiative by Enterprise Projects. She is currently a contributor to Metropolis M magazine.
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is an art historian and curator. She obtained her PhD from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (2021), supported by an Onassis Foundation scholarship. In 2022–23 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, RWTH Aachen University. Her research and curatorial work has been supported by the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, the ARTWORKS Fellowship (Stavros Niarchos Foundation), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. She is the scientific advisor of the exhibition Atomic Age. Artists Grappling with History (Musée d’art Moderne, Paris, 2024–25); CCCB Barcelona, 2026), and in 2024 she curated the group exhibition …that creeps from the earth (2024) at Tavros art space, Athens. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, at the intersection of art history, the history of science and the environmental humanities, centers on nuclear aesthetics, exploring material histories of art and the environment, toxicity, antinuclear activism and feminist discourses. Kyveli is currently a postdoctoral research fellow (VENI) and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is also co-editing the volume Toxic Materialities: Exposure and Pollution in Art Making Across Histories and Geographies (Brill, forthcoming) and curating the artistic research project Troubling Pigments (after Sigmar Polke) in collaboration with the Rijksakademie and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, supported by the Anna Polke Stiftung.
CREDITS
Artistic Direction: Katerina Gregos
Administrative-Financial Direction: Athina Ioannou
Curators: Danai Giannoglou, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou
Coordination: Anna Mykoniati
Production: Anastasia Tsopelaki
Conservation: Fotini Alexopoulou
Registrar: Maria Drakou, Emmanouela Fourtouni
Graphic Design: Iliana Siarga
Audio-Visual Installation: Makis Faros
Technical Support: Aimilios Petrikis, Vangelis Filippas
Lighting: Grigoris Sampanis
Transport/Handling: Orphee Beinoglou
Communication: Marigo Siakka (EMΣT), Sergio Zalmas (Social Media)
Communication Consultant: Maria Tsolaki
Acknowledgments
The curators wish to acknowledge the deeply collaborative labour that has underpinned the preparation of Sea Garden. Special thanks go to the following individuals and organizations: ARTWORKS for supporting our research into Margaret Raspé’s practice in Karpathos; Galerie Molitor, Berlin, and especially Marie-Christine Molitor, Camila Barshee and Laura Heimberg; Caroline Raspé for her generosity and hospitality in Karpathos. Finally, we wholeheartedly thank Susanne Kriemann, Eleanna Papathanasiadi, Myrsini Pleioni, Konstantina Katrakazou, Ilias Giannoglou, Nikos Mavrokordopoulos, George Papadimas, Christina Tzevelekou, Dimitra Papachristou, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Thodoris Prodromidis, Eleni Tsekeri for their invaluable help at different stages of organising the exhibition.
PRESS MATERIAL
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