The nomadic mobility that characterizes the National Museum of Contemporary Art\u2019s exhibitions policy, which has from the word go eschewed closed museum schemas in favour of approaching the public more directly, offers every time new, creative challenges. Our off site exhibition activities in conventional or alternative spaces, in the centre and its peripheries, or in the open public space of the city, bring about collaborations with other institutions, address various social groups, and create new interpretive contexts for art-works and ideas. They seek a new locality through decentralized practices or convergences.<\/p>\n
Eleusis, as vibrantly alive as it is enigmatic, in its diachronic and multicultural specificity, was from our first visit a place of inspiration. Our aim, which intersected with the enthusiasm and openness of the staff of the Municipality of Eleusis and its Cultural Organization, was to design exhibitions and ad hoc artistic events in specific venues and locations in the heart of the city and around it. The start was made in the summer, in Eleusis\u2019 seaside outdoor cinema, which provided an ideally alternative environment for screenings of Rebecca Horn\u2019s decidedly \u201chermetic\u201d performances and films, and for intertextual approaches to her theatrical and cinematic language. The choice of \u039cunicipal Gallery of Eleusis to stage this exhibition of works by Nikos Kessanlis, a leading figure in late modernism and post-modernism, provided an ideal opportunity for a retrospectively compendious presentation to which the EMST\u2019s rich collection of works by the artist is especially suited. The visitor will have the opportunity to follow some important transformations in Kessanlis\u2019 work, in its shift from the object towards potentially immaterial forms and back again to their re-enclosure in mati\u00e8re. And perhaps he may recognize in the artist\u2019s ephemeral and poetic Gestures<\/em>, in which liberation from the conventional art result obeys to random movements and bodily rhythms, a kinship with Rebecca Horn\u2019s performances at some profound level.<\/p>\n The Nikos Kessanlis – From mati\u00e8re to the image<\/em> exhibition is built around a core of works from the EMST collections and focuses on the artist\u2019s activities between the early Sixties and the Nineties and the shifts and ceaseless transformations of a multi-faceted, spontaneous body of work as it oscillated between material and immateriality, figuration and the deconstruction of the image. The show brings together seminal works from Kessanlis\u2019 career which illuminate his artistic quest, as well as lesser-known works which prefigure future directions.1<\/sup><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1.Robert Storr stresses that in retrospectives and one-man shows alike: \u00abMinor, but substantial works that crystallize key aspects of an artist\u2019s sensibility and development are as necessary to the one person show as indisputably major ones. A scattering of such works often engages the viewer first by virtue of their salient and readily accessible qualities, qualities which, when initially seen in relative isolation, teach the viewer what to look for in more complex or rarefied work. A surfeit of show-stopping arts stops the show\u00bb. Robert Storr, \u00abMontrer et raconter\u00bb, Artpress<\/em> 301 (May 2004), p. 31.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The nomadic mobility that characterizes the National Museum of Contemporary Art\u2019s exhibitions policy, which has from the word go eschewed closed museum schemas in favour of approaching the public more directly, offers every time new, creative challenges. Our off site exhibition activities in conventional or alternative spaces, in the centre and its peripheries, or in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":76480,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-exhibition-post.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12811"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78546,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12811\/revisions\/78546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}