ATHENS.- 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.
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.
Curated by Danai Giannoglou, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou
Artists: Claude Cahun, Dora Economou, Catriona Gallagher, Ana Mendieta, Margaret Raspé, Athena Tacha
