EMST Athens revisits Greece's cultural past and future in The Greek Month in London 1975 and Sea Garden

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Volcano Series No 2), 1979. Collection of ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift.

ATHENS.— This November, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) launches its autumn programme with two distinct exhibitions that together illuminate the intersections of history, landscape, and artistic innovation across time and place. The Greek Month in London 1975, 50 Years On—Art at a Time of Political Change reflects the museum’s mission to cultivate creative practices of memory that resist the prevailing culture of amnesia toward the past. By revisiting a pivotal moment in Greece’s post-dictatorship cultural history, the exhibition highlights how key artistic events have shaped the country’s contemporary identity and international presence.

In contrast, Sea Garden reflects EMST’s ongoing commitment to supporting emerging Greek curators and new curatorial voices. Winner of the museum’s Open Call for curatorial proposals, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how art reimagines our relationship with landscape, ecology, and belonging in the Mediterranean and beyond.

At once retrospective and prospective, the double opening marks EMST’s continuing effort to build a living archive of artistic and curatorial practices that have shaped, and continue to shape, the field of contemporary art in Greece and beyond.

The Greek Month in London 1975, 50 Years On—Art at a Time of Political Change revisits the landmark cultural initiative “Greek Month,” presented in London in 1975, in the immediate aftermath of the military dictatorship. Curated by Polina Kosmadaki, the exhibition re-examines the visual arts programme organised by Christos M. Joachimides and Sir Norman Rosenthal, which sought to reintroduce Greek art to the international stage during a period of political transition and renewed democratic optimism. Central to that programme were two seminal exhibitions: Four Painters of 20th Century Greece, which presented an older generation of largely modernist artists, and Eight Artists, Eight Attitudes, Eight Greeks, which showcased a younger generation of contemporary artists defining a new avant-garde.

The exhibition at ΕΜST focuses on the latter. It was important because it articulated a first collective image of a “Greek avant-garde,” framed by a newly restored democracy and the wish to redefine Greece’s cultural position within Europe. Half a century later, EMST returns to these questions, foregrounding the curatorial vision of Joachimides and Rosenthal as a political and artistic gesture of its time.

Through works by Stephen Antonakos, Vlassis Caniaris, Chryssa, Jannis Kounellis, Pavlos, Lucas Samaras, Takis, and Costas Tsoclis—from EMST’s own and other Greek collections—the exhibition unfolds as both an act of remembrance and a dialogue with the present. Archival materials, catalogues, correspondence, and rare documents are presented publicly for the first time, illuminating how the London exhibitions negotiated ideas of national identity, exile, and artistic autonomy in the aftermath of dictatorship.

Eight Artists, Eight Attitudes, Eight Greeks highlighted that the “Greek avant-garde” was never simply a stylistic category but a condition of historical awareness, a way of confronting the paradox between an inherited past and an uncertain present. By re-reading The Greek Month through contemporary eyes, EMST positions curatorial practice itself as an instrument of historical consciousness, capable of tracing the fragile links between art, politics, and the collective imaginary, whilst revisiting its contested reception at the time.

In parallel, Sea Garden, curated by Danai Giannoglou and Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, offers a different but equally resonant meditation on terrain and transformation. Selected as the winning proposal of EMST’s second open call for emerging Greek curators, the exhibition unfolds as a fluid, intergenerational constellation of artists—Claude Cahun, Dora Economou, Catriona Gallagher, Ana Mendieta, Margaret Raspé, and Athena Tacha—whose works articulate a poetic ecology of bodies and landscapes.

Taking its title from Sea Garden (1916), the poetry collection by American poet H.D., the exhibition begins from the practice of Athena Tacha, whose sculptural investigations of natural form, movement, and bodily gesture provide both anchor and departure point. From there, Sea Garden drifts across temporal and geographic currents, tracing the shifting edge where land meets sea, dryness meets wetness, and material meets metaphor.

Each artist contributes a distinct language of embodiment: Cahun’s metamorphic self-portraits, Mendieta’s ephemeral earth-body actions, Raspé’s ecological film works made on the Greek island of Karpathos, Gallagher’s ongoing study of the dry garden of Sparoza in Attica, and Economou’s sculptural mutations that fuse host and parasite, organism and object. Together they reveal a landscape that is not passive ground but a living participant in human and non-human histories.

The exhibition engages landscape as a site of friction, ecological, social, and gendered, foregrounding how its transformations reflect global crises while also holding potential for care and regeneration. By evoking the notion of a “sea garden,” curators Giannoglou and Mavrokordopoulou propose the border not as a line of separation but as a porous space of becoming.

Accompanied by the public programme I even lost my shadow, with contributions by Stefanos Levidis, Danae Io, Margaret Raspé, Catriona Gallagher, and Fredj Moussa, the project extends beyond the gallery into a field of research, performance, and discussion.

Presented together, The Greek Month in London 1975, 50 Years On—Art at a Time of Political Change and Sea Garden articulate EMST’s evolving commitment to the politics of memory and the poetics of fragility. One turns to the archives of the recent past to re-evaluate the trajectories of Greek modernity; the other turns to the fluidity of the natural world to sense the urgencies of the present. Both affirm the museum as a site where history and landscape, body and nation, can be revisited not as fixed categories but as open questions.