EMST Athens opens winter-spring exhibition programme

Hannah Toticki: Everything, everywhere, all the time
Curated by Ioli Tzanetaki.
Hannah Toticki’s solo exhibition at EMST is the artist’s first in Greece and her first big museum exhibition in Europe. Toticki has created a highly personal visual language inspired by fashion, pop culture, design, and theater. Her installations and sculptures integrate apparel, accessories, and furniture, and are frequently paired with performance, film, and music. Toticki examines aspects of the “burn-out society,” invisible women’s work, our relationship with technology, and, more broadly, the state of the art in a post-capitalist society striving for productivity, acceleration, and growth in Everything, everywhere, all the time with a critical eye and an often humorous approach. The exhibition includes pieces from various stages of Toticki’s creative process. They are split into four sections : Production, Sleep, Control, and Attention, which serve as a conceptual framework and highlight the links between the different themes that have infiltrated her works throughout the years. Toticki is also on display at the exhibition Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies). The Danish Arts Fund provided funding.
Till the 28th of May, 2023.

Mikhail Karikis: Because we are together
Curated by Stamatis Schizakis.
EMST is delighted to host the first comprehensive exhibition of Mikhail Karikis’ work in Greece. Karikis, a well-known member of Greece’s cultural diaspora, was born in Thessaloniki. He currently splits his time between London and Lisbon. Though the artist’s work has been featured in numerous prominent international exhibitions, it is less well-known in Greece. Karikis uses moving image and music, as well as collaborative approaches, to raise attention to past and present social, political, and environmental challenges. Collaborating with groups of students, workers, retirees, and activists, the artist creates musical and vocal events that cast a hopeful light on a gloomy future, pulling inspiration from global industrial and political history, literature, and avant-garde music. Weather Orchestra (2022), Surging Waves (2022), Ferocious Love (2020), No Ordinary Protest (2018), Children of Unquiet (2014), and Sounds from Under (2014) are the six significant audio-visual installations from Karikis’ work during the last decade (2011–2012). These installations are accompanied by a selection of smaller works, pictures, and texts. What they all have in common is a feeling of polyphonic poetics, in which distinct narratives connect communities united by a sense of solidarity in their fights for a better future.
Till the 28th of May, 2023.

Eleni Bagaki: Something like a poem, a nude and flowers in a vase
Curated by Tina Pandi.
Eleni Bagaki’s work in painting, sculpture, drawing, text, sound, and video is centered on the evolution of autofiction. Bagaki investigates erotic relationships, sexuality, gender representations, and the precarity that many of Greece’s young people face through the reconstruction of personal experiences or the production of fictional events. Nomadic roaming and flight as an existential condition in the search for a feeling of belonging are central to her artistic activity. The artist’s first big museum presentation, the show at EMST, contains a sequence of paintings with compositions of human beings standing alone or interacting in natural surroundings. Desire is the beginning point for these works: Bagaki’s dreamy paintings are created, as she emphasizes, by and for desire. The artist’s interaction with the depicted bodies and their surroundings is shaped by hints of physical attraction and erotic observation. Something like a poem, a naked woman, and flowers in a vase emerges as a kind of dreamlike roaming and observation on desire, sexuality, and romantic quest.
Till the 7th of May, 2023.

Erica Scourti: Profiles of You
Curated by Daphne Vitali.
Erica Scourti uses comedy, irony, parody, and self-exposure in her distinctly autobiographical work to explore emotion, intimacy, work, doubt, and self-improvement, as well as the artist’s function in relation to technology. Her work is an ongoing self-narrative process in which personal biography intersects with the collective, the personal intersects with the political, and the real intersects with the imaginary. Her visual technique begins with self-observation and methodical documenting of daily life and digital habits via audio-visual diaries and collages. Scourti uses social media, her mobile phone, apps, and the web to make text-based works on fabric or paper, as well as performances, movies, and collages with a lo-fi, raw, and instantaneous style. Viewers become voyeuristic spectators to her personal life, as well as witnesses to phrases, ideas, and concepts with numerous meanings. Her first solo exhibition in Greece, as well as her first big museum exhibition, is at EMST.
Till the 7th of May, 2023.

Melanie Bonajo: Progress vs Regress
Melanie Bonajo (Heerlen, Netherlands) explores modern existential dilemmas and issues of deteriorating intimacy and isolation in an increasingly urbanised and electronic society through her videos, performances, photography, and installations. Their works promote anti-consumerist and alternative approaches of reconnecting, exploring sexualities, intimacy, and sentiments. Bonajo’s experimental movies frequently portray communities living or working on society’s outskirts, emphasizing the value of a strong feeling of community, egalitarianism, and body politics in modern cultures. Progress vs. Regress (2016) is a documentary that examines the impact of technology breakthroughs on social connections via the eyes of the elderly, who have witnessed the most profound and widespread industrial, technological, and digital transformations in human history in the last few decades. The film depicts the demands, expectations, and struggles of a generation fighting to integrate in a world that strives for perpetual growth, efficiency, and speed through the protagonists’ personal, intimate, and emotional stories. Finally, the film is about the dread of falling behind as one ages, and how social media and technology place additional strain on our ability to adjust to new conditions. Finally, it is about how we as a culture treat the old, who are generally viewed as having no economic worth because of their age.
Till the 28th of May, 2023.

Dan Perjovschi: The Long Wall Report
Site-specific wall drawing
Curated by Anna Mykoniati.
Dan Perjovschi has been worldwide known for his cartoon-like drawings in museums and other institutional places, as well as in public spaces, since the 1990s, following the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe. His distinctive imagery, created with permanent black markers, is inspired by current events, politics, social issues, and modern storylines, circumstances, and disorders. Perjovschi covers political problems such as recent global conflicts and contestations, identity challenges, cultural biases, and pressing issues such as migration crises and religion disputes, as well as consumerist habits, with a witty, sharp, and critical perspective. Perjovschi has turned drawing into a medium for knowledge, political commentary, and activism. Perjovschi’s installations, which express challenging themes in quick, off-the-cuff drawings, argue that art may be both political and critical without being didactic or moralistic. Perjovschi has been commissioned to produce a new large-scale 30-metre installation for his first solo museum show in Greece, which will be drawn directly onto the largest wall of the EMST Foyer. Perjovschi’s work has appeared in several exhibits and biennials, as well as literary and political publications such as Contrapunct and 22. In the aftermath of the Democratic Revolution, the latter was the first independent oppositional weekly produced in Romania.
Till the 29th of October, 2023.

The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports funds EMST | National Museum of Modern Art, Athens.