Exploring Seven Months of Female Artistry: A Journey through the National Museum of Contemporary Art’s Latest Exhibitions

From December 2023 until the end of October 2024, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens will showcase What if Women Ruled the World? ,  a three-part exhibition series exclusively dedicated to the works of women artists or artists who identify as female.

“It is the first time,” emphasizes τhe museum’s artistic director, Katerina Gregos, “that a public museum exclusively exhibits works by women creators, not only in the exhibition of its permanent collection but also in all the spaces of its periodical exhibitions.” Despite recent advances, as women artists and cultural practitioners are still underrepresented in most aspects of the art world, this project, initiated by the museum’s artistic director, aims to radically reimagine what a museum would look like if, instead of a few token pieces, works by women artists were the majority. Katerina Gregos continues: “Our intention and goal is to go beyond the dominant narrative and symbolically -and not only symbolically – overturn the reality of the chronic underrepresentation of female creators in all fields of art.” The exhibitions provide an opportunity for women to reflect on their positions, rights, achievements and demands.

This collective exhibition WOMEN, together represents the first re-hang of the museum’s collection since 2019. There is a total of 49 works by 25 artists of different generations, ten of which are Greek. Twelve artists and 24 works are from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Gift, while thirteen artists and 25 works are from the existing collection of NMCA. The exhibition also includes seven new acquisitions, as well as a new long-term loan of a major work by Etel Adnan, courtesy of the Saradar Collection.

While there is no single thematic narrative, rather several intertwining threads, there are many common points of reference and dialogue as well as conceptual and aesthetic affinities between works. The artists are preoccupied with a variety of issues, both related to gender and identity, as well as to social and political issues, and the entanglements between them, although what they mostly share is an interest in materiality and the handcrafted, existential or humanistic issues, and the ephemeral nature of all things.

Finally, there are artists who probe issues regarding history, memory and collective/cultural identities centering around the critical geopolitical position of Greece and its immediate geographic surrounds in South East Europe, the Mediterranean and the former Levant. These are the territories of the former Ottoman Empire and with them come a multitude of suppressed or marginalized histories that lay dormant in the wake of new nation building in the twentieth century. The legacy of this history and the current history of the wider region with its rich historical, cultural and socio-political narratives lie at the heart of NMCA’s renewed collection policy.

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