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Syzygy. Solid Light &amp; Timeless Motion | Apollon Glykas – Ilias SipsasInfo<ul><li>Duration: 13/10-07/01/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | TH | FR | SA | SU &gt; 11:00-19:00, TH &gt; 11:00-22:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona</li></ul>ArtistsApollon Glykas – Ilias SipsasCurated byYannis BolisCoproduction: MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona  The compositions created by Ilias Sipsas and Apollon Glykas present an original concept of viewing, transforming and interpreting reality and the human condition. Their collaboration also forges a unified intervention, a multifaceted visual environment that evolves dynamically, an environment rich in content and open to multiple readings and diverse approaches. The starting point for the duo is their combination of photography and sculpture.Simple, fortuitous, anonymous photographs with no artistic assertions or intentions, images that simply document and capture people and ordinary moments of our life and world -temporally and on paper-, such fragments of memory serve as the material and thematic axes of their work.By enlarging, processing and dissecting these photographs, by selecting parts rather than the entirety of the images, by fragmenting and intervening on their surface, and, typically, by detaching their subject from its temporal and social context, integrating the images into wall or spatial constructions, they create a new condition defined by its coherent character. However, in their use of photographs, they maintain their individual, distinctive style, with each establishing his own sensibility, perspective and aesthetic.Ilias Sipsas explores the analogies between photographic and physical/real space. His large-scale photographic collages conceptually communicate with his sculptural constructions, in which he resourcefully combines objets trouvés with an assortment of materials (metals, clay, plaster, stones, glass, wood, plastic). Often, his works make structural use of light and are distinguished by their materiality, elegance and brittleness, their Dadaist spirit and their subversive-surrealist mood.Apollon Glykas’ works originate from a process of connections, as he works with various materials and techniques. His projects combine photographs (often from his personal archive) with metal elements that allude to technological culture, such as antennae, struts, parts of communication systems, bases. He uses these elements as they are, without interfering with the texture or colour of the material. Meanwhile, motion and light play a key role in his work. The indeterminate -in terms of their intended use and purpose- constructions where the photographs are embedded are constructivist in their approach. These surprising and paradoxical encounters between constructions and photographs create narratives in which time is the dominant dimension, with the notions of the past and future positioned at their core – these images-“messages” are fragments of an antediluvian life in a future world.

Museum Alex Mylona

Syzygy. Solid Light & Timeless Motion | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Info<ul><li>Duration: 20/10/2023 – 11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00 MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 11:00-19:00, TH &gt; 11:00-20:00</li><li>Venues:  MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography &amp; MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts</li></ul>ArtistsDaniel Mayrit, Dimitris Michalakis, MacDonaldStrand, The Archive of Public Protests, Ana Carolina Fernandes, Prarthna Singh, Wolfgang Scheppe, Dougie Wallace, Lauren Greenfield, Kostas Kapsianis, Rafal Milach, Uta Kögelsberger, Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá, Paolo Pellegrin, DISNOVATION.ORG, Kimberly dela Cruz, Christian Lutz, Sinna Nasseri, Joan Fontcuberta / Pilar Rosado, Vangelis Vlahos, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Carey Young, Bani Abidi, Craig Ames, Boris MikhailovCurated byJulian Stallabrass  Coproduction: MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, MOMus-Experimental Center for the ArtsSupport: Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, British Council, Heinrich Böll Foundation – Thessaloniki Office  The Spectre of the PeopleIf once the spectre of communism haunted Europe, now the spectre of populism stalks the Earth. Artists have grappled with its myriad dimensions: how and if to represent ‘the people’, how to represent democratic power, the nature of charismatic leaders, and popular protest and insurgency. The media of the lens, long woven tightly around the history of mass politics, have been a natural field for this artistic exploration.The main exhibition of the 2023 Thessaloniki Photobiennale, The Spectre of the People, explores populism through photography and video: who are ‘the people’, can they be grasped visually, are they the source of hope or dread, how are they condensed in the figures of their would-be leaders, and how do they assemble and act in political protest?The artists shown here approach these issues in widely contrasting, if sometimes overlapping, ways: some document populist leaders and their followers, and by contrast those people declared enemies by populist movements; some offer satirical takes on the absurdities of authoritarian leaders and the political delirium that they create; others perform as populists or make activist work in solidarity with protest movements; others again offer conceptual works on populism, and the deep economic crisis from which it drew strength.The exhibition is divided into four main parts. The first two are shown at the MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography: part one explores artistic responses to the fraught dilemma of how to represent mainstream democratic politics, especially as it falls into crisis. Part two looks at populist leaders and followers, along with the deadly consequences of their actions. The next two parts are shown at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts: part three envisions those who are excluded from ‘the people’ by populist movements, set alongside the very rich who do all they can to insulate themselves from the rest of us, and the means used to police the boundaries. Part four tracks the performative culture of insurgent protest movements of both the left and the right.Like the phenomenon of populism, the exhibition has a global ambit. This scope makes the elusive concepts of ‘the people’ and of populism harder to tie down, as they span continents, the left-right divide, and often tie together mass participation and authoritarian rule. Yet from the very diverse works on display, there emerges an image of the populist field as it oscillates between the poles of political antagonism and solidarity.

Thessaloniki Museum of Photography

The Spectre of the People | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

The Spectre of the PeopleInfo<ul><li>Duration: 20/10/2023 – 11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00 MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 11:00-19:00, TH &gt; 11:00-20:00</li><li>Venues:  MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography &amp; MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts</li></ul>ArtistsDaniel Mayrit, Dimitris Michalakis, MacDonaldStrand, The Archive of Public Protests, Ana Carolina Fernandes, Prarthna Singh, Wolfgang Scheppe, Dougie Wallace, Lauren Greenfield, Kostas Kapsianis, Rafal Milach, Uta Kögelsberger, Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá, Paolo Pellegrin, DISNOVATION.ORG, Kimberly dela Cruz, Christian Lutz, Sinna Nasseri, Joan Fontcuberta / Pilar Rosado, Vangelis Vlahos, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Carey Young, Bani Abidi, Craig Ames, Boris MikhailovCurated byJulian Stallabrass  Coproduction: MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, MOMus-Experimental Center for the ArtsSupport: Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, British Council, Heinrich Böll Foundation – Thessaloniki Office  The Spectre of the PeopleIf once the spectre of communism haunted Europe, now the spectre of populism stalks the Earth. Artists have grappled with its myriad dimensions: how and if to represent ‘the people’, how to represent democratic power, the nature of charismatic leaders, and popular protest and insurgency. The media of the lens, long woven tightly around the history of mass politics, have been a natural field for this artistic exploration.The main exhibition of the 2023 Thessaloniki Photobiennale, The Spectre of the People, explores populism through photography and video: who are ‘the people’, can they be grasped visually, are they the source of hope or dread, how are they condensed in the figures of their would-be leaders, and how do they assemble and act in political protest?The artists shown here approach these issues in widely contrasting, if sometimes overlapping, ways: some document populist leaders and their followers, and by contrast those people declared enemies by populist movements; some offer satirical takes on the absurdities of authoritarian leaders and the political delirium that they create; others perform as populists or make activist work in solidarity with protest movements; others again offer conceptual works on populism, and the deep economic crisis from which it drew strength.The exhibition is divided into four main parts. The first two are shown at the MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography: part one explores artistic responses to the fraught dilemma of how to represent mainstream democratic politics, especially as it falls into crisis. Part two looks at populist leaders and followers, along with the deadly consequences of their actions. The next two parts are shown at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts: part three envisions those who are excluded from ‘the people’ by populist movements, set alongside the very rich who do all they can to insulate themselves from the rest of us, and the means used to police the boundaries. Part four tracks the performative culture of insurgent protest movements of both the left and the right.Like the phenomenon of populism, the exhibition has a global ambit. This scope makes the elusive concepts of ‘the people’ and of populism harder to tie down, as they span continents, the left-right divide, and often tie together mass participation and authoritarian rule. Yet from the very diverse works on display, there emerges an image of the populist field as it oscillates between the poles of political antagonism and solidarity.

Experimental Center for the Arts

The Backyard (2018-2023) | Vicky GeorgiouInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistVicky GeorgiouCurated byStratos KalafatisCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art CollectionsFujifilm Inkjet Photo-Paper: FUJIFILM HELLAS S.A.  This is a homecoming after many years of being away. I collect pieces of untold stories and hidden secrets to understand and reconstruct the past. I try to fill the gap of memory, the gap of time, the gap of space, all the gaps I bore in childhood.My father was a proud shepherd, highly sought after for his animal husbandry skills. Why did he and my mother make the critical decision to leave their village and move across the world?Watching my children play in the garden, I can imagine what life must have been like in the “backyard”, one of the few words they brought back from our life in Australia.I use images as an adhesive material.Climbing trees with my siblings, the movement of my mother’s hands as we hung out the laundry, the words and silences, the colours, the laid table, the smell of smoke at nightfall.I open up a trunk that is full of letters and Christmas cards, I try on mother’s clothes, I have my picture taken with her.I encounter the same questions time and again. Were we ever happy as a family? Why did we leave? Why did we return? Could forgetting be a good thing? Why do I rummage through the ashes of memory? Why did I open the backyard door?

Museum of Contemporary Art

The Backyard (2018-2023) | Vicky Georgiou | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Shame Less | Lina GeoushyInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR |SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistLina GeoushyCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections  Sexual Violence is a pervasive universal problem with 1 in 3 women globally being subjected to it. Egypt, in particular, is a country where violence against women is extremely pervasive. According to a 2013 United Nations study, “virtually all Egyptian women have been victims of sexual harassment,” with 99.3 percent of the women surveyed in the study to state that they have been sexually harassed. The simple action of standing in the street can expose women to harassment and abuse of all kinds.In 2020, the Egyptian government committed to ending gender-based violence as part of the UN’s SDGs (Sustainment Development Goals). We are yet to see this commitment being translated into compliance. Although Egypt has had its “#MeToo” moments, its effects have been rather transient, and its popularity has been limited to social media platforms where algorithms tend to create an echo-chamber-effect, resulting in the involvement of a limited audience in the constructive conversation.In December 2020, in response to the #MeToo wave that Egyptian women led in June of the same year, I decided to start this project. In protest and solidarity with other women against sexual violence, my initial intention was to fight the stigma that surrounds reporting sexual assault. The fact that more women are sharing their stories resulted in many of us realizing the magnitude of our ongoing, deep-rooted personal and collective traumas. This is especially the case when speaking up is punished by victim blaming, gaslighting, shaming, and, eventually, silence. I have been verbally and sexually harassed in the streets, at home, and at work in Cairo, and I am enraged by the prevalence and normalization of the problem. I want to spotlight the issue and fight the stigma around reporting assault. I think we need to ask ourselves whether well-meaning men are part of the problem. Do they contribute to it? Can they be counted on as allies? The project centers around Egyptian women’s stories of sexual violence in different public and private spaces in Cairo.2020 – Ongoing

Shame Less | Lina Geoushy | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Still Neighborhood | Vaggelis TatsisInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR |SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistVaggelis TatsisCurated byYorgos Prinos, Vaggelis TatsisCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections  “Still Neighborhood” project started as a personal quest when I returned to the place where I grew up in order to initially photograph my family. I focused on the people I grew up with, familiar and accessible. Gradually, as the ideas and the experiences shaped into images, each of them determined the next step, the next shot, connected with the previous one but at the same time one step further from it. Portraits and places were originating from my own experiences, memories and nostalgia, then from the closest related people to me and gradually from a wider circle of people all of whom, closer and more distant, shared a connection at the same time introvert and extrovert with the area: from their family to their neighborhood, from their neighborhood to the suburb, from the suburb to the wider area of West Attica.Neighborhood covers a necessity; a person’s need to be part of a community in which each one of them belongs keeping at the same time their identity. This need is similar to one’s need for faith or adoration.Neighborhood is not only defined by geographical districts, but is also formed by the very same people who live there. Each person learns how to be part of the other’s life and share their daily routines.Neighborhood change at a different pace than the greater city’s outlook. Here the pace changes with each generation, with a new puzzle of relationships to be created: neighbors become classmates, classmates become friends, friends become best friends and sometimes couples.The place plays a significant role in people’s lives. It covers their basic needs. The place molds the people and they in turn transform the place with their dynamic and their life path. This relationship – almost as a dependency – between people and their area is of utmost importance, absolutely and determinant for both sides. My photographic interest is not only centered around people and their place but also on their characters, their personalities and their interaction, a more complex relationship pattern that connects them. The mosaic that is gradually formed is concrete and at the same time fluid, creating a constantly enlarging circle without fading or becoming alienated from the quest itself. The quest for identity.

Still Neighborhood | Vaggelis Tatsis | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Self-portraits | Martin ParrInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR |SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistMartin ParrCurated byHercules PapaioannouCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art CollectionsFujifilm Inkjet Photo-Paper: FUJIFILM HELLAS S.A.  Photography since its advent has emphatically showcased the portrait as a reflection of individual and social identity, as a dialogue (fragmented but increasingly dense) with personal and collective memory. In the first decades of the new medium, photographs were realized in studios with the skills and conventions of emerging professionals, in a more or less artful way that spread across countries and continents in a more or less colonial context. As the medium became more and more popular and easy to use, people started to create their own casual snapshots of close friends and family.In the twilight of the 20th and the dawn of the 21st century Martin Parr, while travelling on international media assignments, began to get himself pictured in studios and photobooths all around the world. His figure gradually became part -physically or digitally- of diverse settings, designed to validate stereotypes or generate new ones. In these photographs, contrary to the banality of traditional studio portraits, a local attraction or landmark, an imaginary character or the cardboard effigy of a leader attempt, in versions occasionally flirting with kitsch, to offer the depicted person a notable, prefabricated memory. For twenty years (1996-2015), Parr would surrender himself in a willing, expressionless manner to the hands of his peers, consciously becoming prey to a mechanism of standardized images. This witty series, which inadvertently heralded the current narcissistic flood of selfies, bears stark testimony to the way photography became catalyst of an early globalization process, magnifying the local and discovering the exotic, thanks to its unique ability to travel, assimilate, adapt, reproduce itself, generate a certain aura.The self is here surrounded, from one image to the next, with a blithe fluidity, as it poses in all sorts of atmospheric settings, bygone or futuristic, flamboyant or austere, culturally specific or all weather. These portraits ultimately gain their vitality from the gradual realisation of the artist acting as a conceptual converter of these inventive representations into a coherent proposal, as his spirit lies behind each image, without him having taken any of them; also, by the fact that they reveal the free-flowing waving of identity in the turbulent waters of the 21st century. In this sense, the series brilliantly suggests that identity has never before been so malleable, prescribing a self that is expanded, flexible, fragmented, expendable. Anticipating the condition of the produser (in which everyone can be both a producer and a user of images), the series poignantly raises the question of whether photography can still capture a coherent idea of the self or contributes to its constant reinvention and reconstruction within virtual small worlds. And while one might think that Martin Parr’s Self-Portraits are limited to a parody of self-representation (at a time when this practice appears almost as an imperative duty), they also seem to allude to the ubiquity of the photographic medium which, in the post-photographic web age, still offers itself as part of a popular, unpredictable social rite. Moreover, they seem to hint at the central role our image plays in the ephemeral colonialism of mass tourism.

Self-portraits | Martin Parr | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Marrickville / Silent Agreements | Emmanuel AngelicasInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR |SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistEmmanuel AngelicasCurated byHercules PapaioannouCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections  Back in 1998, Emmanuel Angelicas and six other members of the Australian photographic community took part in a group exhibition titled Lonely Hemisphere at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the international Photosynkyria festival. At the time, no one would imagine that twenty-five years later, Angelicas would be presenting at the same venue a retrospective exhibition of his work on Marrickville, now spanning five decades. Theo Angelopoulos used to say that we always make the same film – that is, we keep revisiting the same inner question or stimulus. Echoing this notion, Angelicas has been photographing since his childhood years, among other projects, the same suburb in Inner West Sydney, the immigrant neighbourhood he was born and raised in.His works, invariably square and in black &amp; white, oscillate between the world of first-generation immigrants, defined by strict codes and rituals, and the fluid world of second-generation ones; between the traditional and the modern, the first regulated by unwritten rules and the second moving, overtly and covertly, beyond social norms and inhibitions. Photos of close-knit nuclear families alternate here with images that convey an impression of sensuality, violence, breaking with norms and a multifaceted diversity. In his portraits the longing for life coexist with the rigidity of death, the visible with the latent, what people really are with what they might have aspired to be, including sometimes the shifting lines separating the two. The frontality of his photographs, with their almost blunt immediacy, is partly misleading. Underneath this convention of objectivity, one senses a sort of vivid affirmation of life as an unpredictable phenomenon, gentle as well as rough, surprising and also resisting convenient classifications.At a time of globalization’s glorification, Angelicas’ photographs represent a meticulous study of the subtle, inexhaustible nuances of the local, recalling the ingenious and unconventional American musician Frank Zappa, observing that whatever is deeply personal becomes also ecumenical. Clearly, then, Angelicas is not content with artfully documenting the life of a Sydney migrant community or a vaguely contemporary Australian identity. He digs deeper to bring to the surface things often hidden, against a recurrent backdrop of existential loneliness. Marrickville though for Angelicas is a project that also inevitably serves as an indirect glimpse into half a century of his own lifetime, into the human crossroads he boldly traversed through “silent agreements”, gaining access to worlds often private. Thanks to Emmanuel’s generous donation, this half-century of Marrickville life will remain alive through these fifty photographic works that are now part of the permanent collection of MOMus – Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.

Marrickville / Silent Agreements | Emmanuel Angelicas | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

White Gold | Amina KadousInfo<ul><li>Duration: 19/10/2023-11/02/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR |SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art</li></ul>ArtistAmina KadousCurated byAmina Kadous, Iro KatsaridouCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art CollectionsFujifilm Inkjet Photo-Paper: FUJIFILM HELLAS S.A.  Whoever says industrial revolution, means cotton – Eric HobsbawmWhite Gold is a long-term and ongoing project, in which Amina Kadous narrates photographically the story of her family, textile merchants and factory owners since the 1960s, which she weaves together with the national history of Egypt, a country that in the historiography of the industrial revolution has been closely associated with cotton culture since the first decades of the 19th century.The artist begins her narrative from her birthplace of El-Mehalla el Kubra, a city in the Nile Delta where the textile industry still flourishes today, most notably the publicly-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, the country’s largest company and a symbol of Egyptian industrialisation. The artist photographs the ancestral home, the textile factories, cotton plantations, images blended with snapshots from the family album, newspaper clippings of the time, and other memorabilia, all gathered to compose the family chronicle.Kadous draws on personal and family reminiscences, while at the same time she reconstructs, in the background, the history of cotton in Egypt: from the heyday of the nationalized cotton industries of the Nasser era, to the neoliberal policies of the decades that followed and the gradual decline of Egyptian cotton.For the display at the Photobiennale, Kadous extends her photographic research to Alexandria, where she attempts to trace the connection between the history of cotton and the Greek community. She photographs traces of the once thriving community, the abandoned factories, the Cotton Stock Exchange, famous cotton varieties named after Greek botanists, bringing to light memories long forgotten.Through the fragments of these silenced histories, the artist mobilizes micro-history as a tool to attempt an “archaeology” of cotton in Egypt: White Gold essentially emerges as an alternative narrative of a people’s historical experience that contains elements of empowerment against the dominant colonial discourse of the past.

White Gold | Amina Kadous | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

<a>Exhibition “Vanitas. Stories of the hereafter” </a>MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections (TIF-Helexpo premises, Thessaloniki, Greece)30 November 2023 – 03 March 2024Opening: Thursday 30 November 2023 / 20:00 The skull, an archetypal and mystical symbol, pagan and Christian, and the different variations on the theme of vanity and death itself by 56 contemporary artists take center stage in the new exhibition-production of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art “Vanitas. Stories of the hereafter” which will take place in Thessaloniki-Greece between 30 November 2023 and 03 March 2024 (opening: Thursday, 30 November 2023, 20:00). The exhibition raises in artistic and cultural terms the most important existential question related to the creation of meaning and consciousness. More than 60 works of art invite us to reflect upon this most fundamental issue of human existence, that remains particularly popular in modern art. The works presented combine symbolic elements with visual values, their dramatic and macabre theme with humorous touches, cruelty with sensitivity, a dark dramatic atmosphere with a lighter, pop approach and iconography, a critical view with a subversive disposition and references to the history of art with contemporary reality. These visual compositions are open to multiple interpretations and readings, while varying widely in terms of their tone, style and overall aesthetic approach. The skull is found not only in European art, but also in the art of many diverse cultures, where it is used as a visualisation of the cycle of life and death, the transience of worldly pleasures and desires, melancholy and repentance, the primal fear felt before an inescapable fate and impending final judgment. In other instances, the skull visualises power and imposition, violence, terror and horror, but also the delving and wandering into dark and uncharted territories of the realms of the unknown and the metaphysical. Meanwhile, in our contemporary world, it emerges and asserts itself as a powerful visual symbol, typically sanitized and divested of its allegorical implications, moral conceptualisations, religious parameters and emotional power – becoming an attractive, influential and anodyne image that appears everywhere, from the worlds of fashion, decoration and advertising, to pop and youth cultures.The exhibition “Vanitas. Stories of the hereafter” will also present works by Ivan Kliun (from the Costakis Collection of MOMus-Museum of Modern Art), sketches and prints created by Moritz Retzsch, Gustav Klucis and Frans Masereel, as well as a print of Arnold Böcklin's "Isle of the Dead", based on the artist’s third version of the painting, produced in Moscow in the 1880s. Participating artists: <a>Giorgos Alexandridis</a>, Nikita Alexeev, Angelos Antonopoulos, Annita Argyroiliopoulou, Manolis Baboussis, Mania Benissi, Emmanouil Bitsakis, Fani Boudouroglou, Alkis Boutlis, Pantelis Chandris, Dionisis Christofilogiannis, Kostas Christopoulos, Elli Chrysidou, Lydia Dambassina, Charalambos Dermatis, Martha Dimitropoulou, Rania Emmanouilidou, Stefanos Epitropou, Takis Germenis, Nikos Giavropoulos, Marion Inglessi, Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, Dimitris Karlaftopoulos, Aris Katsilakis, Antigoni Kavvatha, Viktor Koen, Despina Konstantinou, Nikos Lagos, Aristeidis Lappas, Ivan Lounguine, Alexandros Maganiotis, Dimitra Marouda, Panos Mattheou, Dimitris Merantzas, Christina Mitrentse, Fanouris Moraitis (Nourako), Katerina Moschou, Eleni Mylonas, Nikos Papadimitriou, Antonis Papadopoulos, Gioula Papadopoulou, Ilias Papailiakis, Natassa Poulantza, Lia Psoma, Ifigeneia Sdoukou, Miltos Skouras, Dimitris Tataris, Nikos Tranos, Giorgos Tserionis, Kostas Tsolis, Vasilis Vasilakakis, John Vassos, Fotis Vazakas (Dreamfacta), Christos Venetis, Babis Venetopoulos, Andreas Voussouras, Ira Waldron Curated byYannis Bolis, Art historian, MOMus Curator  Open guided tours (in greek language) with the admission ticket07, 14, 21 December at 18.0009,16, 23 December at 12:00Book your place by calling (Tuesday-Sunday 12:00-17:00, tel +30 2310240002)

Vanitas. Stories of the hereafter

Man Ray: NudesInfo<ul><li>Duration: 14/10/2023-07/04/2024</li><li>Opening days &amp; hours: TU | WE | FR | SA | SU &gt; 10:00-18:00, TH &gt; 12:00-20:00</li><li>Venue:  MOMus-Museum of Modern Art</li></ul>ArtistMan RayCurated byMaria TsantsanoglouCoproduction: MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis CollectionSupport: 58th Dimitria Festival  Man Ray’s father, Melach Radnitzky, was born in Kiev in 1866 and emigrated to USA in 1886, in order to escape the first wave of antisemitic pogrom that started in 1881 at the city Elisavetgrad (Kropyvnytskyi) of Central Ukraine, a part then of the Russian Empire. His mother Manya Louria was of Jewish-Belarussian descent. His real name was Emmanuel Rudzitsky. Born in Philadelphia, he settled at a young age in New York where he studied painting and quickly expressed his interest in photography. Along with Marcel Duchamp he pursued to organize a dada movement in New York. In 1921 he moved to Paris where he became part of the surrealist circles. He invented techniques that evolve art and photography as a visual art such as the “Rayographs”, photograms created in the dark room without camera and lens. Man Ray died in Paris at 1976. His nude photographs are among his most characteristic series and run the whole spectrum of his art. The exhibition presents 38 prints of his most characteristic nude photographs, some of which are less known and publicized. They are representational nudes that with Man Ray’s extraordinary technique transcend the human flesh and enter a dream dimension, carrying the spectator into the hyperreal universe of their creator. Known female models such as Kiki de Montparnasse, Ady, Natasha, the known artist Meret Oppenheim, the photographer Berenice Abbott, but also male models such as Jean Charles Worth and drag queens such as Barbette signify, through the avant-garde art of Man Ray, the empowering femininity  of the new modern era, in the first decades of the 20th century.

Museum of Modern Art

Man Ray: Nudes | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

The Network of Contemporary Culture Museums of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports introduces itself with its first official project, the digital exhibition under the title "Visualizing humanity", which is now available on the platform <a href="https://res.momus.gr/en/network-of-contemporary-culture-museums">res.momus.gr</a> (CLICK <a href="https://res.momus.gr/en/network-of-contemporary-culture-museums" target="_blank">HERE</a>). The exhibition hosts over 100 works of art by 62 artists from the permanent collections of the organizations participating in the Network -the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum (EPMAS), the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) and the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (MOMus)- and is co-organized and curated by the art historians of all three collaborating institutions.This project attempts to capture not only the global humanitarian and financial crisis that humanity has to face in the Covid-19 era, but also further unprecedented challenges related to growing economic inequalities, uncontrollable culture of fear, arbitrary restrictions on individual human freedoms and job insecurity. These challenges highlight the human rights’ debate as more relevant than ever, 70 years after the signing of the European Declaration of Human Rights.The exhibition "Visualizing humanity" is focusing on the healing power of art that can overcome barriers such as language, culture and politics. Structured in three chapters, each of which includes works by all three participating organizations of the Network, this exhibition attempts to present directly or refer to images of courage and injustice, hope and despair, small or big successes and failures of humans to protect humans.The chapter entitled “Animus Immortalis Est” raises the critical issue of human life’s value and dignity at a time when fundamentalism, fascism, religious extremism and terrorism threaten the humanitarian values ​​on which post-World War II Europe was built.The second chapter, entitled “Feels Like Home”, deals with the concept of “home” both literally and figuratively: globalization has turned millions of people from citizens to immigrants; the right to housing, social security and self-determination is more urgent than ever. What does "home" mean to each of us?Finally, the chapter entitled “Climate Crisis” presents artworks that aim to demonstrate the major issue of climate change and its fatal, irreversible environmental, social and economic effects, already felt worldwide, questioning whether humanity intends and is able to correct its environmental mistakes.ArtistsAlexis Akrithakis, Dimitris Alithinos, Ziant Andar, Dimitris Antonitsis, Thanassis Apartis, Achilleas Apergis, Manolis Baboussis, Chronis Botsoglou, Andrea Bowers, Christina Calbari,  Vlassis Caniaris, Tassos Christakis, Dionysis Christofilogiannis, Daniel (Panagopoulos), Michel François, Alexandros Georgiou, Apostolos Georgiou, Giorgos Gerontidis, Giorgos Gyparakis, Nikolaos Gyzis, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Georgios Iakovidis, Orestis Kanellis, Vassos Kapandais, Vasso Katraki, Deborah Kelly &amp; Tina Fiveash, Dimosthenis Kokkinidis, Lazaros Lameras, George Lappas, Andreas Lolis, Nikephoros Lytras, René Magritte, Memos (Agamemnon) Makris, Andrea Mantegna, Katerina Marouda, Carlos Motta, Lia Nalbantidou, Freya Najade, Solomon Nikritin, Chryssa Nikoleri, George Osodi, Yiannis Pantelidis, Thodoris Papadakis, Ilias Papailiakis, Leda Papaconstantinou, Rena Papaspyrou, Konstantinos Parthenis, Giannis Parmakelis, Liubov Popova, Jannis Psychopedis, Alexandros Psychoulis, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Omed Salehi, Santiago Sierra, Artemis Skeva, Sotiris Sorongas, Athena Tacha, Tassos (Anastasios Alevizos),Nikos Tranos, Costas Tsoklis, Georgios Vakirtzis, Giorgos Zongolopoulos Network of Contemporary Culture MuseumsThe Network of Contemporary Culture Museums was established on the initiative of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Visual Arts, Architecture, Photography and Contemporary Culture Museums; it operates in the form of a collaborative platform with the participation of the supervised (by the Ministry) museum organizations of contemporary culture.The idea was born due to the urgent need of our times -as well as the international museum practice of creating networks of synergies and collaborations- to save resources, find collaborative methods and tools, exchange know-hows and jointly promote the artworks that belong to the public collections of the state.The digital exhibition "Visualizing humanity" is the first official project of the Network for which the National Gallery - Museum of Alexandros Soutsos, the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki altogether. It is a collective digital exhibition in which the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in Greece collaborated, in order to create a digital exhibition of an international character that functions as a major presentation of their permanent collections.

MOMus

Visualizing humanity: the first project by the Network of Contemporary Culture Museums of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports

Exhibition: “Divided Memories: 1940-1950. Between History and Experience”<a href="http://www.dividedmemories.de/">www.dividedmemories.de</a> “Divided Memories: 1940-1950. Between History and Experience”, the exhibition that had deeply moved audiences during its original run (December 2016-April 2017) in Thessaloniki at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, is now digital. The exhibition sheds light on the 1940s through records documenting the personal experiences of artists and intellectuals. Artworks, narratives and testimonies, documents, literary works, poetry, and historical texts dating to that momentous decade transform the pain, despair and hardships, and evoke creative and existential impasses, contradictions and hopes, reshaping official History.It also examines the presence of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki since the 1930s, presents new evidence recording developments in the city during the German occupation and chronicling the deportation of the city’s Jews to Nazi extermination camps, as well as photographs of survivors and interviews with Thessaloniki Jews born after 1941.The new, digital form of the exhibition was organized by the Goethe Institut Thessaloniki, the MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and the NS-Dokumentationszentrum Köln (Documentation Center for National Socialism, City of Cologne). Although consisting of fewer (now digitized) exhibits, artworks and documents compared to the physical exhibition that had taken place in Thessaloniki in 2016, it remains a dense and historically important Greek presentation at the initiative of Thessaloniki and its institutions, presented this time on German soil.The artistic part of the exhibition is organized into two sections: the first section starts with the Greek Epic of 1940 and presents life and death in the time of the German Occupation, with references, among others, to hunger and the black market, to the Resistance in Thessaloniki and across Greece –exemplified by the compulsory art exhibition of 1942 and the funeral of poet Kostis Palamas–, the mass executions and the criminal German retaliations.The exhibits that comprise the second section relate to the transition to national liberation, the participation of artists in the Mountain Government of 1944, the Liberation of Athens and Greece, before moving on to the Dekemvriana (“December Events”) of 1944, the voyage of the “Mataroa” and the honorary donation by French artists and intellectuals to the Greek people as a “tribute” to the Greek Resistance. Finally, they relate to the Civil War, the rejection of national division by artists, and the exiles, imprisonments, torture, and executions. The exhibition concludes with a list of Greeks bestowed with the honorific “Righteous Among the Nations”, and with the post-war proposal to recognize the Greek Resistance as the foundation of Europe and civilization.The part dedicated to the Jewish community is also divided into two sections. The first one focuses on the social and political problems faced by this community, while the second one presents the process by which the occupying forces came to control, expropriate and ultimately displace the Jewish population to Auschwitz.This is a reflective curatorial effort that revisits the issues of the war’s declaration, the Battle of Pindus, the German invasion and occupation, the Resistance in Greek cities and mountains, the massacres of civilians, the Holocaust, National Liberation, and the political crisis that would lead to the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). This is done from the perspective of the artists' experiences, their dilemmas and attitudes as intellectuals facing in solidarity with the rest of the population a major political, social and, ultimately, humanitarian crisis.The exhibition is implemented with the financial support of the ‘Hellenic-German Fund for the Future’ of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany.Τhe accompanying bilingual (Greek-German) catalogue reflects the exhibition that was organized and presented in 2016-2017. [Starting point of the exhibition]The first version of the exhibition, when the original works and documents were presented in Thessaloniki in 2016, had been an initiative of the Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and was co-organized with the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki and Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum.It was guided by the various manifestations of cultural and artistic reality in the time of the German Occupation, the Greek Resistance, the 1944 Liberation and the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). That exhibition had juxtaposed the narratives discovered in the works of intellectuals and artists with the dominant ideological representations, while also highlighting issues of historical importance that remain largely unsettled, such as the transformation of Greek society which entailed the fate of Thessaloniki’s Jewish Community.The contribution of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in the exhibits covered a wide range of works (paintings, sketches, photographs, sculptures, posters, political cartoons, videos, films, albums), documents (private and public archival material, publications, objects, letters, film documentaries) and forms of expression (e.g. literary texts), both as testimonies and forms of direct participation and as narratives that had changed across time. In doing so, the exhibition had attempted to shed some light on the issue of memory, also in relation to European reality. By focusing on the complexity of history and the differentiation of experiences, the exhibition confronted both the emotional dimension of human experiences and the cold typology of ideologies. The exhibition aspired to communicate emotions and experiences that transform the understandings of that specific period and specific society of audience members who might be unfamiliar with the era and its history.The exhibits from the 1940s were a deeply personal human scream, as a reaction not only to the horrors of war and civil strife, but also to the miracles of nature and life. The stance taken by artists and intellectuals, without sparing the conqueror, the torturer and usurper, and without ever succumbing to the vulgarity that was omnipresent throughout that decade, kept open a window of light amidst the darkness, remaining generously accessible to every discourse, in an effort to purge the prevailing hatred, intolerance and death.The Exiles, the imprisonments and executions, the Resistance, did not prevent them from rejecting war and violence or from maintaining open channels of communication despite their many differences. In the period’s periodicals and publications, in its theatre and intellectual gatherings, one sees the boldest, most humane, and most inventive forms of resistance – not only as political action, but mostly as a life stance and as a primary condition of doing art.Part of the research was focused on Thessaloniki, the city’s unique geopolitical position and the cosmopolitanism of its pre-war society, economy and history that was tragically transformed by the Holocaust of its Jewish community.The contribution of the Jewish Museum included unpublished historical records (documents, photographs, testimonies) dating as early as the 1930s. The records related to the demographical and geographical changes that influenced Thessaloniki’s Jewish population; local antisemitism; the electoral and political behaviour of the Jewish population; and to Jewish business and construction activity. New records were also presented that regarded developments in Thessaloniki at the time of the German occupation. They demonstrated the higher mortality rate among Jews at the time of the famine, the control of the Jewish Community by German authorities, local collaborationism, the destruction of the Jewish cemetery, the forced labour imposed on Jews and the ransom paid to buy it off. Other records presented a timeline of the displacement of Thessaloniki’s Jews to Nazi extermination camps, the demarcation of ghettos, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, the looting of Jewish properties, as well as the “erasing” of Jews from local records. They also included photographs of survivors and interviews with Thessaloniki Jews born after 1941. [Exhibition] Exhibition InitiativeGoethe-Institut Thessaloniki CoorganisersMOMus-Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Jüdisches Museum Thessaloniki, NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln Goethe-Institut ThessalonikiProject managersPeter Panes, Beate Köhler CoordinationAris Kalogiros TranslationsRenate Lenger-SidiropoulouDoris WilleGeorgios KefalidisKaiti Stefanaki German texts editing Doris Wille MOMus-Museum of Contemporary ArtCuratorsDenys Zacharopoulos, Thouli Misirloglou Research assistants Eleni BasdekiMiguel Fernández Belmonte Scientific Consultant Loukianos Chasiotis, Assistant Professor Modern &amp; Contemporary History, AUTh Works’ use permits | Contacts Katerina Syroglou Accountants’Dora KaipiAreti KaravassiliMari PournouHaris Theodoridis Creative Direction | Digital exhibition design | Digital material MALVI Exhibition graphic design MALVIPanagiotis MetallinosPantelis Toutounopoulos Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki CuratorsEvangelos Chekimoglou, Lucy Nachmia Assistant curatorsPauline SchwankeIliana ErreraMyriam Sedikario Scientific consultants Anastasia ValavanidouZanet BattinouErika Perahia Artistic curatorshipHyBrazil NS-Dokumentationszentrum of the City of Cologne CoordinationRobert Muschalla Programming and Interface-Design | Databank and Editorial StaffChristine Bolz, Redaktionsbüro Dank <a href="http://www.dividedmemories.de/">www.dividedmemories.de</a> Additional information can be found here:<a href="http://www.goethe.de/thessaloniki">www.goethe.de/thessaloniki</a><a href="http://www.momus.gr/">www.momus.gr</a><cite><a href="http://www.jmth.gr%0D/">www.jmth.gr</a></cite><a href="http://www.nsdok.de/">www.nsdok.de</a>

Divided Memories 1940-1950. Between History and Experience

Discover our 360 exhibition with the title ‘Utopia' from the Costakis collection. Click on the <a href="https://www.360-tube.com/360/momus/utopia/">link</a>

Utopia

Discover our 360 exhibition <a href="https://www.360-tube.com/360/momus/together/?fbclid=IwAR0nhwCXFgU9KjqO5NaUwduV88SBDS3zcFZ_9HUKbJ1lY7IGHSCTRvNZVJs">here</a>, with the title:Together, so Far so Close

Together, so Far so Close

Discover our 360 exhibition <a href="https://www.360-tube.com/360/momus/organic/">here</a> with the title:Organic Art. The Avant-Garde in Petrograd

EXHIBITIONS

VENUE

CATEGORY

VENUE

CATEGORY

Syzygy. Solid Light & Timeless Motion | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

The Spectre of the People | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

The Spectre of the People | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

The Backyard (2018-2023) | Vicky Georgiou | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Shame Less | Lina Geoushy | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Still Neighborhood | Vaggelis Tatsis | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Self-portraits | Martin Parr | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Marrickville / Silent Agreements | Emmanuel Angelicas | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

White Gold | Amina Kadous | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Vanitas. Stories of the hereafter

Man Ray: Nudes | Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023

Visualizing humanity: the first project by the Network of Contemporary Culture Museums of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports

Divided Memories 1940-1950. Between History and Experience

Utopia

Together, so Far so Close

Organic Art. The Avant-Garde in Petrograd