Building a Center for New Art in Athens


ATHENS — “Sea, sun and sex with some Greek columns in the background,” art director Poka Yio said. Athens Biennale. He was outlining the Greek government’s tourism campaigns in the 2000s as he took a visitor around an old shopping mall that was one of the venues for the 2021 edition. He said part of his motivation to start the Biennale in 2007 was to change that stereotype: “We wanted to put Athens on the map of contemporary art culture.”

Fifteen years later, Athens is definitely on the radar of the international art crowd, albeit more as a curiosity than a major centre. Despite the pandemic, 40,000 visitors attended the one-month Biennial, which lasted until November. According to the organizers, 10,000 of them came from abroad and are brimming with exhibits around the world, including in the Greek capital. Neon Foundation’s 59 artist group show “Portals” in a recently renovated former tobacco factory.

“If political forces understood how much talk of Athens as a contemporary cultural destination, they could pay more attention because it means money and image,” said Katerina Gregos, director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, known as EMST. . But he added that contemporary art is relatively new to the Greek scene. “We’ve been living in the shadow of the Acropolis for a long time,” he said.

Gregos, born in Greece and founding director of the company, Support Foundation, referring to the cultural dominance of Greece’s classical heritage, which attracted much of the sector’s government funding, before taking on the EMST business last summer.

Credit…Panos Kokkinias

“This is understandable,” he said. “When you have such an incredible cultural heritage to protect, it’s a huge responsibility and we are a small country with limited finances.” “The modern Greek nation-state was shaped around classical ideas, so this consciousness is part of our identity,” he added.

As a result, he said, there is little government support for contemporary visual art, no funding agency such as Arts Councils in the UK, Canada or Australia, or a government-funded organization to support individual artists. Instead, the vacancy is filled by private institutions like Deste. Neon, Onasis and Stavros Niarchos Foundationsgiving grants, hosting artist residencies and holding exhibitions.

“Big foundations have played a huge role in changing attitudes towards contemporary art by creating an ecosystem,” Yio said. “And Athens has another distinguishing element, which is small startups. Many people now come here to open art venues because it is so cheap.” He added that the arrival of the Documenta exhibition, held every five years, in 2017 – the first time the major art world event was staged outside of Germany – changed the rules of the game.

Yet these private sector initiatives, regardless of their success, “do not replace the need for public policy,” said Gregos.

The Greek government seems to agree lately. In July 2019, Nicholas YatromanolakisA Harvard graduate, she was appointed secretary of contemporary culture before being promoted to the minister of culture’s assistant for contemporary culture in early 2021.

Interviewed in his office in the graffiti-filled Excharcheia district in central Athens, 46-year-old Yatromanolakis said contemporary culture has never been seen as a significant contributor to the economy or an important element for Greece’s international image and soft power.

“The epidemic has hit the contemporary industry a lot and I think the prime minister understood the need to invest more on this front,” he said.

One of Yatromanolakis’ first projects was to quickly open EMST. Established in 2000, the museum was a nomadic business for 15 years before a 1957 old brewery in central Athens was chosen as its settlement. But even then, long delays in construction and financingWhat is commonly seen as a symptom of systemic dysfunction meant it was not fully functional until just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

At the same time, the ministry of culture approached Gregos to run the museum. He said he was both excited and skeptical about the idea because the Greek economic crisis that began in 2009 meant profound cuts in all areas of government spending. But he accepted. “Greece’s flagship institution for contemporary art,” he said. “You couldn’t have been offered a more interesting and challenging job.”

About a quarter to a third of the cultural budget of an average of $400 million over the last seven years is allocated to contemporary cultural projects in Greece, while the rest is allocated to classical heritage sites. Yerassimos Yannopoulos, lawyer and board member of EMST, said it’s a relatively small amount when spread across heritage projects, national theaters and museums, and contemporary culture. (For context, France’s cultural budget is about 4 billion dollars.)

“The Prime Minister is very behind the idea of ​​promoting contemporary culture and Nicholas Yatromanolakis is a really bright man, but Greece has been in a terrible state since the debt crisis,” he said. “And you can’t turn things around by sticking to the glorious archaeological heritage,” he added.

Still, Yatromanolakis said, binary thinking can be useless. “I think it’s counterproductive to compare the classic with the contemporary,” he said. Citing British artist Antony Gormley’s 2019 exhibition as an example, he added, “It should be collaborative.” Among the ruins and classical artifacts on the island of Delos.

In a follow-up email, Yatromanolakis sent government funding figures for small-scale contemporary projects, a notable increase from about half a million dollars in 2015 to about 11 million dollars in 2020. Healing and Endurance FacilityIt is split evenly between heritage and contemporary projects, set up to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, which offers another half a billion euros to Greece’s cultural sector.

Afroditi Panagiotakou, cultural director of the Onassis Foundation, said that the reason for the creation of the Onassis Cultural Center was the lack of focus on contemporary culture in Greece. This building, which has two theaters and an exhibition space, opened in 2011. “We were in an economic crisis and the Greek state did not have the means,” he said.

But successfully supporting contemporary art takes more than just money, he added. “Ultimately, the people who change the scene are the artists themselves,” he said. “Our role is to support them, work with them, stand by them.”

Private foundations often work closely with the state, Yatromanolakis said. Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural CenterHome to the National Opera and Ballet of Greece and the Onassis Foundation funding for a new elevator for the Acropolis. “This is not a competition,” he said.

He added that the most ambitious project on his agenda is work and social reform for freelance artists whose needs are not taken into account by current taxation and labor law. “If we can’t fix this, we won’t have the tools to enable cultural professionals to make a living from their jobs,” he said. “There was nothing for contemporary culture, so you have to start from scratch,” Yatromanolakis added. “Despite all the terrible things the pandemic has brought, I think we can use this as a turning point in how we’re going to do it.”

Athens may not be the financial powerhouse, but it was a booming metropolis with an influx of immigrants and artists, “a counterbalance to the London-Paris-Berlin tripod,” said Yio, biennial director. He added that the Greeks never had a “bourgeois sense of art.” “Modernism has been missed here and now we are trying to make big leaps,” he said. “We don’t have many systems and structures that other countries have. But that’s also a very positive thing and part of what makes Athens so seductive. Anything is still possible in this place.”



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