Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

Athens as a guest in Kassel

But Athens has also come to Kassel as a guest. Szymczyk has turned over the Fridericianum to the director of EMST, Aikaterini Koskina, and her curators to present a selection of contemporary art from National Museum in Athens – presumably because the Museum in Athens had to be emptied for documenta 14 and the budget for Kassel would not have been sufficient to fill the huge space in the Fridericianum with freshly curated art. According to the “documenta 14: Kassel Map Booklet“, the atlas of all the exhibition venues in Kassel, the exhibitors have made a virtue out of what seems to be a necessity: “The works that have been brought to Kassel are a commentary on the complex reality of Greece today, and simultaneously point to the parallel international journeys of pioneering Greek artists”. Once again visitors to documenta 14 will have to think again and do something that they really do not want – visit a museum of contemporary art. At the same time, behind the portico of the Museum Fridericianum, whose sign has been deformed by the Istanbul artist Banu Cennetoğlu (*1970 Ankara) into the slogan „BEINGSAFEISSCARY“ (2017. Ill. 8), they will be able to view works by over 80 Greek and a number of international artists from the 1960s until the present day, which would otherwise not have possible.[33]

One of the new works in the EMST collection is an acrylic image in the style of a mural, “Fortunately absurdity is lost (but they have hoped for much more)” (2014) by the Athens painter, Stelios Faitakis (*1976 Athens, Ill. 9). It unites elements of revolutionary workers’ art, symbols of Byzantine Christian painting and figures from today’s youth culture to make up an allegory of Greek society. In his video “The End” (Ill. 10) that was shown in 2007 in the Greek pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Nikos Alexiou (1960-2011) also transfers the mosaic on the floor of the monastery at the Mount of Athos into a digitally created ornament featuring different epochs and influences from Greek culture. By contrast the huge object “Hebraic Embrace” (1991-2005) by Lucas Samaras (*1936 Kastoria, Ill. 11) seems like an echo of international Minimal Art in the sixties and seventies. It is one of the artist’s late works when he was working on reflecting installations like the “Mirrored Room” (1966) in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. It invites viewers to reflect on themselves and see themselves in a different light in both senses of the word. The exhibition also show a characteristic late work completed in 1993 by a co-founder of the roughly contemporaneous Arte Povera movement, Jannis Kounellis ((1936-2017, Ill. 12 he lived in Italy at the time). Between these two movements, is an installation made of a rope, neon and iron slabs by Yiannis Bouteas (*1941 Kalamata, Ill. 13). A room-filling installation by Costas Tsoclis (*1930 Athens, Ill. 14) containing a video of a harpooned fish and projections of almost rigid persons symbolises people’s indifference to the suffering creature: it had previously been shown in 1986 at the Venice Biennale. As successors to Kienholz, Segal and Oldenburg, Dimitris Alithinos (*1945 Athens, Ill. 15) and Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011, Ill. 16) are represented in the exhibition with figurative installations. Alithinos shows a scene of torture in 1973 during the student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic; Caniaris has a faceless (or in an alternative sense of the word, headless) Greek guest worker playing hopscotch in front of a collage of a German and Greek national flag.

Amongst the more recent works by international artists in the EMST collection is a video installation dealing with rituals in closed social groups and entitled “I, Soldier” (2005. Ill. 17) by Köken Ergun (*1976 Istanbul), a Turkish filmmaker and installation artist who lives in Berlin. Here he throws an almost voyeuristic look at state-controlled ceremonies during the Turkish national holiday.[34] The room-filling environment, “Acropolis Redux (The Director’s Cut)” (2004. Ill. 18) by the South African concept artist, Kendell Geers (*1968 Johannesburg) links a shrunken archetypical symbol of classical Greece, the pillars of the Parthenon temple, with a classical symbol of apartheid, rolls of barbed wire, which according to Kendell, are still one of South Africa’s “hit exports”. Belgium is represented with a 1975 minimalist work by the photo, video and concept artist, Danny Matthys (*1947 Zottegem, Ill. 19); Poland with a mixed media work by the sculptor, architect and urban planner, Piotr Kowalski (1927-2004, Ill. 20), which was completed in 1970.