EMST Athens Reimagines Its Collection Through a Southeastern Lens

When the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) throws open the doors to three major exhibitions on June 11, 2026, visitors will encounter a institution in the midst of a profound identity shift. Rather than presenting Greece as the outer edge of Western Europe, the museum is staking a claim for the country as a central meeting point between the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Near East.

At the heart of this programme is South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection, a sweeping rehang curated by artistic director Katerina Gregos. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works by 50 artists drawn from over 20 countries, weaving together recent acquisitions, donations, and key pieces from existing holdings. The title riffs on Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, signalling a deliberate pivot away from the Western-centric orientation that has defined much of modern Greek cultural identity since independence.

Structured across four thematic chapters — The Museum of Possibilities, Restless Geographies, Of Oil and Water, and On the Fragility of Institutions — the show tackles displacement, ecology, border politics, energy infrastructures, and cultural hybridity. The roster of artists reads like a map of the very geographies under examination: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Gabriel Orozco, Michael Rakowitz, Bouchra Khalili, Rabih Mroué, and Nedko Solakov sit alongside Greek figures including Jannis Kounellis, Leda Papaconstantinou, Costas Tsoclis, and Kostis Velonis, among many others.

Gregos has spoken about how Greece's historical ties to the East — long suppressed through Westernisation and Cold War alignment — are resurfacing through contemporary political and economic realities. South by Southeast responds by proposing a counter-narrative to insular nationalism, foregrounding instead histories of coexistence, circulation, and entanglement across the region.

Opening the same day is SPOTLIGHT: George Lappas, curated by Daphne Vitali, marking ten years since the death of one of Greece's most significant sculptors. Born in Egypt and shaped by life across Greece, Europe, the United States, India, and the Middle East, Lappas forged a deeply transnational practice that pushed sculpture into installation, photography, architecture, and light. Fragmented bodies, migration, and the tension between East and West recur throughout his work. The exhibition draws from EMST's collection alongside selected loans, reaffirming his enduring relevance to contemporary conversations around displacement and hybridity.

Completing the trio is VOICES, a solo presentation by emerging Greek artist Margarita Athanasiou. Originally premiered at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin following a residency supported by EMST, the three-channel video essay traces channelling practices from nineteenth-century Spiritualism through to the digital age. Combining archival material, found footage, autobiographical narrative, and speculative fiction, Athanasiou examines how technologies reshape ideas of voice, embodiment, and agency — while probing the connections between mysticism, feminism, and communication systems.

Together, the three exhibitions represent an ambitious institutional effort to rethink how museums engage with geography and cultural history from the perspective of Southern Europe. EMST is positioning itself not merely as a repository of contemporary art but as an active space for reconsidering the political and cultural imaginaries shaping Europe and its neighbours. The broader programme, which opened in April with retrospectives dedicated to Niki Kanagini, Jani Christou, and Stathis Logothetis, culminates next year with The Cosmopolitans, a major international group exhibition also curated by Gregos exploring cosmopolitanism and coexistence across the Eastern Mediterranean and former Levant.

South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection and SPOTLIGHT: George Lappas both run from June 11 to November 8, 2026.
VOICES by Margarita Athanasiou opens concurrently on June 11.