Building a Hub for New Art in Athens ‘Under the Shadow of the Acropolis’

ATHENS — “Sea, sunshine and intercourse, with some Greek columns in the history,” mentioned Poka Yio, the artistic director of the Athens Biennale. He was summing up the Greek government’s tourism campaigns in the 2000s as he led a visitor about a rambling former department shop that was a single of the internet sites of the 2021 version. Portion of the inspiration for setting up the biennale in 2007, he mentioned, was to alter that stereotype: “We preferred to place Athens on the modern artwork cultural map.”

Fifteen many years later on, Athens is surely on the worldwide artwork group radar, nevertheless more as a curiosity than a significant hub. Even with the pandemic, 40,000 website visitors attended the monthlong Biennale, which ran via November. According to the organizers, 10,000 of all those came from abroad, and the Greek cash also teemed with world-class exhibitions, like the Neon Foundation’s 59-artist group exhibit “Portals” in a freshly renovated previous tobacco manufacturing facility.

“If the political powers understood how a lot Athens is currently being talked about as a present-day cultural place, they could shell out more attention, for the reason that it suggests revenue and image,” explained Katerina Gregos, the director of the Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork, recognised as EMST. But contemporary artwork, she added, is comparatively new to the Greek scene. “We have been living beneath the shadow of the Acropolis for a extensive time” she reported.

Gregos, who was born in Greece and was the founding director of the Deste Basis, prior to afterwards using up the EMST task past summer months, was referring to the cultural dominance of Greece’s classical heritage, which attracts most of the sector’s point out funding.

“It’s easy to understand,” she explained. “When you have these types of an incredible cultural heritage to safeguard, it’s an huge duty, and we are a little region with finite funds.” She added, “The contemporary Greek country condition was fashioned in accordance to classical ideas, so this consciousness is section of our identity.”

As a end result, she stated, there has been really minimal authorities assist for modern visual art, with no funding physique like the Arts Councils in England, Canada or Australia, or state-funded group to guidance person artists. As an alternative, the hole is loaded by personal establishments like the Deste, Neon, Onassis and Stavros Niarchos Foundations, which hand out grants, host artist residencies and set on exhibitions.

“The huge foundations have performed a massive function in transforming attitudes to modern day artwork by developing an ecosystem,” Yio mentioned. “And Athens has yet another exclusive element, which is little initiatives. So many folks come below now to open up artwork spaces mainly because it’s so affordable.” The 2017 arrival of the just about every-five-12 months Documenta exhibition — the 1st time the key artwork globe party experienced been staged outdoors Germany — was a recreation changer, he additional.

Yet these private sector initiatives, whatsoever their results, do not “substitute the have to have for a public coverage,” Gregos mentioned.

The Greek govt appears recently to concur. In July 2019, Nicholas Yatromanolakis, a Harvard graduate, was appointed secretary for modern lifestyle, just before staying promoted at the start out of 2021 to the tradition minister’s deputy, liable for modern tradition.

Interviewed in his business in the graffiti-strewn central Athens district of Excharcheia, the 46-year-previous Yatromanolakis mentioned that modern lifestyle hadn’t formerly been observed as a major contributor to the economy, or essential to Greece’s international impression and tender electricity.

“The pandemic hit the present-day sector pretty difficult, and I believe the primary minister acknowledged the want to make investments a lot more on that entrance,” he claimed.

A single of Yatromanolakis’s initial tasks was to get EMST open swiftly. The museum, which was established in 2000, was a nomadic operation for 15 a long time just before a 1957 former brewery in central Athens was preferred as its website. But even then, lengthy delays in building and financing, commonly viewed as symptomatic of systemic dysfunction, intended it was not completely operational until just right before the coronavirus pandemic broke out in early 2020.

All over the exact time, Gregos was approached by the tradition ministry to run the museum. She was the two psyched and skeptical about the strategy, she claimed, for the reason that the Greek economic crisis that began in 2009 experienced meant deep cuts in all regions of federal government investing. But she accepted. “It is Greece’s flagship establishment for modern art,” she mentioned. “You couldn’t be provided a extra exciting and challenging occupation.”

Modern cultural initiatives in Greece are presently allocated all around a quarter to a 3rd of the culture spending plan — which has averaged all-around $400 million for the past 7 several years — when the relaxation is allotted to the classical heritage web pages. It is a somewhat modest volume when unfold between heritage assignments, the nationwide theaters and museums, and modern lifestyle, claimed Yerassimos Yannopoulos, a attorney and board member of EMST. (For context, France’s culture budget is all-around $4 billion.)

“The prime minister is incredibly a great deal guiding this concept of promoting modern day lifestyle, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis is a definitely brilliant person, but Greece has been in a dire predicament since the credit card debt crisis,” he mentioned. He additional, “And you can’t change issues about by sticking to the wonderful archaeological legacy.”

Nevertheless Yatromanolakis stated binary pondering can be unhelpful. “I think pitting the classical against the present-day is unproductive,” he mentioned. “It should be collaborative,” he extra, citing as an case in point a 2019 exhibition of performs by the British artist Antony Gormley amid ruins and classical artifacts on Delos island.

In a observe-up email, Yatromanolakis sent the figures for condition funding for small-scale up to date projects, displaying a notable augmentation, from around 50 percent a million bucks in 2015 to all over $11 million in 2020. He also highlighted additional European Union funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility, set up to mitigate the impression of the pandemic, which delivers yet another half a billion euros to Greece’s society sector, similarly divided concerning heritage and modern day initiatives.

Afroditi Panagiotakou, the director of culture at the Onassis Foundation, stated that the deficiency of focus on modern society in Greece was the rationale for creating the Onassis Cultural Middle. That building, with its two theaters and exhibition spaces, opened in 2011. “We ended up in an financial disaster and the Greek condition merely did not have the indicates,” she said.

But productively supporting modern day art needs far more than just revenue, she extra. “Ultimately the people who alter the scene are the artists by themselves,” she stated. “Our position is to support them, operate with them, be there for them.”

Yatromanolakis claimed that the personal foundations routinely worked closely with the point out, citing the Stavros Niarchos Basis Cultural Centre, which houses the Greek Countrywide Opera and Ballet, and the Onassis Foundation’s funding for a new elevator for the Acropolis. “It’s not a competitiveness,” he said.

He added that the most ambitious venture on his agenda was labor and social reform for freelance artists, whose desires are not taken into account by existing taxation and work legislation. “If we never repair that, we will not have the instruments to enable lifestyle industry experts to stay from their do the job,” he reported. “There was nothing in spot for present-day culture, so you have to get started from scratch,” Yatromanolakis additional. “Despite all the awful factors the pandemic introduced, I believe we can use this as a turning stage on how we do items.”

Athens could not have fiscal ability, reported Yio, the Biennale director, but with its inflow of migrants and artists, it was a rising metropolis, “a counterbalance to the London-Paris-Berlin tripod.” Greeks, he additional, have in no way experienced “a bourgeois understanding” of artwork. “Modernism was missed below, and we are now hoping to make enormous leaps,” he reported. “We don’t have several of the techniques and constructions that other nations have. But this is a quite beneficial matter, much too, and aspect of what would make Athens so seductive. Almost everything is even now attainable in this area.”