Overview - Group show: heart in heart - National Museum of Contemporary Art

	Yael Kanarek, Heart in Heart, 2004 Installation National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens © Photo: Courtesy of bitforms gallery nyc, Photo: John Berens

National Museum of Contemporary Art - EMST

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Curator: Anna Kafetsi

On June 11, The National Museum of Contemporary Art will inaugurate heart in heart, a large scale exhibition in which 23 artists participate with paintings, sculpture, installations, drawings, photographs, videos and web art from EMST collection. Most of the works are presented for the first time. Occupying the entire exhibition space of the Museum in the Athens Conservatory building, the exhibition will last for four months.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the eponymous sculpture by artist Yael Kanarek, a recent acquisition of the collection. Featured artists in the exhibition include: Carl Andre, Kutlug Ataman, Bill Viola, Nan Goldin, Ilya Kabakov, Pedro Cabrita-Reis, Yael Kanarek, Nikos Kessanlis, Kimsooja, Yorgos Lazongas, John Baldessari, Per Barclay, Pantelis Xagoraris, Nina Papaconstantinou, Steve Roden, Lucas Samaras, Shelly Silver, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, George Hadjimichalis, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Rebecca Horn and Chryssa.

The exhibition presupposes a prevalent museological strategy today, which invites us to rethink the collection - a museum's heart - as a constantly shifting field of new relationships among works.

The exhibition attempts to penetrate into secrets and hidden codes, personal diaries and intimate confessions, love letters and stories, fears, desires and emotions through contemporary and earlier works which conceal, converse and conflict with each other, store memories and touches, enabling the establishment of clandestine links among them as well as of a narrative which conceals and at the same time reveals through the images and the words of others.

In the framework of the exhibition heart in heart the tribute soundscapes is organized in the media lounge and the patio of the museum with sound works by some of the most important contemporary representatives of sound art (electronic, environmental, etc) among which are: Erik Belgum, Jürgen Bräuninger, Steven Feld, Bill Fontana, Thomas Gerwin, Bob Gluck, Yael Kanarek, Daniel Lentz, Steve Roden, Mario Verandi, Nils Vigeland, Hildegard Westerkamp's Trevor Wishart.

This exhibition presupposes a prevalent museological strategy today, which invites us to rethink the collection - a museum's heart - as a constantly shifting field of new relationships among works, or, to quote the contemporary thinker Homi Bhabha, in terms of "transitionality" and translation. Through the process of cultural translation, the original intentions of the works move and relocate in new interpretative environments; their history is re-read under new conditions; new narratives, identities and meanings emerge; past and present are reconstructed, one within the other. Through such a dynamic perception and mobility, the collection emerges as an open reality in the intermediate space between past and present, and the translation, the ongoing crossing of the dividing lines, the only feature that allows it to survive.

In this context, the exhibition heart in heart seeks, first of all, to create a narrative space of approach and coexistence for works and artists in the permanent collection - a new, temporary, metaphorical habitat. Through contemporary and earlier works that converse, conflict, store memories and touches, and in any case open up to new readings and identifications, heart in heart enables to establish often clandestine and hidden connections among the works as well as a narrative which conceals and at the same time reveals through the images and the words of others. The viewer is invited to penetrate into the secrets and encrypted messages of the exhibition, using the key provided by his own sensitivity and experience as well as by the works themselves, by what they say and what they pass over in silence. Hidden codes, personal diaries, autobiographical narratives, intimate confessions, love letters and stories, fears, desires and emotions enable us to explore an emotional topography where the private intersects with the public as well as to question their dividing lines nowadays.

Anna Kafetsi

heart in heart Press Release as pdf-File

Participating artists and list of exhibited works as pdf-File

COMMENTS ON THE WORKS as pdf-File

Anna Kafetsi text as pdf-File

USEFUL INFORMATION as pdf-File