Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp is the first temporary exhibition in the long overdue public unfolding of the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). The project offers a reflective dialogue between the collections of EMST and M HKA, the Flemish Contemporary Art Museum, based in Antwerp. This exhibition commences the program EMST in the World.

The impulse of both Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp and EMST in the World is the necessity of cultural dialogue on a global scale, also within multifaceted Europe. Societies nowadays tend to polarize in 49 % versus 51 % camps, negotiations start from antagonistic positions as a default position, introversion and individualism became entrenched states. There may be loftier aspirations than the capacity of conversation, but its recent fragility often reached critical levels and can be described as an urgent situation.

Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp has been developed bottom up, each time starting from work of a Greek and a Belgian artist, that resonate, searching a notion that arises from this resonance, then adding a third artist from elsewhere in one of the two collections. In this way the exhibition was structured around 22 notions with each time work of three artists in a dialogue around it, the total consisting of more than 70 works from 66 artists.