IN A SURVEY undergone by artnet.com in 2022, it was found that “Only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14.9 percent of exhibitions, at 31 U.S. museums between 2008 and 2020, were of work by female-identifying artists”. However, the under-representation of female artists in museums is a global problem, which has led many art directors to rethink, and to rehang. For example, in 2023, Tate Britain decided to redirect its focus on women artists, by presenting a rehang of its galleries via a new project aimed to include the works of more women artists – fifty percent of the works in fact. But here in Athens, EMST director Katerina Gregos has gone a few steps further, by organizing the project “What if Women Ruled the World?”, which comprises a series of exhibitions by female artists, plus a focus on female artists from the museum’s collection, plus from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Donation that was bequeathed to the museum.

So what’s in store at EMST these days? From December 2023 to autumn 2024, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) is presenting – in three parts – a cycle of exhibitions exclusively dedicated to the artistic work of women or artists who identify themselves as female, under the broader umbrella title “What if women ruled the world?” inspired by the work of Yael Bartana, (2017).

This new project will see to the gradual, entire occupation of the museum from female artistic creation, with a new presentation of the collection on an entire floor of the museum, plus the first presentation of selected works from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection Donation, and a series of fourteen solo exhibitions by Greek women and international artists of different generations.

A woman’s world?

This exhibition program revolves around an oft-repeated hypothetical question: what would happen if the governance of the world had feminine characteristics, if it was based on empathy, care, understanding rather than competition, violence, and the constant quest for power; Would our world be better? Would this mean the end of political and armed conflicts and stalemates? Would human rights be better off? Would economic policies be more socially just and sensitive to the environment and to our non-human companions?

Would there be more discussions and compromises? Or would we be witnessing the same human flaws, corruption and abuses of power that those in critical decision-making positions engage in? At a time when we see the strengthening of male-dominated authoritarian regimes in various parts of the world, leading to social and political polarization and increased geopolitical tensions, it seems like it is the right time to reflect on these questions that come up more and more frequently (in the public debate).

This project aims to radically reconsider what a museum would be like if most of the works in its collection were created by female artists. As Gregos points out: “Especially in a country like Greece, where there has never been an organized feminist movement in the visual arts and women artists have been systematically marginalized for decades, this initiative is an important statement and, at the same time, a restoration of a great inequality. At a time when we are witnessing a resurgence of attacks on women’s rights (such as the overturning of the US Supreme Court’s landmark Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973) the issue of women’s empowerment and gender equality, in all sectors, is more urgent than ever before.”

The first part of the project “What if Women Ruled the World?” kicked off on December 14 with a performance by 2021 Prix de Rome winner Alexis Blake (Netherlands/USA), which marked the artist’s first presentation in Greece. Blake’s multi-disciplinary practice coalesces visual art, performance and dance. The solo exhibitions of Leda Papaconstantinou, Chryssa Romanos and Danai Anesiadou were also inaugurated, as was the exhibition “Women, Together” (curated by Katerina Gregos and Eleni Koukou), which presented a selection of 49 works by 25 female artists from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection and from the museum’s collection. Also presented within the framework of the exhibition “Women, together”, the group ‘This is not a feminist project’ has compiled and presented a chronology of the course of the feminist movement in Greece from 1979 until today.

Leda Papaconstantinou

The first ever major retrospective exhibition for Leda Papaconstantinou (b. 1945), one of the most important artists in the history of contemporary art in Greece, is entitled “Time in my Hands”. For over almost five decades, Papaconstantinou developed a diverse body of work that took on a range of forms – performance, sculpture, video, site-specific installations, painting, etc., in order to explore issues of gender, sexuality, collective and personal memory, history, politics and ecology, centred always on the body. As a trailblazing feminist artist and one of the most important artists of her generation, Papaconstantinou’s work is a seminal reference point for the Greek art scene and serves as an inspiration for subsequent generations of artists.

The exhibition, curated by Tina Pandi, is an appraisal of Papaconstantinou’s entire oeuvre, bringing together for the first time a large number of installations, paintings, sculptures, audio-visual and audio works, as well as rare and unpublished photographic and textual archival documents and traces of her performances, highlighting the importance and timely character of her practice, in its own time but also today.

Chryssa Romanos

The solo exhibition “The Search for Happiness for as Many as Possible”, comprising the works of Chryssa Romanos (1931–2006), and curated by Eleni Koukou and Dimitris Tsoumplekas, presents the works of one of the most significant Greek artists to emerge in the 1960s. She belongs to that group of Greek expat intellectuals who lived and worked in the artistic centres of the West and, for the very first time in the history of Greek art, actively participated in formulating international artistic movements of their era. The twenty years that Romanos spent in France (1961–1981) proved decisive for moulding her artistic identity. She was part of the circle of the influential critic Pierre Restany and the Nouveau Realistes and was one of the important female figures in the Paris art scene of the 1960s.

Open-ended narrative structures, mechanical reproduction, randomness, transparency, and the notion of play characterise her body of work. From her very first works, the motif of the labyrinth, the critique of consumerism, the political interest in social inequalities and injustice, the democratisation of art, the osmosis of art and everyday life, and the interest in travel recur as main thematic axes, and evolve as the artist herself matures and her social and political environment transforms.

The exhibition includes works from almost all periods of her oeuvre, highlighting their correlation and relationship, and concludes with a video work based on the rich photographic archive of Chryssa Romanos and her husband, the equally influential artist and Athens School of Fine Arts professor Nikos Kessanlis, emphasising the indissoluble and reciprocal relationship between art and life.

Danai Anesiadou

The first solo exhibition in Greece of the Belgo-Greek artist Danai Anesiadou, is entitled “D Posessions”. Born in Germany to parents of Greek origin and based in Brussels since her early years, Anesiadou has developed a range of metaphysical and personal concerns into a seductive and mercurial body of work over the last 15 years, which references cinema, occult sciences, Greek antiquity, surrealism, and contemporary affairs.

“D Possessions” invites visitors into an allegorical scenography consisting of sculptures, collages, and her own furniture, among others, referencing the rise of political, social and spiritual crises. In an attempt to permanently get rid of all her personal belongings, she cast them into epoxy resin. She added metal shavings and quartz crystals to the mix and turned them into orgonites – energy transmutation devices that some consider to attract Orgone, which extracts negative energy and transmutes it into positive energy. The exhibition is a co-production with WIELS, Brussels, and curated by Ioli Tzanetaki.

• For more a more indepth look at these exhibitions, and the other exhibitions also running at EMST, visit the museum’s site. http://www.emst.gr

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