THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (ΕΜΣT) transforms its rooftop into one of the most impressive summer cinemas in Athens, named CineFIX, recalling the name of the former brewery in which it is housed. With panoramic views of the entire city, including the Acropolis, the rooftop of EMΣΤ creates ideal conditions for the screening of audiovisual artworks and alters the viewers’ relationship with artists’ films and their usual context.

EMΣT’s summer cinema will begin on Friday, June 21st at 21.30 with a screening of all of Penny Siopis’ films, currently featured in her retrospective exhibition For Dear Life at the Museum. It is a unique opportunity for viewers to watch Siopis’ multi-layered work in flowing dialogue with the city that is one of their fictional reference points.
 

Penny Siopis combines found 8mm and 16mm home-movie footage with text and sound, to shape stories about people caught up, often traumatically, in larger political and social upheavals. The stories are usually from South African history but, for complex political reasons, they do not figure in the official historiography of the country. Τhe films probe issues of colonialism and apartheid, madness and modernity, migration and globalisation and, more recently, interrogate environmental issues and  human/non-human relations.

All in all, Siopis’ filmic oeuvre is an immersive and gripping meditation on migration, exile, diaspora, political turmoil, and the intermingling of public and private lives, constituting a gripping portrait of a world in flux and providing insight into Siopis’ Greek and South African roots and experiences. From the 1919-1922 Greco Turkish war which marked the fate of millions of Greeks and changed the map of Greece, to colonialism, apartheid, and African liberation, Siopis weaves a series of intricate allusive narratives that paint a highly evocative portrait of the latter half of the 20th century, and a world in radical transformation especially on the African continent.
 

The works that will be screened are as follows:

My Lovely Day, 1997, 21′ 15″

Obscure White Messenger, 2010, 15′ 1″

The Master is Drowning, 2012, 10′ 5″

The New Parthenon, 2016, 15′ 26″

She Breathes Water, 2019, 5′ 12″

Shadow Shame Again, 2021, 6′ 16″
 

Τotal screening time: 75’
Admission: 2 euros at the Museum’s Ticket Desk.

The artist will be present for a Q&A after the screening.

The next screening will take place on Thursday 4^th July.

The screenings will run throughout the summer until the beginning of October and will take place every second Thursday of the month.

For more info visit the museum’s site here