IYP X National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
An Ode to Things. Niki Kanagini. A Retrospective
Curated by: Tina Pandi
An Ode to Things. Niki Kanagini. Retrospective revisits the work of one of the most significant Greek female artists of the post-war era, Niki Kanagini (1933–2008), in order to offer a comprehensive re-examination of her artistic practice and pay tribute to one of the most singular female voices of the latter part of the twentieth century in Greece.
The exhibition brings together a diverse body of work, spanning four decades: from her large-scale tapestries first shown at the 5th Biennale Internationale de Tapisserie in Lausanne (1971) and her first solo exhibition at the Iolas-Zoumboulakis Gallery (1976), to her immersive, participatory installations. The exhibition seeks to reintroduce the critical dimensions of the artist’s work, such as her engagement with the language of modernism and the relationship between the applied and fine arts, her systematic exploration of writing as a visual medium, and her investigation of gender identity and experience, as well as of the participatory and sociological implications of art.
The exhibition takes its title – An Ode to Things – from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s (1904–1973) eponymous poem, which was found among the artist’s personal papers and was likely a source of inspiration for her. The poem’s closing lines – many things conspired to tell me the whole story. Not only did they touch me, or my hand touched them: they were so close that they were a part of my being (trans. Ken Krabbenhoft) – speak to Kanagini’s almost obsessive inquiry into the microcosms of mundanity and the myriad things populating them, serving as repositories of memory, time, and identity. This exhibition at ΕΜΣΤ ventures beyond a mere exploration of the formal transformations of objects in Kanagini’s work and instead focuses on key areas of her artistic practice: the performative character of her work, its multisensory quality, and the manifold ways in which it related to diverse contexts – gendered, (inter)cultural, and social. The exhibition has been designed as a holistic experience addressed to “potential viewers and readers,” as the artist herself would describe them in some of her Manuscripts.
An Ode to Things also presents, for the first time, seminal works from a promised gift of the artist’s family to ΕΜΣΤ.
Kanagini Niki (1933-2008)
Silence is not golden, 1974
acrylic and mixed media on paper
100 x 70 cm