Publication Title: Theorimata
Editor: Emmanuel Mavrommatis, Bia Papadopoulou, Artemis Potamianou, Faye Tzanetoulakou
Publisher: AICA Hellas, Greek Section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA
Language: English / Greek
Date: 2018
Location: Athens
This text was written to accompany the invitation extended to the artist-run space 3 137 to present its work at EMΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Following our earlier research and collaboration on the project After The Explosion…You Hear The Light, which revisited Greek art of the 1970s and the notion of institutional critique, I saw this as an opportunity to further examine the role of independent art spaces as alternative cultural institutions.
The text considers what happens when such an autonomous structure enters the framework of the museum, and how the artists responded by creating a collective in situ installation composed of altered versions of earlier works. I draw attention to the way that, by removing key elements from these pieces, they managed to transform them into partial traces or fragments that challenge conventional ideas of exhibition, memory, and artistic meaning