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This week, a Greek art institution, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST), embarked on an avant-garde project, dedicating its space exclusively to female artists. The groundbreaking exhibition titled “What if women ruled the world?” represents a significant shift in the museum’s curatorial approach.
Katerina Gregos, the artistic director of EMST, elucidated the initiative in a statement to AFP, noting, “For 10 months, the entire museum will be in the hands of female artists.”
In a reimagined layout, the museum’s permanent collections now feature the works of 25 female artists. Additionally, 15 temporary exhibits are planned. The roster includes a diverse array of talent, such as Syrian-American contemporary artist Diana Al-Hadid, French visual artist Annette Messager, Iranian-American painter Tala Madani, Greek-Belgian contemporary artist Danai Anesiadou, and English visual artist Cornelia Parker. Previously, women constituted a mere 37 percent of the artists in the museum’s permanent exhibition, a statistic Gregos highlighted to underscore the significance of this transformation.
The artworks selected for the exhibition engage with a spectrum of themes: the stereotypical perceptions of female beauty, the prevalence of violence against women, the pervasiveness of inequality, the impacts of consumerism, and the disproportionate effects of poverty on women. Gregos, who assumed her position in 2021, emphasized the continued underrepresentation of women in various facets of the art world. She articulated the museum’s objective: “We wanted to reverse the trend and see what a museum would look like if, instead of a few token pieces, works by female artists made up the majority.”
In a broader context, the disparity in representation is not unique to Greece. A survey by the Washington-based National Museum of Women in the Arts revealed that among the 18 top museums in the United States, a staggering 87 percent of displayed works were created by male artists. Although specific data for Greece is lacking, Gregos highlighted the particular challenges faced by Greek female artists in gaining recognition in a traditionally male-dominated and internationally peripheral art market.
Gregos also underscored the systematic marginalization of female artists in Greece, a nation with no significant feminist movement in the visual arts. The exhibition seeks to remedy this long-standing inequality. At the exhibition’s outset, a frieze chronologically depicts the evolution of women’s rights in Greece, a country where women’s suffrage was granted only in 1953 and marriage dowries were abolished as recently as 1983. Gregos provocatively reflected on the gendered dynamics of power and conflict: “Most wars and destruction are orchestrated mainly by men. If women were in charge, perhaps there would be less violence, more compromise, and more fairness. It wouldn’t be a perfect world, but it would certainly be different.”
The EMST, housed in a 19th-century brewery complex, has been fully operational since 2021. This initiative not only alters the landscape of Greek contemporary art but also poses a profound question about the potential shifts in societal and cultural paradigms if women’s perspectives were more prominently featured.
With AFP.
