"a
strange, wonderful exhibition..."
Holland
Cotter, The New York Times
The
exhibition from the Onassis Cultural Center New York, which moved and charmed
public and critics alike, is coming to Greece! A narrative exhibition which
sheds light on the unseen world of emotions in the personal, social and
political life of antiquity.
129 masterpieces from the world's
greatest museums:
129 tales of emotions
An
Onassis Foundation initiative
staged
in collaboration with the Acropolis Museum
18 JULY - 19 NOVEMBER 2017
Greece's top museum and one of the most
important in the world, the Acropolis Museum joins forces with the Onassis
Foundation, an organization which has been contributing to Culture and
Education for 42 years, in a rare and significant partnership. The end result
is co-staging in Athens the “εmotions” exhibition, which scored such a huge
success at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York.
Exhibits from the world's greatest museums
tell stories of emotions in ancient Greek art through the gaze of the Acropolis
Museum. As the Museum's President, Professor Dimitris Pantermalis, explains:
"This is an unusual archaeological exhibition which focuses on the
portrayal of the 'ethos of the soul' in 129 ancient art-works. Using
surprisingly simple but powerful means, the ancient artists depicted bright
emotions like desire, love, lust and shame, but also dark passions like
madness, fury, revenge and heartbreak".
For his part, the President of the Onassis
Foundation, Dr Antonis Papadimitriou, expressed his joy at seeing the
outstanding exhibition transferred to Greece so successfully: ...
"The
journey through time and space goes on. After the impressive exhibition at the
Onassis Cultural Center in New York, 129 relics from the collections of great
Greek and international museums are on their way to the Acropolis Museum. Their
mission is the same: to help us empathize with the ancient world and the
emotions that ruled it. The exhibition chimes both with the Onassis
Foundation's educational mission and with the current tendency in historical
research, which no longer seeks to extract from the past ready-made teachings
for the present, but strives instead to convey the visitors into the past and
expose them to the ideas that were prevalent in given eras. It is, of course, a
great honour that our partner in this project is the Acropolis Museum, an
institution synonymous with extroversion in Greek culture and the unique use of
exhibits to inform and educate visitors."
The show's curators are: Angelos Chaniotis,
Professor of Ancient History and Classics in the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton and a member of the Board of the Onassis Foundation's affiliate
organization in the US; Nikos Kaltsas, honorary director of the National
Archaeological Museum; and Ioannis Mylonopoulos, assistant professor of Ancient
Greek Art and Archaeology at Columbia University.
The
exhibition will be displayed in a new tailor made setting, developed by the
Acropolis Museum in collaboration with the architect, Eleni Spartsi. The
general oversight of the updated display has been undertaken by the President
of the Acropolis Museum himself, Professor Dimitris Pandermalis.