SOCIAL ART: The Other Side of History

One of the biggest and most significant topics that concerns contemporary art globally is “Trauma” and how it is assimilated in the artworks of contemporary visual artists, creating the modern visual narrative. Observing the contemporary art scene internationally, we see that artist such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz (representatives of Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980, the last two), through their works and powerful commentaries against Nazism, compel Germany to confront its past∙ during the 1990’s trough her videos the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat critiques the position of women in her country∙ the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum brings to the international stage the trauma of her homeland with artworks such as “Hot Spot”, but also many other artists introduce local issues to the international art scene, which suddenly are magnified and transformed into universal ones, in an effort to transfigure the dark pages of their history and transmute them into contemporary artistic production.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: dreamideamachine Archive

Thus, the idea of the exhibition “The Other Side of History” was born within a Greek framework, with five major historical events as its focal points: The War of Greek Independence (25/3/1821-3/2/1830), the The Asia Minor Catastrophe (2/5/1919- 14/9/1922), the World War II (28/10/1940-12/10/1944), the Dekemvriana events (3/12/44-11/1/1945) & the  Greek Civil War (31/3/1946-10/8/1949)   and finally the Military Dictatorship (21/4/1967- 24/7/1974), events that directly or indirectly affected every Greek citizen and whose influences have changed the human geography of our country. The Greek artists, from time to time, have articulated and engaged with these events, as well as their consequences, such as migration, which is intertwined with our history and culture. Migration has often had positive effects and worked in our favor, while at other times, under its psychological weight and influence, has created multiple issues and problems on social, political, and sociological level.The “Trauma” both collective and personal, stemming from the aforementioned historical events, the spoken, the acknowledged, the worked-through, transformed into poetry, text, folk song, documentaries, novels, contemporary artworks, as well as the unspoken, the raw, the untamed, the lurking, the one that still unsettles us, occupies us, and hovers in the background, takes center stage in an exhibition, where twenty artists from different generations and using various expressive media such as: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installations, and video, coexist in a creative dialogue, aiming to contribute, with their own vocabulary, to a narrative that encompasses all the anxieties of the past and the ambiguous fears of the future. In a Greece that is changing daily, transforms, shifts, its boundaries expand and its human geography evolves, and where within all this, everything and everyone changes, without the comfort of articulating a visual narrative on an international art scene, like the German artists or the Serbian Marina Abramović in “Balkan Baroque,” a work presented at the Venice Biennale in 1997, which won the Golden Lion. In this work, she attempted to cleanse the wounds of history in response to the war in Yugoslavia.

Participating Artists: Io Angeli, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Maria Stamati, Nikos Giampanis, Eleni Zouni, Dimitris Lempesis, Aimilia Balaska, Lamprini Boviatsou, Aggelos Papadimitriou, Artemis Potamianou, Angelos Skourtis, Panagiotis Rappas, Ifigeneia Sdoukou, Nikos Tranos, Annalina Photopoulou, Panos Charalampous, George Harvalias, Maria Genitsariou, Katerina Apostolidou

Photo: Opening of the exhibition “The Other Side of History”, Hydra 2023, Photo: © & Courtesy Dimitris Lempesis

Organizer & Production: Municipal Social Enterprise of Hydra (K.E.D.Y.)

Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, The National Historical Museum, Lazaros Koundouriotis Historical Mansion, Hydra Island, Greece, Duration: 10/6-31/10/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-16:00, www.nhmuseum.gr/