South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection / George Lappas / Margarita Athanasiou: VOICES

EMSΤ Athens presents three major new exhibitions opening on June 11, 2026: South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection; SPOTLIGHT: George Lappas; and VOICES, a solo presentation by Margarita Athanasiou. Though distinct in form and generation, the exhibitions are united by questions of geography, memory, displacement, and cultural exchange across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Near East, positioning Greece as a site of intersection between multiple histories, identities, and artistic traditions. 

At the centre of the programme is South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection, a major new collection presentation curated by artistic director Katerina Gregos. Bringing together more than 100 works by 50 artists from over 20 countries, it marks a significant reorientation of the museum’s collection policy and institutional outlook. Drawing on recent acquisitions, donations, and a selection of key works from EMSΤ holdings, the rehang repositions Greece not as the periphery of Western Europe, but as a central node within the intertwined cultural geographies of the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Near East. 

The title playfully references Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, signalling a symbolic and geopolitical shift away from the long-standing Western-centric orientation that shaped much of modern Greek cultural identity following independence. Instead, South by Southeast proposes a more plural and historically entangled perspective, highlighting the deep connections between Greece and neighbouring regions shaped by migration, trade, multilingualism, imperial legacies, conflict, and exchange. 

Structured across four thematic chapters—The Museum of Possibilities, Restless Geographies, Of Oil and Water, and On the Fragility of Institutions—the exhibition explores questions of displacement, ecology, border politics, energy infrastructures, precarity, democracy, and cultural hybridity through works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Diana Al-Hadid, Monira Al Quadiri, Athanasios Argianas, Lynda Benglis, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Chryssa, Bia Davou, Navine G. Dossos, Eirene Efstathiou, Stelios Faitakis, Apostolos Georgiou, Ivan Grubanov, Artan Hajrullahu, Mona Hatoum, Giorgos Ioannou, Emily Jacir, Sven Johne, Konstantin Kakanias, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Bouchra Khalili, Panos Kokkinias, Jannis Kounellis, Ange Leccia, Nate Lowman, Rabih Mroué, Eleni Mylonas, Jennifer Nelson, Gabriel Orozco, George Osodi, Adrian Paci, Leda Papaconstantinou, Maria Papadimitriou, Malvina Panagiotidi, Rena Papaspyrou, Antonis Pittas, Walid Raad, Thomias Radin, Michael Rakowitz, Serban Savu, Nedko Solakov, Sphinxes, Thomas Struth, Lina Theodorou, Costas Tsoclis, Vangjush Vellahu, Kostis Velonis, Vangelis Vlahos, Eirini Vourloumis, and Akram Zaatari.

The exhibition also reflects broader geopolitical and cultural shifts currently reshaping Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. As Gregos notes, Greece’s historical ties to the East—long suppressed through processes of Westernisation and Cold War alignment—are increasingly reasserting themselves through contemporary political, economic, and cultural realities. South by Southeast responds to this moment by proposing a counter-narrative to insular nationalism and Western exceptionalism, exploring instead the region’s histories of coexistence, circulation, and interconnectedness. 

Opening concurrently is SPOTLIGHT: George Lappas, curated by Daphne Vitali, marking the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of one of the most influential Greek artists of his generation. Featuring works from the EMSΤ collection alongside selected loans, the exhibition revisits Lappas’ seminal contribution to sculpture through a practice that expanded the medium into installation, photography, architecture, and light. 

Born in Egypt and shaped by experiences across Greece, Europe, the United States, India, and the Middle East, George Lappas developed a deeply transnational artistic language in which fragmented bodies, migration, transformation, and the tension between East and West became recurring themes. The exhibition foregrounds the enduring relevance of his work within contemporary discussions surrounding displacement, hybridity, memory, and subjectivity. 

EMSΤ also presents VOICES, a solo exhibition by emerging Greek artist Margarita Athanasiou, whose interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of spirituality, technology, mythology, feminism, and digital culture through video, installation, performance, and text. Presented in Athens for the first time following its European premiere at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin—where Athanasiou undertook a residency supported by EMSΤ—VOICES is a three-channel video essay tracing the history of channelling practices from nineteenth-century Spiritualism to the digital age. Combining archival material, found footage, autobiographical narratives, and speculative fiction, the work examines how technologies shape ideas of voice, embodiment, agency, and belief, while reflecting on the relationship between mysticism, feminism, and systems of communication. 

Together, these exhibitions reveal EMSΤ’s ambitious effort to rethink how museums engage with geography, identity, and cultural history from the perspective of Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Rather than treating the region as peripheral to dominant Western narratives, EMST positions it as a complex site of circulation, plurality, contradiction, and artistic innovation. The programme opened in April with Niki Kanagini: An Ode To Things Retrospective; Jani Christou: Enantiodromia; and Stathis Logothetis: Earth To Earth; and culminates next year with The Cosmopolitans, a major international group exhibition curated by Katerina Gregos that explores the layered histories of cosmopolitanism, migration, hybridity, and coexistence across the Eastern Mediterranean and the former Levant. Read collectively, the exhibitions position EMSΤ not only as a museum of contemporary art, but as an active space for reconsidering the cultural, historical and political imaginaries shaping Europe and its neighbouring regions today.

For further information, please contact:
International press: Amanda Kelly and Vanessa Saraceno, Pickles PR
National Press: Marigo Siakka and Maria Tsolaki, EMST

ΕΜSΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens is funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.