Exhibitions
Sea Garden as landscapes in tension between the body, ecology and the limit
Sea Garden is the winning group exhibition of the second Open Call of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT), an initiative launched in 2023 to support curatorial research and give visibility to new voices in contemporary curating in Greece. Curated by Danai Giannoglou and Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, the temporary exhibition opened on Saturday, November 8, in Project Room 2 and will be on view until February 8, 2026, as part of the museum's autumn 2025 temporary exhibition program.
The title alludes to HD's poetry collection Sea Garden (1916) and articulates a series of works that explore the landscape as a territory traversed by human interventions, ecological tensions, and political projections. Through images and natural materials, the exhibition presents humid and arid landscapes—reflected, eroded, or inhabited by bodies—that reveal both the promise of progress and its toxic consequences.
The exhibition begins with the work of Athena Tacha (b. 1936), held in the EMΣT Collection, and her conception of landscape as an open sculptural form linked to both the human and non-human body. Her works, created with elements such as pebbles, petals, and shells, engage in dialogue with diverse artistic practices: Margaret Raspé's ecological sensibility, Catriona Gallagher's research on Sparoza's dry garden, Dora Economou's organic mutations, Claude Cahun's performative resistance to gender norms, and Ana Mendieta's ephemeral bodily traces.
Sea Garden explores the contradictory yet structural coexistence of dryness and humidity: the excess of water that threatens flooding and the scarcity that foreshadows relentless heat. The exhibition combines historical works and recent productions to highlight that transitional point where land meets sea. The idea of a “marine garden” invites us to imagine the edge as stage, symbol, and system, and to consider thresholds and borders—environmental, labor-related, gender-based, and migratory—as spaces in constant transformation.
