State Museum of Contemporary Art (Moni Lzariston)

The State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) was founded in 1997 and is housed in the northeast wing of the Moni Lazariston building complex in Stavroupoli, Thessaloniki. The core of the museum’s collections and exhibitions is the George Costakis Collection, which consists of 1277 artworks (paintings, sketches, constructions, china, etc.) of the most significant artists of the Russian Avant-Garde period. The Museum also owns an interesting collection of works by contemporary artists.

In its years of operation, the SMCA has developed extensive exhibition activities through the holding of large exhibitions, collaborations/co-production of exhibitions with modern and contemporary art museums in the country and abroad, through the publication of special catalogues, the organisation of international scientific conferences, the design and running of special websites, the implementation of educational activities.

In addition, the Museum is the organising institution of the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, which is being organised since 2007 in Thessaloniki under the auspices of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, with the collaboration of many cultural institutions.

The State Museum of Contemporary Art is a pluralist, radical and innovative vehicle of culture, which apart from managing the Costakis Collection, establishes events of international prestige, and promotes and enhances the contemporary artistic production of the country by presenting its exhibition initiatives to an audience, exceeding social and other boundaries.

“No artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” as has been argued many times by historians and makers themselves in various words. “His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism” states Arthur Danto: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work among them”.

After the End of Art, p.165

The overarching structure of the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, decided on by us -the three curators- takes into account the buildings which host the exhibitions and also their history. It seemed natural, therefore, to particularly engage with the George Costakis collection, part of the permanent collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art. The collection is the most important collection of Russian Avant-garde art in the world. It represents all the various tendencies and movements within the avant-garde, one of the most radical and fascinating periods in the history of art, which flourished in Russia during the first three decades of the 20th century.

For the first time in the short history of the Biennale we took the initiative to select artists and works that relate indirectly to the collection, both aesthetically and conceptually. We wanted to assemble an exhibition shaped around a -not necessarily literal- dialog between the contemporary artworks and selected pieces from the collection. This would allow visitors to the Biennale to have the chance to see works of art from the collection -once again or for the first time- within a context that might trigger new ideas and thoughts. Our quest was neither to involve artists that have been influenced per se by the Russian Avant-garde movements or aesthetics, nor to commission works that derived directly from the thematic or the formalistic scope of the collection. This could easily have turned into a nostalgic exercise. Instead, we aimed to find subtle, notional affinities that are crucial to works from different periods that are displayed together.

The ideas of hope and failure, humor and sovereignty, among others, seem to set the tone of the exhibition. History, after all, evolves in loops, and artistic expression always reacts to fundamental philosophical and scientific changes or alterations in the political and social structures, by offering an apparatus of departure from the reality toward the “imaginary”. This fact is not exclusively an abstract or magical formula, but also a pictorial and literal blueprint that is drawn directly from life. Maybe this elliptical motion endorses what Kazimir Malevich called the “non-objective reality”: the artists’ ability to uncover invisible aspects of people’s lives, to chart new paths that will explore new worlds and bring about new conditions for everyday life, even though they might be criticized as “utopian”.

Marina Fokidis

Maria Tsantsanoglou

21 Kolokotroni Str, Moni Lazariston

Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00 / Monday closed

Τ: +30 2310 589141 & 143