The Fix Brewery on Syngrou Avenue made beer for Athens from 1864 until 1983. After its closure, the building sat empty for nearly two decades while Athens decided what to do with a hulking modernist industrial shell on a major boulevard. In 2000, the Greek state founded EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, and gave it the brewery. Then began one of the longest, most expensive openings in modern Greek cultural history. The museum operated out of the Athens Conservatory while the Fix building was renovated; deadlines slipped year by year through 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2020, before EU subsidies were lost and Greek government funding had to be repeatedly topped up to the tune of 40 million euros, plus another 3 million from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The museum is open now, finally, in the building it was promised, on the corner of Syngrou and Kallirois.
EMST organizes its acquisitions along two axes. A historic axis runs from the second half of the twentieth century, anchored by Greek modernists like Vlassis Caniaris, Nikos Kessanlis, Costas Tsoclis, and Chryssa, the Greek-American light artist whose neon constructions hung in MoMA decades before her work came home. A contemporary axis tracks the present, with works by Ilya Kabakov, Stephen Antonakos, Gary Hill, Nan Goldin, Vadim Zakharov, Gillian Wearing, Ann-Sofi Siden, Nikos Navridis, George Hadjimichalis, and a long list of others. The collection has grown by donation as much as by purchase. In 2022, the Greek collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos gifted EMST 140 contemporary works as part of a larger giveaway that also benefited Tate, the Guggenheim, and MCA Chicago. That gift included pieces by Kutlug Ataman, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, and Annette Messager, transforming the museum's holdings overnight.
EMST built one of the deepest video art collections in southern Europe almost by accident, because video could be acquired more cheaply than painting and because the museum's directors believed time-based media would define the century. The list reads like a syllabus. Bill Viola. Bruce Nauman. Nam June Paik. Mona Hatoum. Vito Acconci. Dan Graham. Robert Wilson. Tony Oursler. Marina Abramovic and Ulay's documentation of their relationship endings. Chris Burden's recordings from the 1970s when he had himself shot in a gallery as art. Lynda Benglis, Sadie Benning, Sophie Calle, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Rosler, Dara Birnbaum. Walid Raad's Atlas Group archive, which fictionalizes the Lebanese civil war. Jayce Salloum's Beirut footage. The room sequencing changes with each curatorial cycle, but the sheer density of major international video work in a Greek state museum was, when EMST began acquiring in the early 2000s, unprecedented for the country.
Anna Kafetsi founded the museum in 2000 and ran it until 2014. She had been the curator of twentieth-century work at the National Gallery and brought a clear vision: a museum that would not just exhibit international contemporary art but participate in it, commissioning new work, hosting residencies, building publications. Katerina Koskina succeeded her from 2014 to 2018, navigating Greece's debt crisis and the worst of the building delays. After interim directorship by Dimitris Antonakakis and Syrago Tsiara from 2019 to 2021, the Belgian-trained Greek curator Katerina Gregos took over in 2021 and has presided over the actual opening. Each director has reshaped the collection around her own readings of the contemporary moment, which is one of the things that makes a museum young and alive: it can still be argued with.
Athens is a city stamped almost violently by antiquity. The Acropolis is visible from most of central Athens, the National Archaeological Museum holds the densest collection of pre-Christian Greek art in the world, the New Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 to tell the story of one hill in marble. EMST is something else: a public commitment that what Greek artists are making now also belongs in a national institution, displayed at scale, with the same gravity afforded to a fifth-century kouros. The library is bilingual, the archives include the papers of artists like Bia Davou and Pandelis Xagoraris donated by their son Zafos, and the educational programs reach school groups across Attica. In a country that the world reflexively associates with the dead, EMST insists on the living.
37.963 N, 23.725 E. The museum sits on Kallirrois Avenue, just south of the Acropolis on the corner with Syngrou Avenue, in the Koukaki/Makrygianni neighborhood of central Athens. Best viewed from 1,500-2,500 ft AGL with the Acropolis 1 km north as the dominant landmark. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center sits 5 km southwest on the coast at Faliro. Athens Eleftherios Venizelos (LGAV) lies 25 km east-northeast; controlled airspace, ATC required. Best aerial photography in winter mornings when haze is minimal.