Image: National Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco
The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens is opening ‘South by Southeast’, a major exhibition that places the museum’s collection in dialogue with works from more than 50 artists across 20 countries. The show runs from 11 June to 8 November 2026 and is presented on the museum’s second floor, with curator Katerina Gregou framing it as a reorientation of EMST’s collecting and exhibition strategy toward the Mediterranean and Southeast Europe.
According to the museum, ‘South by Southeast’ marks a decisive moment in the evolution of the collection. It brings together recent acquisitions and donations, existing works from the museum holdings, and selected loans. The exhibition is tied to a collecting policy introduced in 2021, which looks beyond inherited Western conventions and places Greece within a broader cultural geography that includes the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa. EMST describes this shift as a way of recasting Greece not as a peripheral outpost of Western Europe, but as a central node in a region shaped by long histories of movement, exchange, conflict, multilingualism and layered identities.
The title is an intentional play on Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’. In the museum’s account, the wordplay signals a symbolic redirection away from the long-standing attachment to Anglo-Saxon and Western European models that has shaped Greek modernity since independence. Rather than presenting a single linear narrative, the exhibition proposes a more complex and plural map of connections across the eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Europe, where the histories of empire, border change, displacement, trade and artistic circulation remain closely entangled.
The museum says the exhibition includes more than 100 works by 50 artists from 20-plus countries. Artists listed on the exhibition page include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Diana Al-Hadid, Monira Al Qadiri, Lynda Benglis, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Bouchra Khalili, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Paci, Michael Rakowitz, Akram Zaatari and many others, alongside Greek artists such as Athanasios Argianas, Kostis Velonis, Vangelis Vlahos, Giorgos Ioannou, Giorgos Koutloudis, Panos Kokkinias, Maria Papadimitriou, Leda Papaconstantinou, Rena Papaspyrou, Antonis Pittas and Chryssa. The exhibition also includes work by a number of artists represented in EMST’s collection and selected loans.
EMST links the exhibition to current political and cultural conditions in Greece, referring to the aftermath of economic crisis, increased migration flows and broader shifts in Europe’s political landscape. In this context, the museum presents ‘South by Southeast’ as a counter-narrative to inward-looking nationalism and Western exceptionalism, foregrounding shared histories and interconnected futures across the region. The exhibition is positioned as both a curatorial project and an institutional statement about how the museum understands Greece’s cultural place in relation to the Mediterranean and its neighboring regions.
The exhibition also forms part of a broader cluster of EMST presentations opening on 11 June 2026. On the same date, the museum is presenting ‘Giorgos Lappas. Spotlight’, a project devoted to the artist’s work, and ‘VOICES’ by Margarita Athanasiou. The museum’s June programming also includes ‘Stathis Logothetis: Earth to Earth’, which runs from 2 April to 8 November 2026, but ‘South by Southeast’ remains the museum’s most extensive collection-based exhibition in the current slate, with its opening set for 11 June and public run continuing until 8 November at EMST in Athens.
