until Friday January 31 2014
Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
T : +30 2310 830538
6 Manoli Andronikou Street
540 13 Thessaloniki
Greece
The exhibition “Mediterranean palimpsests: three enigmas of decay and incorruption” invites to an open dialogue two cultural derivatives of different eras of the same place. An ancient text, the earliest preserved Greek “book” in Europe, the Derveni papyrus, converses with two contemporary works of art, in the form of installation, by the artist Demetris Xonoglou.
The exhibition’s narrative is being unfolded in two different units, defined by two large in size installations by Demetris Xonoglou, in two halls of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The first raises the issue of the relationship between the political and institutional power with knowledge and cultural and material goods, while the second highlights the issue of personal responsibility towards knowledge and the choices, according to which everyone constructs, through the plethora of cultural information, their personal cultural palimpsest.
The exhibition addresses the perennial question regarding the acquisition and management of knowledge. Knowledge as a collection of cultural information units from different sources of provenance, as a dynamic multi-collective construction, which travels through the material and organic bodies in space and time. Knowledge as a personal case, but also as a collective condition for its existence, its definition and preservation. A question that rises urgently through a new prism, in a crucial for humanity era: “how knowledge is transmitted”, “how it is assimilated”, “who manages knowledge” and finally “how knowledge of the past is transformed into creation in the present.
