until Tuesday December 31 2013

Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
T : 2310 240002 / 2310 281212
Egnatia 154
546 36 Thessaloniki
Greece

www.mmca.org.gr/mmst/el/index.htm

This MMCA exhibition comprises more than 120 emblematic contemporary art works by Greek and foreign artists, who are negotiating the manifold concept of free public space. The Mediterranean is understood here, as spatial paradigm and structure in which the traditional notion of centre is substituted by the function of an “opposite side”, which gives place to communication and exchange.

The exhibition explores systematically and for the first time, the formation of new cognitive and aesthetic categories as a topology of "The Mediterranean Experience”, within contemporary art, starting with Le Nouveau Réalisme and Arte Povera until the present times. After the 2nd World War, public art stopped being exclusively identified with “statue-making” and monumental sculpture, and the unorthodox demand of artists for a unification of art with life came to the fore. Within this frame new forms of art appeared, such as the Environments, the Installations and the Performances, that inaugurated a conscious attempt at the incorporation of the artist’s creation into the real space and targeted the active participation of the audience in the artistic result.

Public art in the Mediterranean region was historically linked to the urban context. In time though, the new social, economic and political circumstances as well as the rapid advancement of technology created a different artistic context. Today, “public space” can be considered as the mental dimension of a monument such as the White Tower of Thessaloniki, of a private space like the house of Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, or even the potential spaces of the Mass Media or internet as well as archives –a locus of memory– of objects that testify to the existence of the Other, next to us or opposite.