BENAKI MUSEUM-PIREOS 138 PRESENTS : IN A BRIGHT GREEN FIELD

There is a rare power in witnessing an exhibition that doesn’t just speak about a place but speaks from it. In a Bright Green Field, the renewed collaborative effort between the DESTE Foundation, the New Museum NY, and the Benaki Museum, opens a new space for Greek and Cypriot voices, one where material, landscape, and memory intersect with possibility. Featuring twenty-nine emerging artists, this exhibition at the Benaki Pireos 138 explores the urgent themes of ecology, technology, and community with clarity and ambition.

Each work, whether film, sculpture, or performance, feels like a living conversation between Athens, Nicosia, and the broader world. This is not just contemporary art aboutGreece; it is contemporary art as Greece today.

As director of AAATHENS, an initiative committed to fostering Athens’ visibility on a global stage, I found this show particularly moving. There’s something deeply resonant in the way the curators have allowed a Greek sensibility to emerge, not through clichés, but through curiosity, material, and lived complexity.

The scenography carries a poetic rhythm, giving space for ideas to breathe and connect.

It’s the first exhibition in recent memory that manages to be both grounded and visionary, letting Athens express itself not as a backdrop, but as a protagonist in shaping cultural futures. This, truly, is Greece speaking.