EMST PRESENTS SOUTH BY SOUTHEAST RE-ORIENTING THE COLLECTION CURATED BY KATERINA GREGOS

At EMST Athens, South by Southeast reorients the museum’s collection with striking curatorial virtuosity. Built from recent acquisitions, donations, core holdings by artists from the Middle East, works by Greek artists across generations, and key loans, the show rejects a Western-centered canon and places Greece at the centre of a broader Mediterranean, Balkan and Near Eastern conversation.

Galleries function as staged scenes: compositions vibrate, juxtapositions startle, and the rhythm of the rooms forces quick re-orientations, history and identity presented as layered, mobile, and provocatively plural.

More than an acquisition report, this is EMST’s statement of intent: a new collection policy that takes the Southeast as its point of departure and reconfigures the collection, and, more broadly, the museum itself, as a network of overlapping narratives, movements, and cultural exchanges, with Greece at its centre.