Mέλη ΚΠΙΣΝ | Ξενάγηση στην έκθεση Untitled (Pride and Contempt) της Barbara Kruger

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A ninety-metre wall of text runs along the National Library of Greece — black, white and red, in Greek, impossible to walk past without reading. This members' guided tour of Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Pride and Contempt) takes you through it on foot.

Kruger has spent more than five decades setting blunt declarative text against image to interrogate power, money and who gets to speak. For this exhibition she has made thirteen new site-specific works for the open spaces of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center — her first solo exhibition in Greece, and the first time her statements appear in Greek, language about truth, authority and critical thinking aimed squarely at the present. The works line the Canal and the Esplanade, so Untitled (Pride and Contempt) is not a room you enter but a route you walk, folded into the everyday traffic of joggers, families and commuters crossing the grounds.

The guided walk supplies the framing the wall text alone withholds: why these phrases, in this public place, in this language, now.

If you want a hushed, climate-controlled gallery, this is the opposite — it is outdoors, in June, and you read at monumental scale under open sky. But if you want to watch one of the sharpest text artists alive speak directly to Greek passers-by, walk it with a guide. Open to SNFCC members; the exhibition itself runs through 1 November, but this tour is a single afternoon.

The wall comes down in November; the argument Kruger makes on it is built to outlast the paint.