Participating artists: Marilia Fotopoulou, Pavlos Fysakis, Yioula Hadjigeorgioy, Kostas Kapsianis, Yannis Manolis, Campus Novel, Spyros Staveris, Ioannis Theodoropoulos, Marinos Tsagkarakis.
Curated by: Konstantinos Argianas
Last year dozens of art and history exhibitions, on the anniversary of the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, highlighted Greek national pride while reviving a peculiar romantic nationalism. On the other hand, in recent years, several exhibitions have sometimes subverted the official national narrative and at others have explored, in a polemic tone, aspects of the Greek economic, social, and cultural crisis.
The exhibition Greece is ordinary is situated on the edge of these two above-mentioned worlds. More precisely, paraphrasing the title of the essay Culture is ordinary (1958) by the British thinker Raymond Williams, the curatorial and artistic proposal here attempts to constitute an alternative visual ethnography of contemporary modern Greek culture.
With a playful and ironic, but highly critical and reflective mood, and undermining any kind of exoticization of Greek specificity that has dominated (and continues to dominate) the public sphere in recent years, this exhibition proposes an alternative visual narrative of modern Greece that can be summarized as follows: That, despite constant appeals to the contrary, this little peninsula in the Mediterranean is nothing more than an ordinary, commonplace country. Or is it not?