ATHENS TOP NEWS
Athens, 25-09-2016
WEEKEND REPORT
WEEKEND REPORT
Athens, 25-09-2016
TRANSPORTATION
TRANSPORTATION
Thessaloniki, 24-09-2016
WEEKEND REPORT
WEEKEND REPORT
Athens, 24-09-2016
EVENT
EVENT
Athens, 23-09-2016
WEEKEND REPORT
WEEKEND REPORT
ATHENS EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
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6th ATHENS OPEN AIR FILM FESTIVAL (30-09-2016 8:00 pm) The Athens Open Air Film Festival takes place for the 6th year in a row with more than 20 hand-picked projections in the capital¢s most prominent neighborhoods, converting Athens into a luminous film oasis.
The program of this year¢s festival includes legendary musicals, spaghetti westerns, acclaimed dramas, award winning masterpieces, science fiction and horror films, Greek films and unknown cinema masterworks accompanied by live music!
From June to September, special places in Athens such as archaeological sites, parks, squares, a few of the most beautiful Museums in town and one of the most impressive archaeological sites, namely the Temple of Olympian Zeus, are turned into “open air cinemas” with free entrance for the audience.
From the Festival¢s selected locations, there could not be missing some of the best open-air cinemas of Athens, while the collaboration that the Festival launched last year with the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, is consolidated this year with the screening of three films in the 260 Peiraios garden. The Athens Open Air Film Festival collaborates this year with the British Council and the British Embassy and participates in the world celebration for the 400-year anniversary since the death of the great British playwright. The tribute under the title “Shakespeare in the City” will “bring to life” Shakespeare¢s plays through six films that drew inspiration from the theatrical tradition of the British bard.
Places: Various venues and locations in Athens.
For more info: www.cinemag.gr/aoaff.
ATHENS & EPIDAURUS FESTIVAL 2016 (30-09-2016 9:00 pm) The Athens & Epidaurus Festival’s program, as well as the presale date, were announced on May 16th, 2016.
For more information: www.greekfestival.gr.
DODONA ORACLE EXHIBITION AT THE ACROPOLIS MUSEUM (10-01-2017 8:00 pm) The Acropolis Museum has currently debuted an exhibition regarding the Oracle of Dodona that will last through January 10th, 2017.
The exhibition aims at providing wider knowledge about the oldest Greek oracle, tracing the way it functioned, its role and importance in the ancient world, and at the same time showcasing the human need to predict the future.
The exhibit¢s narration begins with Dodona during the late Bronze Age. Clay and bronze artifacts illuminate the identity of the first inhabitants, the primitive cult of Mother Earth and the establishment of Zeus¢ cult.
The main interest in the exhibition lies in Zeus and his predominant presence in the sanctuary. The central theme is the prophetic oak tree that with the rustle of its leaves would answer the agonizing questions of people of what lies ahead. Prophecies were also given by priests who de-coded the sounds of bronze cauldrons and the cooing of pigeons.
The excavations conducted in Dodona have brought to light some thousands of questions carved in metal sheets of lead, posed by visitors in the sanctuary. Some of these questions concern matters of trade, debts, assets, court decisions, health, fertility, upcoming marriage, dowries and widowhood and are presented in a separate unit of the exhibition. From the dedications in the sanctuary parts of bronze statues, parts of armory, swords and part of their suspensions, dedications from those who benefited from the gods or invoked their help are also displayed.
Moreover, characteristic coins highlight the political aspect of the Oracle and its connection with Pyrros, the King of Epirus. Lastly, the relationship between the city of Athens and Dodona is presented by two exhibits from the Acropolis Museum.
The exhibition is conducted with the collaboration of the Acropolis Museum and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Ioannina. The exhibits are on a loan from the Ioannina Museum and the National Archaeological Museum, Carapanos Collection.
Venue: The Acropolis Museum, Makriyianni Street 2-4th, Tel. +30 210 - 9241043.
DOCUMENTA 14 (31-08-2017 8:00 pm) On October 6th, 2014, a symposium titled "documenta 14, Kassel: Learning from Athens" was held at Kunsthochschule (Academy of Fine Arts) in Kassel, Germany, at the invitation of the academy. Organized by the team of documenta 14, and led by Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk, the symposium presented key members of the next documenta organization, as well as discussed essential ideas and thematic concerns of the exhibition project as a whole, scheduled to take place in 2017.
The city of Kassel has been the host of documenta since its inception in 1955. Likewise, over the past thirteen editions, documenta has served as host to many artists and cultural practitioners from around the globe. But, ultimately, this position of host-with all the privileges involved-appears to be no longer tenable and begs to be questioned, if only temporarily. To this end, Szymczyk introduced documenta 14's planned twofold structure: In 2017, documenta 14 will establish a second site-Athens-bringing Kassel and the Greek capital onto equal footing as the two locations of the exhibition. Thus documenta's undisputed position as host will be abandoned for another role, that of guest, in Athens.
Szymczyk noted that the main lines of thinking behind this move are manifold. They have to do with the current social and political situation both in Europe and globally, which motivates artistic action. Further, they indicate the need to embody in documenta 14 the palpable tension between the North and the South as it is reflected, articulated, and interpreted in contemporary cultural production. The challenge involves avoiding the traps of binary logic, while resonating with changing realities. To that end, instead of the singular spectacle, with its clearly designated location and temporal order, typical for great international exhibitions, documenta 14 will comprise two iterations set in dynamic balance in space and time.
The distance between Kassel and Athens will fundamentally alter the visitors' experience of documenta 14. A feeling of loss and longing brought about by geographic and mental displacement created by two distant iterations of the exhibition might change the visitors' perception of the show, working against the idea of rootedness and countering the widespread, normative assumption that such an exhibition must sustain the unity of action, place, and time. Challenging this state of things, documenta 14 will attempt to encompass a multitude of voices in, between, and beyond the two cities where it is situated, reaching beyond the European context from the vantage point of the Mediterranean metropolis, where Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia face each other. The diverse and diverging locations and socioeconomic circumstances of Kassel and Athens will come to bear on the very process of creation of the exhibitions, while inspiring and determining its individual works of art. For documenta 14, the participating artists will be invited to think and produce within the dynamic between these two cities.
The working schedule envisages documenta 14 to open in Athens in April 2017; it will then be inaugurated two months later in Kassel, on June 10. This will ensure that there will be a month of overlap, with two parts of the exhibition running in parallel. Moreover, though each iteration of the exhibition will be developed as an autonomous project, they will inform each other's content while not repeating the form, with several distinctive venues in Athens, as in Kassel. Documenta 14 intends to learn from the city of Athens and its citizens, instead of parachuting a prepackaged event from Kassel into one or several picturesque venues. Rather than being merely a sum of two destinations, documenta 14 will unfold in a three-year-long process of learning and producing knowledge, while also engaging in the process of instituting spaces for public life in both locations. In this process, both cities' communities will become involved, contributing to the project. Already, over the course of 2013 and 2014, several instructive meetings have taken place in Athens with a number of the city's cultural producers who represented the diversity and contradictions of the Greek context today, beginning an ongoing discussion of collaboration with certain institutions there. In parallel, similar discussions have been led in Kassel.
Greece in 2014 is not an isolated case; it is emblematic of the fast-changing global situation, and it embodies the economic, political, social, and cultural dilemmas that Europe must face today-much as Kassel in 1955 embodied the need to deal with the trauma of destruction brought about by the Nazi regime and simultaneously served as a strategic location at the onset of the Cold War. If Athens exemplifies the current issues that extend beyond the proverbial notion of the "Greek Crisis," these problems-which are as much European and global as they are Greek-remain unresolved. Yet they present us with an opportunity to open up a space of imagination, thinking, and action, instead of following the disempowering neoliberal setup that offers itself as (non)action implied in the (non)choice of austerity. While the specific timing and choice of locale of Kassel in 1955 were precisely the factors that allowed documenta to develop into a now half-century-old venture, those sociopolitical parameters that made documenta urgent are no longer in play. This sense of urgency, then, must be found elsewhere.
Szymczyk and his team concluded by noting that documenta 14-in its temporary displacement and doubling of perspectives-would enable those artistic strategies that reach toward the reality of a contemporary world, one understood as a place for a multitude made up of individuals, and not as a territory defined by hegemonic relationships that make it a place of suffering and misery for many. It is this world that will be addressed in the exhibition, the world larger than Germany or Greece.
Author: http://www-en.elculture.gr.
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