The title of the exhibition refers to the way cartographers during the Middle Ages used to represent unknown territories by using dragons, monsters, and fictional creatures, for instance in lands or waters considered dangerous or unfamiliar. These creatures adorn maps on spaces that are usually left blank or in spots where the geography of the world was still unknown.

The American artist Rick Lowe became known in Greece from Victoria Square Project, a “social sculpture” installed in 2016 in Victoria Square, Athens, in collaboration with Maria Papadimitirou, as part of the international institution documenta 14. During the past seven years VSP has been a unique example of socially engaged contemporary art, which contributes to sustaining and developing synergies between artists, refugees, immigrants and local communities.
A series of social projects developed by Rick Lowe led the artist to explore and further expand his political and social concerns, including aesthetic and subjective terms. The artist turned his attention to the iconographic and allegorical tools of mapping and cartography, bringing (back) to the center fundamental human experiences, such as traces of inhabitation and appropriation of the space in destabilized metropolitan areas and/or zones of conflict.
Rick Lowe's micrographic patterns and mappings constantly negotiate the “unknown”, the “unseen” and the “unmapped” by mixing forms of physical and social mapping, imaginary and psychical mapping, forms which do not exclude the unconscious, whose “socially symbolic acts” the literary theorist Fredric Jameson called “political unconscious”.
Rick Lowe and curators Yorgos Tzirtzilakis and Polina Kosmadaki, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum scholarly team and AREA, Architecture Research Athens, instigate here a dialogue between historical materials from the vast Benaki Museum collection and the artist’s works. The unexpected connections but also the gaps between them constitute a reflective tool to develop strategies of narrating the world – especially its more obscure facets – and/or imagining new cosmologies and pathways. Considering the contemporary condition where everything is (continuously) registered, controlled, represented mapping can highlight a way to rethink where we stand and what can art and contemporary culture do, - questions very much at the heart of Lowe’s practice.

When:

Opening: 01/06/2023 at 20:00

DURATION 02/06 - 30/07/2023

The exhibition is open during museum opening days & hours.

TICKET:

€9, €7

It is possible to pre-purchase a ticket via tickets.benaki.org or from the Museum's ticket offices during the days and hours of the visit.