The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) transforms its roof into one of the most impressive summer cinemas in Athens, CineFIX. With a panoramic view of the entire city, and the Acropolis in the background, the EMST rooftop creates an ideal condition for the projection of films, videos and audio-visual artistic works and changes the relationships of the viewers with the works of contemporary art and their surroundings. The summer screenings will last all summer until September and will take place every second week of the month.
EMST's summer cinema will start on Friday 21st June at 21.30 with the screening of all the Penny Siopis films presented in the For Dear Life retrospective at EMST. It is a unique opportunity for viewers to stream Siopis' multi-layered work in dialogue with the city that is one of their imaginary points of reference.
Penny Siopis combines readymade 8mm and 16mm film with text and sound to tell the story of people caught, often with traumatic consequences for themselves, in the throes of the political and social conflicts of their time. The individual stories he tells usually come from the larger world of South African History, stories that have been left out of the official historiography of the place. The films deal with themes such as colonialism and apartheid, modernity, immigration and globalization, while more recently reflections on the environment and the relationship between the human and non-human factors have been added.
Taken as a whole, Penny Siopis' works are a contemplative, riveting immersion in the realities of migration and exile, diaspora, political upheaval and the merging of public and private life; they are portraits of a fluid world that capture the eye and give access to the personal universe of the artist, in a material that concerns the roots and experiences of her and her family in South Africa but also in Greece. Covering a range of historical experiences - from the Greco-Turkish war of the period 1919-1922, which sealed the fate of millions of Greeks and changed the map of the country, and the successive immigration waves, to the African liberation movements - Siopis weaves in these works a series of highly elaborate allegories that assemble a particularly revealing, eloquent picture of the last half of the 20th century and a world that is changing dramatically, especially in Africa.
The projects that will be shown are the following:
My Lovely Day, 1997, 21′ 15″
Obscure White Messenger, 2010, 15′ 1″
The Master is Drowning, 2012, 10′ 5″
The New Parthenon (The New Parthenon), 2016, 15′ 26″
She Breathes Water, 2019, 5′ 12″
Shadow Shame Again, 2021, 6′ 16″
Total duration 75'
The artist will be present for a discussion with the audience after the screening.
The next screening will take place on Thursday, July 4.
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