Duration: 24.10 – 08.12.2022 

Wednesday 13:00 – 21:00 / Thursday – Friday 11:00 – 19:00 / Saturday – Sunday 11:00 – 16:00

Co-organizer: MOMus

 urator: Barbara Polla – MOMus / Curator Yannis Bolis 

The exhibition “the garden”, in the exhibition space of the ASFA, “N. Kessanlis”, unfolds a multimedia portrait of Manolis Babousis. It is composed of old and new works from his long career, printed photographs, video projections of images, drawings, installations and sound works. His poetry par excellence ”poélitique” runs throughout the exhibition.

Manolis Babousis, photographer, visual artist and architect, professor emeritus of the ASFA, is a sharp critic of consumer society, institutions and even art. He is a “producer of utopia”.

In 201, with his design, organization and supervision, and with the support of the then Rectorate, the Faculty’s parking lot was transformed into a garden. Babousis uses an installation to transfer the “parking lot” to the school’s exhibition space, while a video with images of the garden and the artist’s voice is shown in a room.  At the same time, the recent photo series “view” 2022, presents trees that grow facing the sea, planted on the island of Kea, 2000-2022, most of them by the artist himself. These photographs represent “the green current” of Babousis’ life and art.

On display for the first time are the large ”mosaic drawings” 2021-2022, and a new installation, a play of collisions between architecture and nature with new and older photographs, the video projection ”la piscine” and architectural models made of cubes, metal, wood, catalogues and books (2021-2022).

The ”autobiographical” video, ”off the wall” 2022, guides us with humour through his obsessions, with all the possible and imaginary museums and monuments from the ”cemetery of anonymous artists”, the ”Nothing shops” where you pay without buying anything, to the ”Forest Delivery Service”, when with a phone call the forest comes!

The video projection and installation “without” 2022, with 180 unpublished photographs and the sound works in the exhibition are as much about the art world as “the architect’s prize” 2003, a project by which the artist refers to “those who unquestioningly tolerated the dismemberment and abuse of FIX, an important work by Zeneto”.

Among his earlier works, Babousis exhibits the video and photographs from 1973 when, with a group of musicians, he participated in an action in the Volterra-Italy psychiatric hospital, as well as drawings from his 1975 thesis in architecture (Natalini, Superstudio) in which he proposed, instead of building a new psychiatric hospital, to demolish it, leaving only one wall as a monument. Like the wall seated on chairs that he exhibited in 2014 at the Ileana Tuda Gallery.

The photographs “Athens”, 1985 – 1996, highlight the unformedness of pre-Olympic Athens, depicting its inhabitants as alien inspectors of unfinished projects, while the series of photographs by A.T.M. entitled ” busts”, 1998-1999 and the video image projections “secrets” 2001, “crisis” 2003-2006, explore the globalized and immaterial economy and the evaluations that take place in institutional spaces.

The exhibition “the garden” also presents in video projections, photographic works by students whose students he was a professor of the photography workshop from its inception in 1999 until 2013.

The exhibition catalogue with texts by Barbara Polla, Yannis Bolis and Manolis Babousis will be available after the opening.

The exhibition is under the auspices and financial support of the Ministry of Culture, MOMus, and the auspices of the ASFA,

the kind sponsorships of NEON, RENAULT, the Kir-Yianni estate, and is a preliminary action of the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art organized by MOMus.

Organization – production of the exhibition : ARTVIRUSFREE AMKE.

“Nikos Kessanlis” Hall 

256 Pireos St., Piraeus St., Athens, Greece 

Opening Monday 24.10.2022 / 19:00 – 23:00