Every exhibition invites us to view the world from a different perspective. When it concludes, it leaves behind not only images and knowledge, but also questions that continue to linger with us. The exhibition The World of the Avant-Garde: City, Nature, Universe, Human, the result of a collaboration between the National Gallery and MOMUS—Museum of Modern Art—Kostakis Collection, gave us the opportunity to encounter the Russian Avant-Garde through the dynamic relationship between humans and the world around them. From the city and nature to the universe, artistic creation emerged as a realm of experimentation, questioning, and utopian thought.

The two-day event taking place at the conclusion of the exhibition is therefore not an epilogue but yet another opportunity to reexamine the questions raised by the Avant-Garde through different scholarly approaches and forms of artistic expression. The history of the Costakis Collection, its journey, the people who contributed to its rise to prominence, and the exhibition experience itself will intersect, during the two-day event, with music, film, and education.

This event holds special symbolic significance, as it takes place thirty years after the first major presentation of the Costakis Collection in Greece, at the National Gallery in 1995, curated by Anna Kafetsi. The two-day event is dedicated to her memory.

The conclusion of the exhibition provides an opportunity to continue reflecting on art as a space of freedom, experimentation, and dialogue—a space where we can imagine and, above all, claim different worlds.

As part of the European Heritage Days 2026, admission to the National Gallery and the events of the two-day festival is free.

Saturday 26 & Sunday 27 September

National Gallery Greece – Alexandros Soutsos Museum

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Anna Kafetsi