A recent donation to the Benaki Museum, with objects mainly from Nigeria, Cameroon and Kenya, was the starting point for the collection of stories of people of African descent who were born or live in Greece. “Africa amongst us*” is a participatory exhibition that brings the Afro-diasporic community of Greece to the forefront.

It is planned by, for and with over thirty community members and is being held in collaboration with the ANASA Cultural Center for African Arts and Cultures.

Despite the abundance of objects on display, all from the John Phillipson Collection, “Africa amongst us*” is not an exhibition of African art. It uses the objects as intermediaries to hear people’s stories. Through them, the power of the human spirit and the identity of a very active community that keeps its identity alive is revealed.

The many and varied parallel events complement and enrich the exhibition. The February and March programme includes discussions, performances, music and of course guided tours and educational programmes.

John Phillipson, on whose collection the exhibition was based, was a Greek-Canadian mining engineer and exploration geologist, a prolific and avid collector, but also an accomplished translator of Cavafy’s poetry. He had been based in Africa since the 1960s and spent much of his life travelling around the continent, mainly based in Kenya. He also lived in Mozambique and Yaoundé, Cameroon. He assembled most of the Collection in the 1990s. He passed away in 2015 and his collection was donated to the Benaki Museum in his memory by his wife Connie, fulfilling the collector’s deeply personal desire to promote appreciation of African cultures and artistic developments in Greece, the country of his birth.

Benaki Museum / Pireos 138

Duration: 13 February– 25 May 2025

Curators: 

Sofia Chandaka, Curator of Collections of World Cultures at the Benaki Museum,  

Michalis Afolayan,founder of the ANASA Cultural Centre for African Art and Cultures