The art gallery “ekfrasi-Gianna grammatopoulos”, presents the exhibition of Michalis Manousakis entitled Children’s Museum Anochyroto.

The artist Michalis Manousakis attempts for the third time (the first time in 2011 at EMST, one meter and the second in 2016 at the Athens School of Fine Arts, heroes in the trash) to approach with tenderness an important historical period of Greece. Not as a historian, but as a person who reads documents in a penetrating way, mainly photographs of children and games, he puts the viewer into mechanisms of imagination, highlighting joy and pain, sometimes with facts and sometimes with fiction. The reason is the dates and references that are written in front of or behind the photos.

His thoughts are on Hellenism. In the Hellenism that spreads from Alexandria, to Smyrna, Constantinople, Thrace, Thessaloniki, Athens, to Chania. Starting from the special story of his mother and her family who was hunted by the Tsetes in 1922 arriving in Chania from the Sokia of Asia Minor (video).

Michalis Manousakis unfolds the tangle of history with photographs of children and toys from the period 1860-1930. A period that marked the nation with the tragic end of 1922 and then the desperate flight of people from the place of their ancestors.  With stories separate for each one, having a common root the loss of their lives, which were their people, their life, their homeland, their memories. Fortunately, however, they are not exhausted, they do not have the power to wipe out centuries of history. The ruins of time will be restored each time in the mind and become building materials for the future.

Opening: Tuesday 13 December 2022, 19:00

Exhibition duration: December 13, 2022-January 14, 2023