Curated by Anna Kafetsi
After Babel is the second part of The Unwritten Library trilogy organized by AnnexM to take place during Athens 2018 World Book Capital. Revolving around the threefold theme Books/Readers/Writers, the three exhibitions seek to explore the complex networks of relations and interconnections emerging at the intersection of textuality and orality, book/text and body, private and public space.
The second exhibition focuses on books and texts through their material, hybrid or immaterial presence. Objects of desire and main characters in new fictions, books generate enchantment and emotion through the exhibits. They cross paths with vision and other senses. Through processes both linguistic and conceptual, visual and performative/discursive, they open an ambiguous, dialogical, often hermetic space of reading. The viewer-reader crosses its boundaries to go beyond knowledge and meaning, sometimes even beyond writing itself, into unpredictable, uncharted aesthetic territories and their poetic and political potentialities.
Conceived as a labyrinth of silent and performing “reading rooms,” “storage” and “display areas,” the exhibition makes use of public as well as inaccessible spaces of the Megaron on four different levels, turning the building and its labyrinthine, secret routes into a metaphor of a post-Borgesian library of Babel.
On display are more than 100 artworks – paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and video installations, sound art, artists’ books, internet art, including new productions, as well as performances. Guided tours and educational programmes for people of all ages are also conducted.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Fiona Banner
Rania Bellou
Jorge Mendez Blake
Irma Blank
Benny Brunner
Vlassis Caniaris
Ulises Carriόn
Andreas Embirikos
Didem Erk
Dora García
Shilpa Gupta
George Hadjimichalis
Gary Hill
William Kentridge
Julien Levesque
Estefania Penafiel Loaiza
Michael Mandiberg
Rivane Neuenschwander
Nina Papaconstantinou
Kyrillos Sarris
Dayanita Singh
Michelle Stuart
Stephanie Syjuco
Thu Van Tran
Georgios Xenos