Greece in USA & USA in Greece – Exporting and Importing Culture

In the context of «Greece in USA,” the non-profit organization for the promotion of contemporary Greek culture in America, that showcased 150 Greek artists in New York, Dr. Sozita Goudouna conceives and organizes in collaboration with the director of the Municipal Theater of Piraeus the new cultural platform «ARTPORT.”

Sozita Goudouna

The inaugural exhibitions of ARTPORT focus on collaborations and cultural connections between America and Greece and presents for the first time in Greece Andres Serrano’s “Torture” and John Akomfrah’s video installation “The Airport.”

The arts platform instigates a dialogue between two distinct artists that are seemingly quite different but that are in fact «faraway, so close.»

The 70-year-old American Andres Serrano, born and raised in New York in an American family of Honduran and Afro-Cuban origin, who has expressed a desire to photograph the homeless in Greece, and 64-year-old Briton John Akomfrah, born in Ghana, founder of the 1982 Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) – one of the few international artists who managed to capture in such a poetic way the Greek crisis – are the protagonists of this exchange.

Andres Serrano reveals an often embarrassing reality through his camera.

Religion, death, sex and violence permeate the work of the American artist. Since the 1980s, Serrano’s work has sparked heated debate, raising questions worldwide about censorship, taste, public decency, and accepted forms of expression. Serrano’s name, along with Robert Mapplethorpe, was at the crossroads of the 1989 Cultural Wars in New York when his photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987) became the subject of a national debate on artistic freedom, expression and public funding of “controversial” art.

Nevertheless, Serrano, with the poetry of his work, goes beyond the public debate on censorship of the art as expressed in his historical works, while John Akomfrah focuses on the recent economic crisis in Greece and the abandoned former Hellinikon airport to capture Greek History through an elastic perception of historical time.

The Airport

«Torture» by Andres Serrano – An A/political Project

Solo Exhibition at the Port Authority Stone Warehouse GATE E2
9/9 – 3/10/21

«The Airport» by John Akomfrah

16/9 – 25/9/21
Municipal Theatre of Pireaus Main Stage
Screening hours: 12.00, 17.00 and 19.00 / Screening time: 50΄ / Number of spectators: 15 people per screening / Free admission
Opening: Thursday 16 September 2021 – 19.00

Torture

Currently on view:

THE RIGHT TO BREATHE

Group exhibition more at: https://undercurrent.nyc/exhibitions-and-events/2021/6/7/the-right-to-breathe

Opening Wednesday, July 14, 2021 – Friday, October 8, 2021

At Undercurrent
70 John Street Brooklyn, NY, 11201 United States

Under the Auspices: Greek Ministry of Culture