ATHENS — “Sea, sun and sex, with some Greek columns in the background,” said Poka Yio, the artistic director of the Athens Biennale. He was summing up the Greek government’s tourism campaigns in the 2000s as he led a visitor around a rambling former department store that was one of the sites of the 2021 edition. Part of the motivation for starting the biennale in 2007, he said, was to change that stereotype: “We wanted to put Athens on the contemporary art cultural map.”
Fifteen years later, Athens is certainly on the international art crowd radar, though more as a curiosity than a major hub. Despite the pandemic, 40,000 visitors attended the monthlong Biennale, which ran through November. According to the organizers, 10,000 of those came from abroad, and the Greek capital also teemed with world-class exhibitions, including the Neon Foundation’s 59-artist group show “Portals” in a newly renovated former tobacco factory.
“If the political powers understood how much Athens is being talked about as a contemporary cultural destination, they might pay more attention, because it means money and image,” said Katerina Gregos, the director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, known as EMST. But contemporary art, she added, is relatively new to the Greek scene. “We have been living under the shadow of the Acropolis for a long time” she said.
Gregos, who was born in Greece and was the founding director of the Deste Foundation, before later taking up the EMST job last summer,...
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