gb agency

59 artists from 27 countries including 15 new site-specific works commissioned by NEON will be featured in the group exhibition Portals, opening on 11 June in the renovated spaces of the former Public Tobacco Factory – Hellenic Parliament Library & Printing House, as part of the collaboration between the Hellenic Parliament and NEON.
The timing is highly appropriate, as we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, while at the same time countries and societies all over the world are reeling from the pandemic. Within this framework, Portals aspires to convey the messages, ideas and visions of contemporary artistic creation, investigating the new reality revealed through the prism of change and disruption.
The exhibition is curated by Elina Kountouri, Director of NEON, and Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
The exhibition takes place in the NEON-renovated building of the former Public Tobacco Factory, which emerges as a modern cultural hub, open to all. In this space, artists from both Greece and across the world express the pluralism of ideas and address the concept of the collective and our cultural understanding of history and politics, public space and our communal past, present and future. The exhibition is inspired by an article from 2020 by the novelist Arundhati Roy, on the Financial Times on 3 April 2020, who sees the pandemic as a “portal, a gateway between one world and the next”. Acknowledging that the rupture created by the pandemic individually and collectively opens a portal, it is up to us to negotiate our transition through it. The exhibition explores contemporary reality and pays tribute to a world in need of healing and unity.