The DESTE Foundation and the New Museum, in partnership with the Benaki Museum, Athens, are pleased to announce In a Bright Green Field, the third in a series of collaborative exhibitions highlighting the work of contemporary Greek and Cypriot artists. On view starting June 11, 2025, at the Benaki Museum–Pireos 138, Athens, In a Bright Green Field features the work of twenty-nine young artists exploring possible futures where renewed relationships with the natural world might emerge and expansive approaches to community may flourish. Gathering artists working across a variety of mediums, this exhibition surveys some of the most exciting emerging practices in Athens, Nicosia, and across Europe.
The exhibition highlights a generation of artists who are particularly attentive to the local histories of Greece and Cyprus and the ways in which they are useful for thinking through larger global challenges. These artists register the dramatic changes to labor and landscape accelerated by technology, while working to highlight emergent forms of collectivity across both urban and rural life. Their works explore the poetics of infrastructure, pastoral science-fictions, urban animism, and generative collaborations that resonate far beyond the space of the museum. Ranging from lyrical painting and sculpture to experimental documentary film to communal performance, In a Bright Green Field looks at art practices that can serve as prototypes for myriad possible futures.
In a Bright Green Field follows the 2019 exhibition The Same River Twice and the 2016 exhibition The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum and DESTE Foundation in partnership with the Benaki Museum. It echoes previous projects by both the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation over the past four decades that have looked to contemporary art to address the most pressing issues of the day, and embodies the mission of the Benaki Museum, a historical museum with a contemporary program focused on bridging the past and the present.
The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, New Museum, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by the DESTE Foundation with new writing by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Athens-based curator and writer Danai Giannoglou, and Nicosia-based curator and writer Ioulita Toumazi.
Featured image: Nefeli Papadimoul, Skinscapes, 2021 | photo: Robin Zenner
