The flowing energy and the clear, revealing, mysterious, and transcendent ample light, offer aesthetic fascination and invoke at the same time the ineffable and mystical, claiming more than the obvious, through works which address the viewer and communicate with him, seeking his synergy and involvement. [Stephen Antonakos, Entrance, 1996, Construction with neon, wood and aluminum, Alpha Bank Collection] Photo: Thanos Makris [From the current exhibition "Stephen Antonakos: Light. Stephen Antonakos and Russian Avant-Garde at MOMus - Museum Alex Mylona]

The 11-year-old Amir from Afghanistan is drawn to be a flag bearer at the October 28th school parade. Some, however, have objections. Early in the morning, they attacked throwing stones and bottles at Amir's house, terrorizing him and his family. The perpetrators, among other things, threw a cardboard with the threatening message that Amir's family should leave Greece immediately. The right-wing organization Cryptia was responsible for the attack. "We will fight until the last illegal immigrant is gone, we will use violence mercilessly" they said on their phone call on the "iefimerida" website. To be noted, Amir participated in the October 28th parade holding his school sign. [Panagiotis Mitsobonos, "Flag bearer", Dafni, November 2017] [Sketch from the current exhibition "X them out. The Black Map of Racist Violence at MOMus - Museum of Contemporary Art]

The parade historically evolved as a public event that kept the national morale high, serving in parallel and briefly as an arena of social cohesion, especially in the urban environments that are characterized by heterogeneity and anonymity. As an event it is taking place on national holidays, that is in a day off from work and a condition that favors gathering. It is also an opportunity for the younger and for the older to see with bare eyes the well-polished gear of war, to inspect the protection mechanism against any kind of outside threat. The gathering of a wider audience for a mostly military procession is bearing automatically adrenaline. In the recent period, and in an era of extended peace, doubts have been risen for the parade’s necessity and expense at a time with adverse financial weather conditions. This year is the only perhaps in the recent history of the country in which parades have been called off, as the highest priority is another war, that of public health against an invisible enemy. It may be then a sudden chance for someone to recollect emotions and memories on the phenomenon, to weigh presences and absences, the value of habit against that of change. [Photo: Yiannis Stylianou, Parade, 1967, ©Yiannis Stylianou Archive / MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography]

The Costakis Collection of МОМus-Museum of Modern Art includes a small Black Quadrilateral. When the painting was analyzed by art conservation specialist Maria Kokkori, the x-ray revealed traces of an earlier painting below it. It was part of a lost painting, one of the sketches for which is known with the title War (1914) and depicts a horse with the words “Berlin”, “War”, “Teeth”, “Fallacy”, “Painting” and “Simulation" (Khardzhiev collection, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). According to Kokkori, there was almost no dust to be found between the two colored layers, which means that Malevich painted this certain suprematist work right after he had completed the earlier painting, making the Black Quadrilateral one of the earliest works of suprematist painting and leading us safely to date it from 1915. [Kazimir Malevich, Black Quadrilateral, 1915 [and its reference to War] Oil on canvas. 17 х 24, MOMus - Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection]

The detainees-trainees of the 3rd Second Chance School of the General Detention Center of Diavata, with whom Mary Zygouri worked, "made" Nasieet or Nektarios (acronym for team members' names). He speaks Albanian, Pontian, Arabic and Ibdo. He liked fast cars and football. His dream was to study law. He wanted to help people. He didn't want injustice. The prisoners thus imagined him holding a bouquet of roses, purple and red. [Image: Detail of Mary Zygouri's work, "Frankestein and the Frankestein Brides of Diavata", drawings and dummies in natural size, which emerged from the collective workshops in the women's and men's departments at the 3rd SCS of Thessaloniki. Prisoners-trainees who participated with her were: Amalia, Angelina, Gardenia, Theodora, Svetlana, Teresa, Alkiviadis, Arthur, Ahmend, Eglo, Endri, Enver, Qamar, Kostas, Klodian, Besnik K., Omar, Raphael, Stathis, Juko]. [From the exhibition "Honorable Outlaws - Face. Freedom. Silence" at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts]

The art of Alex Mylona succeeds in transmuting emotion and moulding its vital relationship with the world; in touching the secret of existence and birth, motherhood and love; in combining the myths of the ancient Greek world —the birth of Aphrodite, the Minotaur and Medea— with the spirituality of Byzantium, to seek out the balances, to reflect on the nature and potential of plastic art, to suggest a new arrangement of space and surface, of rhythm and volumes, of positivity and negativity, of emptiness and wholeness, of materiality and form. [Alex Mylona, The Kiss (Homage to Brancusi), 1967, Pentelic marble, 71x74x19 cm MOMus - Museum Alex Mylona]

Even if you're thinking of trips you can't do, maybe trips you don't want to do, Alexis Akrithakis's work is what allows you to think both twice. He often talks about life and love, about desire and trauma, as if talking about paradise and hell. We have been told stories with language, stories through persistent little painting gestures (the famous "tsiki tsiki"), stories through an iconography that often brings forth suitcases, boats or anything like a toy. In the work of the MOMus collection, the plane flies into a red evening sky, in which the Big Bear glows with neon light, and awakens memories different for each one. [Alexis Akrithakis, Airplane, 1982, plastic color, wood, neon, Donation of Alexander Iolas to Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMus - Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections]

The legendary George Costakis describes the story of how he acquainted one of the most important works of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), who was his favorite artist: “Liubov Popova’s brother, Pavel Sergeievich [from whom George Costakis acquired the majority of Popova’s works] had a stepson who lived in Zvenigorod, outside Moscow. Pavel Sergeievich once suggested me to visit him... So I went ... We walked to the garden. I noticed that the window of the storage house was nailed with a plywood. On the plywood I could read a number and below the signature: ‘Popova’. I entered the storage house and I saw the other side of the plywood. It was a great painting! ‘No, I can’t give it to you. If it rains the warehouse will be wet. Bring me a plywood and only then I will give you the painting’. I had to go to Moscow and look for a plywood. I didn’t find the dimensions needed so I bought two smaller pieces and brought them to Zvenigorod. In return, the landlord gave me the wonderful painting.” This turned to be the most important painting of the series “Space-Force Construction”, a series Popova worked between 1920 and 1922 together with her partner and friend, the constructivist architect Aleksandr Vesnin, which defines the theoretical basis of her constructivist and productivist period and – tragically – the last period of her life. [Liubov Popova, Space Force Construction, 1921, Oil and wooddust on plywood, 71×63.9 ©MOMus - Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection]

The city has been hosting the Holocaust Memorial since 1997. It is a work of Nandor Glid completed by his son Daniel, creators of other similar monuments in Belgrade, Dachau and Yad Vasem in Jerusalem. In the sketch, the monument comes to life, accepts the Nazi attack that desecrated its body, bends and tilts, but resists. It struggles to stand up and lift the weight of the memory we loaded on its shoulders. The bodies are entangled in the shape of the lamp, they burn, they bleed. They rediscover the original connection with the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki in 1942. Some monuments are living organisms. They become subject to assault, claim, vandalism. Invisible or unwanted, exiled or indifferent, they come back to remind us of the measure of our endurance in the memory with which we find it difficult to reconcile. [Stavros Kioutsioukis, Swastika in memory Thessaloniki December 2018. Unidentified persons desecrate once more the Holocaust Memorial in Eleftheria Square, in the centre of the city. The perpetrators spray a swastika on the memorial and leave undisturbed] [Sketch from the exhibition "X them out. The Black Map of Racist Violence at MOMus - Museum of Contemporary Art]

Light defines the starting point and basis of Stephen Antonakos's work varying from his austere minimal proposals with the arches, ellipses, and angles, to his poetic juxtapositions of artificial and painterly light, his large scale installations in public space, his Chapels referring to the byzantine tradition, and his imposing compositions in which visible and invisible, material and non-material find themselves in a borderline relation-harmony. [Stephen Antonakos, Untitled (page 51), 1988, Silkscreen on silver-metallic paper ©MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and State Museum of Contemporary Art Collections]