Evi Kalogiropoulou
Neighbours
November 2, 2020–December 31, 2020Screens Series Online, New Museum, New York
Through the end of 2020, the New Museum presents selected videos by artists featured in their program online.
In 2016, the New Museum inaugurated a platform for the presentation of new video works by emerging contemporary artists titled Screens Series. Encompassing a combination of screenings in the New Museum theater and on monitors on the Lower Level, the series has presented artists working with a range of media—from 16mm film to computer-generated imagery (CGI). When the Museum closed in March due to heightened concerns around the spread of COVID-19, they featured selected videos by Screens Series artists online, bringing art to the public at home. They also expanded the series to include other single-channel videos by artists who have exhibited at the New Museum in the past several years.
In her video Neighbours (2018), Evi Kalogiropoulou documents a scrap metal yard in the Votanikos neighborhood in the center of Athens, Greece, and the family that has been working there for over forty years. The area has been a nexus of constant transformation: an ancient olive grove became transformed over time into an industrial zone, now surrounded by Roma settlements and refugee camps. Through meandrous filming and conversation with scrap yard workers, Kalogiropoulou hones in on themes of immigration, land ownership, and machismo.
Neighbours (2018), Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in collaboration with the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation, “Same River Twice”, June 21, 2019–September 22, 2019.
