The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Benaki Museum Athens, and is supported by the British Council and the British School at Athens.

"The exhibition is the third exhibition we host in response to our research platform “The Bureau of Care” (following the solo exhibitions of Chto Delat and Kader Attia) that looks into the politics and ethics of care. The show is focusing on the care practiced through the work of anthropologist Margaret Kenna who has been conducting research on the small island of Anafi in Greece since 1966.

Margaret Kenna is an anthropologist and researcher, and has devoted most of her academic work to the island of Anafi, her research begun in May 1966 and continues to this day. Kenna has been looking into the island and the way of life of the islanders for more than fifty years. In 2006, the Municipality of Anafi declared her an honorary citizen of the island. The anthropologist in 2019 decided to donate all her research material to the British School at Athens, a donation that has not been completed due to the global pandemic of SARS COVID-19. Prior to this, Kenna has donated a great part of her photographic archive to the Benaki Museum in Athens. Audiences will have the opportunity to see a small part of her diligent work and research, for the first time.

This project, conceived in dialogue with Association Phenomenon, who has been organising a biennial contemporary visual arts project in the island since 2015, aims to bring together, the colossal work of an anthropologist, with contemporary artistic practices, aiming to direct towards care-fully enacted dialogues between anthropology and visual arts.

The exhibition gives the public the opportunity to see unique documents and recordings
of life on the remote island, which portray the various changes that occurred in the island's social fibre in the pre and post-dictatorship periods until today. It is a unique perspective, on a miniature and unique example of social organisation and how it has radically developed through the decades, posing many questions in relation to tradition, the ties
between citizens in small communities, the role of women in them, but also decentralisation, modernisation and the isolation in remote islands such as Anafi, its citizens known in greek as ‘akrites’ (ακρίτες)."

Three artists were invited to respond to Kenna’s work and archive, and were commissioned to produce new works, presented together with fragments of Kenna’s archive. Hellen Ascoli, Zoe Hatzigiannaki and Maria Varela, have each focused on specific aspects of the varied research trajectories Kenna’s academic work has taken throughout the years.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by iLiana Fokianaki, Margaret Kenna, Piergiorgio Pepe & Iordanis Kerenidis and Antonis Arvanitis, former president of the Anafiots Worldwide Association

For more information please contact us at info@stateofconcept.org