MOMAFAD
Curated by Dionisis Christofilogiannis
Former Ellinikon International Airport, Athens
Eva Mitala’s silkscreen print lies flat on the floor of the former Transit Area illuminated by the bright daylight from the large windows on the left. Here, her silkscreen becomes part of the landscape, in subtle dialogue with the off-centre bench standing just behind. Easily overlooked, Mitala’s work is a quiet comment on the power of the everyday to ground oneself amidst the chaos of modern life.
MOMAFAD (The Museum of Modern Art for A Day) is a project/artwork created by the contemporary Greek artist Dionisis Christofilogiannis which reclaims spaces and transforms them into museums for the duration of one day.
Each edition brings together the works of a group of contemporary artists which are handed over to the project’s organizers for a day. Subsequently photographed, these temporary installations are turned into a permanent piece of the site’s history.
The first MOMAFAD took place in the abandoned terminal of the Ellinikon International Airport of Athens designed by Finnish modern architect Eero Saarinen in 1968. Both the architectural value of the building and its emotional salience as a site of public memory contributed to its selection. Lying vacant since 2001, the former East Terminal was designated as a national heritage site in 2006 yet remained abandoned until only recently when it was incorporated into the large-scale Ellinikon redevelopment project. As the texts that follow will explore, the space is a site of contradiction, history, memory, and fragility, private, civic, and public ownership.
The photographs of the ephemeral installations, newly commissioned texts, and archival material comprise MOMAFAD’s final form, a publication, which aims to become an archive in its own right.
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