The modern Greek art collections of the Benaki Museum on Koumpari Street have been “conversing” since March 1st with the contemporary art of visual artists Nikomachis Karakostanoglou and Ilias Papailiakis.

The two artists, at the invitation of the museum’s curator Polynas Kosmadakis, created a path-collaborative installation in the museum space of the first floor with the title of the folk song “What good does the nightingale say”, which arose from the “dialogue” between them on various themes such as craftsmanship, materiality, sensuality and popular culture.

The approximately twenty works of clay, paper and paints by Karakostanoglou and Papailiakis have been made specifically for the museum space, with reference to specific exhibits or sets of exhibits of the Museum’s permanent exhibition, artefacts, objects and costumes. They invite the viewer into pauses-moments of conversation with the evidence of Greek material culture, illuminating the expressions of the part and the whole in folk tradition. The world, memory, time, the self and the other, the secret, the god and the dark metaphysical take shape, are colored, acquire materiality and are formalized in connection with the Greek cultural adventure. Water, hearth, soil, sanctuary, temple, city and countryside, decoration, passer-by, guardian, angel and destiny are some of the elements of a narrative or an initiation born with the folk song “How well the nightingale says”, as the title of the exhibition testifies.