Leda Papaconstantinou: Time In My Hands, a Retrospective

The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens is celebrating women's art this season with a series of group and solo exhibitions honouring pioneering female artists.

EMST has dedicated this season to the appreciation of women's art and is presenting yet another exhibition by one of the leading figures on the Greek art scene. Leda Papaconstantinou has inspired generations as a feminist artist. With an artistic journey spanning nearly five decades, her oeuvre includes a diverse range of media such as performance, sculpture, video, site-specific installations and painting. Always centred on an exploration of the human body, her work addresses issues of gender, sexuality, collective memory, history and politics. Time in my Hands traces her career from the 1960s, when she was a pioneer of performance art at a time of cultural radicalism. Her work challenged social norms and power dynamics. This retrospective illuminates her contributions to gender discourse, identity construction and the interplay between art and society, from her early feminist performances to her recent large-scale video installations. Unpublished photographic and textual archival documents and traces of her performances are on display for the first time. The exhibition is titled after the site-specific installation of the same name which the artist created for the Monastiraki metro station in 2010, based on a photograph from the video The Arrows are of Eros.