In A Bright Green Field
Benaki Museum, Pireos

Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari

DESTE Foundation and the New Museum, in partnership with the Benaki Museum.
10/06-13/09/2025

Press

https://deste.gr/exhibition/in-a-bright-green-field/
https://elculture.com/elcmagazine/in-a-bright-green-field-an-exhibition-of-works-by-29-emerging-artists-transforms-the-benaki-museum-pireos-138-into-a-radiant-green-meadow/ https://www.lifo.gr/guide/arts/events/bright-green-field
https://www.thecultivist.com/stories/the-art-of-hydra-athens-this-summer
https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibition/in-a-bright-green-field/

Of Embers and Silence, 2025
Oil and acrylic on deadstock raw silk, jute, copper
320 x 170 x 40 cm
Photography by G. Sfakianakis.

Exhibition text:
Eleni Odysseos’s paintings weave together narratives of social and ecological interdependence, delving into fading histories of labor and communal rituals-particularly in relation to her native Cyprus-that

propose more harmonious relationships between humans and nature. Rendered on expanses of deadstock raw silk sourced from fabric shops across Cyprus, her recent tapestry-like works consider the rich history of the island’s silk production, and its entanglement to exploitation, colonisation, and domestic and industrial production.

Combining silk-generated from earthly materials like soil, water, and mulberry trees-with vibrant pigments in oil, Odysseos creates gestural paintings of amorphous forms that suggest various states of metamorphosis between life and death, paying tribute to the silkworm and other more than human beings.

Her new work, of Embers and Silence (2025), marries silk and jute, natural-fiber textiles historically associated with trade routes connecting East and West. For Odysseos, these textiles hold a personal connection to silkworm cultivation and potato farming-labor practices that were sources of sustenance for the women in her family. Hung across branchlike copper rods, creating cradles of folded fabric, the work further implicates the ancient history of copper mining in Cyprus as well as global structures of extractivism.

Throughout her practice, Odysseos deploys the political, ecological, and spiritual resonances of the forms and materials she uses to recoup and foster new nodes of connection between humans and the natural world.

Press release
The DESTE Foundation and the New Museum, in partnership with the Benaki Museum, Athens, are pleased to announce In a Bright Green Field, the third in a series of collaborative exhibitions highlighting the work of contemporary Greek and Cypriot artists. On view starting June 11, 2025, at the Benaki Museum–Pireos 138, Athens, In a Bright Green Field features the work of twenty-nine young artists exploring possible futures where renewed relationships with the natural world might emerge and expansive approaches to community may flourish. Gathering artists working across a variety of mediums, this exhibition surveys some of the most exciting emerging practices in Athens, Nicosia, and across Europe.

The exhibition highlights a generation of artists who are particularly attentive to the local histories of Greece and Cyprus and the ways in which they are useful for thinking through larger global challenges. These artists register the dramatic changes to labor and landscape accelerated by technology, while working to highlight emergent forms of collectivity across both urban and rural life. Their works explore the poetics of infrastructure, pastoral science-fictions, urban animism, and generative collaborations that resonate far beyond the space of the museum. Ranging from lyrical painting and sculpture to experimental documentary film to communal performance, In a Bright Green Fieldlooks at art practices that can serve as prototypes for myriad possible futures.

In a Bright Green Field follows the 2019 exhibition The Same River Twice and the 2016 exhibition The Equilibrists, organized by the New Museum and DESTE Foundation in partnership with the Benaki Museum. It echoes previous projects by both the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation over the past four decades that have looked to contemporary art to address the most pressing issues of the day, and embodies the mission of the Benaki Museum, a historical museum with a contemporary program focused on bridging the past and the present.

The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, New Museum, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by the DESTE Foundation with new writing by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Athens-based curator and writer Danai Giannoglou, and Nicosia-based curator and writer Ioulita Toumazi.