Alone with Art and Unanswered Questions. Some places feel like dreams you don’t want to wake up from. Or maybe you do wake up, but you’re still unsure what they meant. The MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki is one of those places.
The Greek May sun spills over the streets, its warmth blending with the salt of the sea. After a good coffee, I pass by the Rotunda, Kamara, and the Acropolis Wall before stepping into the gallery—more of an exhibition hall than a traditional museum. I leave behind the tourists and the well-defined world of travel. Here, things are different. Here, everything blurs, shifts, asks questions I don’t have answers to.
The exhibition “From Now On: Stories for a Next Tomorrow” doesn’t tell stories. It hints at them, sketches them at the edges of our perception, only for them to slip away the moment we try to grasp them.
Much like at Spazju Creativ in Malta, the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Prague’s DOX, or Ostrava’s Plato—wherever I go, I seek out contemporary art. It provokes, inspires, and forces me to think.
Fragments of a Future We Don’t Yet Know
The works at MOMus feel like remnants of a future that hasn’t yet arrived. Light projections, solitary objects, and distorted visual impressions bend and merge into strange forms. Sculptures resembling relics of a civilization that either never existed or is only just beginning to take shape. Noises and whispers.
Everything here is a question: Where are we headed? Who decides what comes next? And will we even understand it when it arrives?
From Now On
One piece catches my eye—an enormous digital display where text constantly disintegrates and reassembles. It reminds me of a dream where you’re reading a book, but the words change every time you look back. The artist calls it a metaphor for the fluid nature of truth in the digital age. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a reflection of a world that moves faster every day, leaving nothing solid to hold onto.
Lately, every time I scroll through social media or listen to politicians speak, I think about this. What can we even rely on anymore?
The Need for Provocation
In an era where information comes in flashes and disappears before it can settle in our minds, provocative art isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. Social media has trained us to skim the surface, to consume visuals without reflection. TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook—an endless stream of images with no time to pause, where thoughts dissolve like sugar in hot water.
But here, at MOMus, everything is different. Art forces you to stop. To endure that unsettling moment of uncertainty when you don’t yet understand what you’re looking at, but you feel it affecting you. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s important. Because if we lose the ability to pause and truly engage with ideas, we lose the ability to see the world in depth. We become like skipping stones—gliding across the surface for a while, but eventually sinking.
Good art should provoke. It should ask questions that stay with us longer than a few seconds. It should pull us out of our comfort zone, leaving ideas and concepts lingering in our minds, calling us back to them again and again.
It’s like an open-ended conversation with the world—one that doesn’t offer easy answers but instead gives us more to wonder about. And that is where its beauty lies—the exact opposite of socialist realism or nationalist simplicity.
Phobia
I stand before PHOBIA, a series of works that feel like reflections of our deepest fears. The artist created them in response to the Great Depression and the New York stock market crash over 80 years ago. Intangible shadows, distorted shapes, blurred outlines—like the embodiment of anxieties we carry within us.
COVID, Ukraine, populism, disinformation—somehow, that atmosphere feels eerily present again.
These are emotions that can’t be named, only felt. Like walking down an empty street, sensing someone behind you, but turning around to find no one there. I felt something similar on the old city stairs near the Acropolis Wall.
A Cultural Exchange
The exhibition features over 100 artists from nearly every continent. Art shouldn’t be locked away. It shouldn’t be nationalistic, descriptive, shallow—or worse, kitsch or plagiarism.
Art should be open. A universal language. A kind of Esperanto for those who can absorb and comprehend it. A way to understand what it’s trying to whisper.
Umbrellas
If you walk along Thessaloniki’s promenade, you’ll find them. If you step into MOMus, you’ll see them again. The same object, but each one different.
Umbrellas are more than just umbrellas. They symbolize protection, anonymity, the mundane. Yet, as I look at them, I feel like I’m missing something.
Are they just a visual motif? Or do they carry a hidden story?
It’s nearly impossible to find a moment when no one is taking a selfie with them. Just like the tourists in a crowd—each one seemingly the same, yet each with a unique life, desires, and secrets.
It’s impossible not to see the connection to one of Thessaloniki’s most iconic installations—Umbrellas by Giorgos Zoggolopoulos on the seaside promenade. There, the umbrellas float, their metal frames appearing weightless despite being firmly anchored. They remain still, yet somehow capture the movement of wind and time.
Maybe that’s the point—the constant transformation of meaning.
Inside the gallery, Umbrellas reflect individual anonymity and uniformity. Outside, by the sea, they become a symbol of openness and uncertainty. Standing at the boundary between the port and the infinite horizon, between what is known and what is yet to come. For those willing to see, they spark the imagination.
Development in Four Elements
Are we merely spectators, or do we become part of the transformation? Fire, water, earth, air. Yannis Bouteas deconstructs and reassembles them in a series of objects that feel like remnants of an unknown ritual. Each piece bears marks of time and change—as if pulled from another reality and placed here, in the neutral space of a gallery.
What is a Ladder? – Achilles Aperghis
A ladder leads upward, but to where? Achilles Aperghis doesn’t give us an answer. His ladders twist and disappear into the ceiling. Some bend as if gravity refuses them. Is this a path to progress, or just an illusion of advancement?
Are we in control of life, or are we simply carried along by the waves of chance?
Greece
One of the most striking series (first photo) plays with reality. Yang Yongliang blends traditional Chinese landscapes with modern elements. In Greece, ancient ruins intertwine with skyscrapers, nature merges with cities, until the boundaries between them disappear.
Is it a dystopia or just a different way of seeing the world? Netflix offers us these kinds of scenarios all the time.
Seneca, Plato, Epicurus, Socrates… Maybe we’re just looking for a new way to see what has always existed.
MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art
I walk among paintings, sculptures, installations—and the shadows they cast. I realize that what makes art important isn’t comfort, luxury, or golden bathtubs—it’s disturbance. Culture shouldn’t be about soothing us. It should shake our certainties, create dialogue between different worlds.
Art that doesn’t ask questions is nothing more than empty decoration. And decoration isn’t enough when the world is changing faster than we can comprehend.
I step outside. The sun is still bright, the air still warm, the sea still near. Everything seems normal.
But in my mind, the images and questions linger. Maybe I’ll never find the answers. But that’s not the point. Maybe it’s enough to keep asking.
I’m leaving MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art for the boardwalk. I walk around Umbrellas one more time, have a tsatsiki and buy some good Greek wine.
