Within the crisis, Greek Art proclaims: I exist”, wrote the critic for the Greek daily Proto Thema on this year’s Art Athina. The crisis has hardened the resolve of Greece’s gallerists, many of whom were integral to the creation of Art Athina launched in 1993 by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association. This says a lot about the resilience of the visual arts sector in Greece, a community that, until recently, received little governmental support, though the current Minister for Culture, Pavlos Geroulanos, has been a noticeable advocate as institutions begin to realize more ambitious exhibitions, such as the Marathon Marathon project, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery and Nadja Argyropoulou, at the New Acropolis Museum in 2010, held to commemorate the 2500-yearanniversary of the first marathon run.
 But even state support is not enough. Enter collectors and their foundations. Greek collectors have enjoyed a prominent position within the contemporary art world; Dimitris Daskalopoulos currently has a monumental show, The Luminous Interval, at the Guggenheim Bilbao (until September 11), while Dakis Ioannou has planned a summer extravaganza through the opening of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art‘s two new projects: Investigations of A Dog–Works from the FACE Collections in Athens (through October 30) and Black Mirror–Doug Aitken (through September 25) in their project space on the island of Hydra. In parallel to Investigations of A Dog, DESTE will also be presenting in Athens three solo shows by artists Kerstin Braetsch & Das Institut, Jakub Ziolkowski and Paul Chan at the foundation’s main space in Athens until October 30. Meanwhile, the Museum of Cycladic Art presents work by Alexandra Bahzetsis, Anastasia Douka, Irini Miga, Eytichis Patsourakis, Theodoros Stamatoyannis, and Jannis Varelas: this year’s nominees for the DESTE Prize until October 30 (winner to be announced September 14). From Jannis Varelas’s figures expressing jumbled histories wrought with tensions, to Eftychis Patsourakis’s contemplations on individual and collective memory, identity and history, the ideas of knowledge, perception and the transmission of information, history and culture are key issues that feed many of the exhibitions taking place in Greece today. The twenty-first century is a complex place united by vast international and local networks that Greece is wholly part of. It shows in the art.
 Following on from the Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas double-bill in summer 2010, the Museum of Cycladic Art also presents The Last Grand
Tour, curated by Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, featuring artists who lived and worked in Greece during the 20th century, from Lynda Benglis, Barbara Hepworth, Martin Kippenberger, and Daniel Spoerri until October 10.
 Indeed, if there is anything that has affected the speed by which the twenty-first century is unfolding on social, political and economic levels, and how collective space is adapting to such changes, it is the internet. The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) investigates this intermediary space with a media project by Angelo Plessas, an artist with an interest in the online-offline relationship. Through a multi-disciplinary practice Plessas is staging The Angelo Foundation School of Music, an entity of his online universe centered on the Angelo Foundation and its many subsidiaries. Playing on the museum’s temporary location in the Athens Conservatory, Plessas has created three web pages and has organized interactive musical workshops with musicians from the conservatory in the museum’s media lounge, drawing on the arts as a means to socialize the internet by bringing its users into a physical, and therefore potentially political, forum.
 The show runs concurrently with three exhibitions that recalls the seminal period of the 1980s, as Greece’s restored democracy rose from the ashes of the junta, and officially entered the European Community in 1981. The complete series of Rena Papaspyrou’s photocopy compositions Every Month: Photocopies Directly From Matter, 1980-1981, paintings by so-called 1980s-generation painter Apostolou Georgiou, and a new production by Maaria Wirkkala in the Project Room, end September 18. At the same time, Yannis Moralis: A classic of the 20th century, at the National Gallery in Athens, which closed at the end of August, recalled the historical mechanization of war, global conflict and mass upheavals as told in the histories of the first and second world wars.
 But modern Greek history can not be put into context without referencing wider European art history. For that, the second installment of The George Economou Collection exhibition at the Athens Municipal Gallery will be on show until October 2. Described as a “discreet enigma” in the collecting world, the second part follows on from 249 works ranging from post-Renaissance to Expressionism and Cubism to the installation of 200 works spanning Surrealism, The School of Paris, Portrait-Nude-Still Life (1890-1996), Art of the first post-war decade, Art in the 1960s, Neo-Fauves as well as prints from the collection focusing on the classical motifs of nude, still-life, and portrait by the likes of Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miro, André Masson, Paul Delvaux, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Maurice Utrillo, Jean Tinguely, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Jorg Immendorf, Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, and Gerhard Richter.
The exhibition is hosted at the new Municipal Gallery of Athens, in the neoclassical buildings of the former silk factory attributed to the name of the
neighborhood; Metaxourgeio (silk area) donated to the Municipality of Athens in 1993. Everyone knows in Athens that Metaxourgheio has somewhat fallen into a state of visible decline. Yet the galleries the Breeder, Rebecca Camhi and AMP are still continuing individual and international programs that feature both local and foreign artists in the neighborhood. With a focus on young American artists alongside a bevy of European contemporaries, AMP is worth visiting just for the aesthetics of the neighborhood contrasted with the language of the arts; Steven Shearer’s 2009 Poem For Athens is plastered on one side of the gallery wall overlooking a parking lot and a daily army of immigrants, junkies and locals all going about their daily business.
 Presenting the 3rd Athens Biennale Monodromos (October 23-December 11) to the public at this year’s Art Athina, Co-Director Augustine Zenakos took the opportunity to discuss recent attacks on immigrants in the city centre as well as protests that took place during a massive 24-hourstrike action against further austerity measures in which acts of police brutality hospitalized protestors. “Faced with this situation, we simply cannot make exhibitions in the same way as they were before,” he said, describing Greece as a universal case study. “What is art and the exhibition going to say?” Zenakos asked. He has a point.
 In 2007, alongside artist Poka Yio and curator Xenia Kalpatsoglou, Zenakos established the Athens Biennale with the show-stopping title, DESTROY ATHENS. Remembering the impact of the 2008 December riots, the Biennale has since become a foreshadowing of the explosive tensions within contemporary Greek society. It is a testament to XYZ as they like to be called, that three young people were able to create an event that revealed a flourishing contemporary art scene that added a breath of fresh generational air into Greece’s cultural framework. If what those young protestors in Athens scrawled onto the city walls were right, perhaps we should take note. “We are the image of the future,” they sprayed as the riots raged in the city. In many ways, so is its art world.