Contemporary art rarely gets a seat at the table in the most important museum of ancient Greek art. This week it did. Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni opened Imitate the Sleep of Stones, a solo exhibition by the South African artist William Kentridge, at the Hellenic National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The show places his new works directly alongside antiquities from the museum’s collection, all circling one myth: Orpheus descending into the underworld to bring back Eurydice.
Rust, paper and ghosts
Kentridge’s familiar themes are all here: stone and paper, excavation and drawing, stillness and movement, survival and disappearance. Among the standouts are the rust-coloured steel figures of Frieze (13 rusted figures) from 2026, hybrid silhouettes in which people merge with trees, clothes and tools such as megaphones and haversacks, a procession that speaks of movement, displacement and collective history. Paper tree silhouettes nod to Rainer Maria Rilke’s reading of the myth, in which Eurydice turns into stone and earth.
The centrepiece is a diorama using Pepper’s Ghost, the 19th-century stage trick that reflects moving images into a physical model. Projected figures appear in the little theatre as fleeting presences, merging drawing, performance, cinema and illusion, a passage between being seen and vanishing, just like Orpheus’ journey.
A dialogue across 3,000 years
The ancient partners are impressive. They include a Corinthian red-figure calyx krater from around 400–375 BC showing Orpheus with his lyre, an ivory lyre and its fragments from the vaulted tomb of Menidi dating to the 14th–13th centuries BC, and a white kylix by the Pistoxenos Painter from about 470 BC, on loan from the Acropolis Museum, depicting the attack of the Thracian women on Orpheus.
Kentridge called the show “an incredible privilege” and said there was no other city where this conversation could happen. He also thanked the minister for allowing contemporary work into “the heart of classical Athens”, noting that many culture ministers would have said no.
Part of a bigger Athens moment
The exhibition grows out of Kentridge’s staging of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which premiered on the same day at the Greek National Opera in the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, an international co-production with Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In June, a large solo show titled The Big YES, the Big NO is set to follow at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. The museum itself is also on the brink of change: a major redesign by David Chipperfield Architects and Alexandros N. Tombazis & Associates is ahead. The exhibition is curated by Burcu Fikretoğlu, with Dora Vasilakou as assistant curator and exhibition design by Sabine Theunissen.