MOMUS MUSEUM ALEX MYLONAS PRESENTS “A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES”

The unexpected, the ambiguous and the enigmatic, the imaginary and the grotesque act as a conceptual and spatial grid for the exhibition entitled “a Cabinet of Curiosities” presented at MOMus Museum Alex Mylonas, from 13 February to 31 August 2025. The periodical exhibitions’ space of the Museum in Thissio, Athens, is “conquered” by paintings, prints, sculptures, constructions and videos ‒works remarkably diverse in style, materials, qualities, sensitivities, visual values and aesthetic preferences‒ created by 78 artists.

Emerging in Europe during the Renaissance, cabinets of curiosities came to be identified with a collecting frenzy, aesthetic pleasure and amazement through their wondrous and rare exhibits: these ranged from works of art andrelics to strange and “exotic” artifacts from distant cultures, alongside scientific tools and instruments, objects from the natural world, and items related to medicine, zoology, botany, gemology, mineralogy, and astrology, as well as to the realms of the occult, alchemy, and magic.

These cabinets, which can be considered precursors to modern museums, played a pivotal role in shaping Western perceptions of the “other”, while also offering an aesthetic, social, anthropological and political space wirh numerous benefits of research.

In the modern, extended Cabinet of Curiosities at MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona, in a multiple connection of images and realities, the exhibits cover a broad thematic spectrum, opening portals to different worlds, times, and regions. The stories they tell, inventive and original, explore concepts such as life and death, nature and technology, vanity and paradox, violence and threat, myth and dream, erotic desire and libido. The exhibition “a Cabinet of Curiosities” functions as a proposal-challenge for a modern, new “cabinet” which, although apparently creates the fear of emptiness (horror vacui), can nevertheless function as a starting point for a new consideration of the present we live in.