NEON and the Acropolis Museum present the exhibition Allspice | Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures at the Acropolis Museum Temporary Exhibition Gallery.

Allspice | Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures is the opening exhibition of the trilogy Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures, a collaboration between the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Acropolis Museum, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Athens, and NEON. The exhibition initiates a deep and meaningful dialogue between contemporary works and ancient artefacts. This partnership underscores enduring themes of cultural heritage, loss and restitution, survival, and the ongoing creation of culture. It presents the multifaceted work of internationally acclaimed contemporary artist Michael Rakowitz interacting with ancient artifacts from the Middle East and southeastern Mediterranean. The trilogy starts in 2025 at the Acropolis Museum, continues in the museum’s western exterior area leading to Mitseon Street, and concludes in 2026 at the Old Acropolis Museum on the Acropolis Hill.

The first part of the trilogy is the exhibition Allspice | Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures contemporary works by Michael Rakowitz will be shown alongside ancient artefacts from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and the Thanos N. Zintilis Collection of Cypriot Antiquities at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens. Together, these elements interweave narratives that speak to both our past and present.

The exhibition also features three new commissions by the artist.

Set in the Acropolis Museum’s Temporary Exhibition Gallery – where the absence of the Parthenon sculptures is acknowledged – the exhibition unfolds a story of colonialism and the looting of cultural institutions, as viewed through Rakowitz’s lens. The artist addresses a persistent global and still unresolved cultural trauma: the displacement of objects that embody the memory and identity of a people, transforming them into artefacts in exile; as well as products of looting, theft, transaction, destruction and disappearance.

Michael Rakowitz states: ‘Over the past three years planning these projects with NEON and the Acropolis Museum, I have been so lucky to travel to Athens again and again. Each time, I have anticipated with excitement my arrival in this amazing city, and I weep when I depart. Truly, I have become homesick for Athens, a place that has embraced me, and I have embraced back. As the child of a father who is a doctor devoted to healing and mending the breached and the broken, and a Baghdadi Jewish mother who continues to pass on her culture to her sons and her grandchildren, I deeply connect to the local histories of displacement and restoration. The Acropolis Museum itself, where the exquisite parts of the Parthenon are exhibited while the other half has been violently removed, has been such an inspiration, as it has taught me so much and has opened further understanding for me about my own work. To be able to exhibit my work here leaves me speechless, as it overlaps and connects not only through the past but opens windows into a future where objects and people can be reunited. With love, I say, efcharisto. Thank you for inviting me here.’