Polina Kosmadaki

Polina Kosmadaki is an art historian living and working in Athens. She holds a Ph.D in Art History from the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne. She is currently Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of the Department of Paintings of the Benaki Museum, Athens and a Lecturer of Art History in the European Studies program of the Hellenic Open University. Since 2008 she is an associate researcher of the French School at Athens’ Modern Section, currently the Head Researcher of a project on the editor and art critic Christian Zervos and his journal Cahiers d’art.

Her research interests lie in the avant-garde periodicals and exhibitions of the interwar period, the reception of Antiquity in contemporary art, institutional critique and exhibition history, the ethnographic turn of contemporary art, craft as critique. She has edited catalogues and contributed with articles and academic papers on modern and contemporary art in a number of journals and books. She has edited the volumes: Christian Zervos & Cahiers d’art, the archaic turn, 2019; Paris-Athènes 1919-1939 Le double voyage, École Francaise d’Athènes, 2018 (with Lucile Farnoux); Greece: Traces of today, Imago Mundi, Fabrica, Luciano Benetton Foundation, 2015; Institution critique-critical institutions, AICA HELLAS, September 2013 (with Elpida Karampa). She has curated numerous exhibitions both for the Benaki Museum and as an independent curator: Christian Zervos & Cahiers d’art, Benaki Museum, Musée Zervos Vézelay, École Francaise d‘Athènes 2019, Jannis Varelas, Anima I, 2019, Liquid Antiquity, DESTE & Benaki Museum 2017,  Ametria, Deste & Benaki Museum, 2015, George Lappas, Happy Birthday, Deste & Benaki Museum 2016, Cabinets of Miracles with Christoforos Marinos for ZONE D, 2010. Since 2011 she is running the commissions program «Artists in dialogue with the Benaki Museum» (Andy Holden, Adam Chodzko, Ciara Philips, Zafos Xagoraris, Antonis Pittas), in collaboration with the British Council, Greece. In 2017 she collaborated in Deste Foundation’s program Liquid Antiquity, a critical reflexion on the liquid relation between the ancient and the contemporary, while she directed Benaki Museum’s participation in documenta 14.