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 artefacts 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 Temporary Exhibition Gallery of the Acropolis Museum – 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.

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