The Acropolis Museum’s newest exhibition, Allspice: Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures, offers a compelling journey through time, bringing together ancient Assyrian and Greek artifacts with contemporary works by acclaimed Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz. Opening on May 13 and running through October 31, 2025, this is the first in a trilogy of exhibitions unfolding across Athens through 2026, presented in collaboration with the NEON Organization.
Set within the Museum’s Temporary Exhibition Gallery, Allspice initiates a conversation between civilizations separated by millennia but united by shared themes of displacement, loss, and cultural resilience. Ancient relics 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 stand alongside Rakowitz’s poignant reconstructions of destroyed Assyrian masterpieces.
At the heart of the exhibition is Rakowitz’s long-running project, The invisible enemy should not exist, a series that recreates lost artifacts using humble materials like Middle Eastern food packaging and Arabic-English newspapers. These “reappearances” do not attempt to mask the gaps left by looting and war—instead, they embrace absence as testimony, turning trauma into tangible memory.