South by Southeast marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of EMΣT’s collection and its orientation. Drawing on recent acquisitions, donations, as well as existing works in the collection and donations, the exhibition foregrounds a new collection policy, begun in 2021, that looks beyond inherited Western canons and repositions Greece within a wider Mediterranean and south-eastern European cultural geography—one that extends through the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. In doing so, it reframes Greece not as the periphery of Western Europe, but as a central node in South East Europe and the Middle or ‘Near’ East, a historically entangled region shaped by mobility, exchange, conflict, multilingualism, and layered identities. The exhibition includes 50 artists from more than 20 countries.

The exhibition’s title is a deliberate play on Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, signaling a symbolic reorientation away from the long-standing fixation on Anglo-Saxon and Western European cultural paradigms that has marked Greek modernity since independence. Instead, South by Southeast insists on a more complex, plural cartography—one that acknowledges Greece’s strategic geographical location at the crossroads of continents, empires, and belief systems, and its deep historical affinities with the region once known as the Levant. This shift resonates with broader cultural and geopolitical currents, including what has been described recently as a contemporary “turn East” in Greece, reflecting renewed political, economic, and cultural engagements with neighbouring regions.

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