Crisis Center

THESSALONIKI, GREECE 09.26.11

Originally published at http://artforum.com/diary/id=29023 by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“YOU GET A STRANGE IMPRESSION of a city when you arrive and everything is closed because it’s Sunday,” mused Sueyun Locks, art patron and owner of the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. A parade of shuttered storefronts on the streets of Thessaloniki passed by the windows of a shuttle bus bringing Locks and a half dozen other people to the opening of the city’s third biennial on September 18. “Due to the crisis, everything will be closed on Monday as well. Just so you don’t have the wrong impression,” said Margarita Pournara, a tough-nosed critic from an Athens newspaper, an edge of steely humor in her voice.

The weight of the Greek debt crisis looms over this edition of the biennial like a boulder. According to a local paper, Thessaloniki’s State Museum of Contemporary Art, which has been organizing the event since it began in 2007, had received less than 2 percent of its one-million-euro budget as of September 1. On Saturday, after the Greek government passed another round of austerity measures, almost everyone in the city went on strike, “including the police,” said Melina Melikidou, who had been hired by the museum as a secretary on a temporary contract but was doing, by my estimation, three higher-level jobs for the biennial at once. On Friday, a small-business owner in his fifties, up to his eyeballs in loan payments, doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire on a sidewalk in front of a Thessaloniki bank. (He survived, as did his debt.) Suicide rates in Greece have doubled since the crisis began. Read the rest of this entry »