Ametria

Ametria is the privilege of disproportion, of excess, the rejection of an overall vision, the error that turns out to be right. Out of the meeting of the Benaki Museum and the DESTE Foundation, works and objects become proofs of an impulse that, as a precise and determinate entity, takes part in the evolution of thought.

Totally uninterested in the values of community life, which promotes the virtues of measure and the happy mean, dismeasure is the expression of an original purposeless drive, which chooses neither to have nor not to have and whose sole intention is to be exercised without reserve. The degree of dismeasure is dependent on just how radical is the drive that expresses it.

When a drive that dominates the field of consciousness finds a particular form, it becomes instigation, stirring opposition or prompting imitation. If the imitation overcomes by impulse the inclination to restraint, an epidemic phenomenon occurs that forces the community to change its way of thinking and behaviour and its common action. An order of dismeasure can be extended to the point of becoming a conventional value, triggering a series of effects from the social environment to the natural person.

Ametria is organized by the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum. The collaboration between the two institutions was initiated in 2014 and, through a series of solo and group contemporary art exhibitions hosted at the Benaki Museum, aims to promote new and radical developments in contemporary art practice and inspire novel curatorial approaches.

The exhibition is based on an idea by Roberto Cuoghi.
Curatorial team: Nicoletta De Rosa, Polina Kosmadaki, Alessandro Pasini, Tomaso Piantini, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis.