Allspice | Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures

Allspice | Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures is a temporary exhibition held at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, running from 13 May to 31 October 2025. It is the first exhibition of a living artist’s work in the museum’s history. The show is the opening chapter of a trilogy unfolding between 2025 and 2026, organised by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Acropolis Museum and NEON, and curated by the museum’s general director Nikolaos Chr. Stampolidis with NEON’s director Elina Kountouri.

The exhibition sets fourteen works by Rakowitz against thirteen ancient objects on loan from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and one from the Thanos N. Zintilis Collection of Cypriot antiquities. Among the contemporary works are selections from the artist’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, which reconstructs artefacts looted or destroyed from Iraq’s National Museum in cardboard and the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs. Rakowitz is an artist of Baghdadi-Jewish descent. The exhibition title refers to a spice associated with his mother’s kitchen; the works address themes of displacement, restitution, and the survival of cultural objects in conditions of conflict and exile.

The exhibition is installed in the Temporary Exhibition Gallery on the ground level of the museum, which was designed by Bernard Tschumi and Michael Photiadis and opened in 2009. The museum’s permanent programme includes the Parthenon Gallery on the third floor, which holds the surviving frieze fragments.