We are pleased to share with you that Outset Greece is proudly supporting the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art — everything must change. Radical Intelligence. Saloniki 9 — on view from May 23 to July 5, 2026, across Thessaloniki International Fair–HELEXPO (Pavilions 2 & 3), MOMUS-Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kalochori Lagoon at the Axios Delta National Park.
Organised by MOMUS-Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki and curated by independent curator and art historian Nadja Argyropoulou, the 9th edition reconfigures the institution both spatially and conceptually. Taking the form of a "para-biennale", it engages with the urgency, ambiguity and contested politics of a phrase — everything must change — that today resonates as both a revolutionary cry and an empty slogan, wielded by social revolutionaries and techno-feudalists alike, by persecuted activists and fascist-adjacent demagogues, by countercultures and institutional propaganda. The shorthand "S9" evokes Saloniki, an older, eastern-rooted name for the city, inserting in the Biennale a double movement both towards and away from its place.
Curated to connect life and art in unexpected ways — through humour, ingenuity, and a spirit of joyful militancy that remains non-didactic yet alternatively pedagogical — the Biennale acknowledges paradoxes of enclosure and escape, takes pleasure in errant paths and improvisation, and attends to the intimate labour of the unrecognised. The "Radical Intelligence" of the title looks beyond the trite thauma–trauma binary of the AI moment toward the multi-layered, revolutionary thinking that resides elsewhere, while envisioning a world of many worlds.
The exhibition brings together a substantial cohort of Greek and international artists, alongside major thematic installations — among them Pan Daimonium. On Surrealism as a state of mind; The Museum of Friendship, drawing on the Jean-Marie Drot collection on the island of Ios; Earth in Turmoil and Agitprop machines, with works of the Russian Avant-Garde from the G. Costakis Collection at MOMUS-Museum of Modern Art; and Flipper Zone. Playing against the spectacle, co-curated with Vanessa Theodoropoulou.
Curator Nadja Argyropoulou notes: "What are the things that 'must change'? How, when, by whom, and with whom? Might the 'sustainable dismantling' of institutions, practices, and rituals that confine and alienate us be just as vital as the sustainable growth of everything that heals and unites us?"
