everything must change. RIS9

With the ambiguous title, everything must change. RIS9, the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is organized by MOMUS and curated by independent curator Nadja Argyropoulou.

It engages with a common(place), yet (re)current, urgent, and plural demand that, with its punchiness, can feel like a revolutionary cry and echo like an empty slogan, ring like a rage bait and work like a charm; there is something in it for everyone, and it does not belong to anyone. It is a phrase that is now, more than ever, wielded by social revolutionaries and technofeudalists alike, by persecuted activists and fascist-adjacent demagogues, by rival social classes and diametrically opposed collective forms of expression, by countercultures and institutional propaganda. It is being used to erase the gap between the home and the streets, the click and the walk, to highjack ambivalence and twist solidarity.

Premiere: Agnieszka Polska, Red River, 2026 

"It may seem that we are living at the end of an epoch, an epoch that few lucky ones will remember as auspicious, and even fewer as compassionate. Yet, as the process of global rearrangement of social and political orders looms over everything we know, it is difficult to trust the change. No ethical entity guards over the crushing forces of reconfiguration, and the new world order might bring only a new dimension of cruelty. Similarly, it is difficult to navigate one’s role of a witness to this ultimate social and political change. As heartbreaking accounts of violence are blended with meaningless, machine-generated content, the very notion of truth ceases to exist. The unbelievable and the surreal is to be trusted more than any realistic picture pretending to capture “normality”.

Red River is a short live-action film presenting the emotional depths brought by the current political climate. Shot entirely from the strict subjective viewpoint of an unspecified protagonist, the film resembles the visual frame of a first-person shooter video game frame: the audience sees events through the lead character's eyes. The character wanders through eerily empty streets of Thessaloniki, checks reels from the ongoing genocide in Palestine, hums an old Greek folk song and encounters awkward passers-by. 

Shot in Thessaloniki and Mount Papandayam in Indonesia, Red River blends two radically different landscapes into a seamless continuity, through which reverberates a folk song: I kissed red lips, which dyed my lips red, which dyed a kerchief, which dyed a river… Reflecting on past and contemporary horrors, the film poses a question: if we can’t believe our eyes, what connects us to reality?" - Agnieszka Polska