National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens is the only national Greek institution focusing solely on collecting contemporary Greek and international art. The museum actively collects art to enrich its permanent collection focusing on work from the latter half of the 20th century and contemporary works. The museum reopened in February 2020 after and now shows an impressive collection of contemporary art including the works of Gillian Wearing, John Baldessari and Rebecca Horn - Apollo magazine describes the museum as ‘a collection worth waiting for’.

Challenge:

The National Museum is a fast growing collection with continuous work being done to write and translate artwork interpretation texts. Staff were looking for a simple process to update information on new collection items for visitors. Working to raise the profile of contemporary Greek artists, the museum was also looking to make their collection more discoverable, shareable and accessible. They were looking for an avenue to not only highlight the work of Greek contemporary artists but also improve their own data in a flexible way that would grow with their collection.

Our solution:

Smartify’s dashboard can be used in different ways: some collections want to host a few items as part of a tour and upload works manually, others want to import their entire collection and work with our data experts to integrate their collection automatically. With the National Museum we decided to go one step further and worked as consultants to cleanse their data and created an API to easily integrate their database with Smartify.

The result:

The API not only allowed the National Museum to share their collection with Smartify - they can also use the API to share their data with other sources to continue growing access to their collection. With ongoing database integration, artworks updated in their own system are automatically added to the Smartify platform. The guide is kept up to date without manual data entry ensuring the best possible visitor experience.