Artemis Eleftheriadou

Artists: Victoria Ahrens, Peter Ainsworth, Charalambos Artemis  & Alexandra Manglis, Nicolas Lambouris, Wiebke Leister, Adam O’Meara, Zé Barretta, Kyriaki Costa, Marina Kassianidou, Efi Savvides, Stephen Vaughan, Michal Baror, Armenoui Kasparian Sairadari, Thomas Nicolaou, Sara Sallam, Lena Séraphin & Andrea Meinin Bück, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Andreas Papallas & Thomas Aquilina. 

The exhibition Ar[t]chaeology is the outcome of a collaborative project between eighteen local and international artists, curators and academics who have been exploring this exact complex relationship between archaeology and contemporary photography by asking whether the two can work synergistically for the interpretation of material culture.  The artists involved in Ar[t]chaeology adopted archaeology in a Foucaultian way: as a methodological approach that understands discourse, classification and the archive as a dynamic set of relations. Inspired and drawing from the field of archaeological practices, artists in the exhibition work through excavation and fieldwork, the process of laboratory analysis and classification, and with archives to critically negotiate issues relevant to three main axes: I. unpacking and deconstructing official narratives, processes of memorialization, personal accounts, and witnessing, as a way of re-imagining history and the past II. tracing, collecting and appropriating fragments as a way of engaging with diverse temporalities, historical knowledge and discontinuity and III. engaging with existing archives and constructing new ones as sites for excavation and critical analysis

Finally, Ar[t]chaeology offers a platform for further discussion on how artists’ archaeological engagements, fabrications, and visual solutions may produce an alternative interpretive framework for material culture and the past. More importantly, the works, individually and collectively, ask how art/archaeology could offer us with a new connection with the present that has social and political rationality, especially in relation to fluid notions of historicity, identity, memory and materiality in the world of global encounters and transcultural crossings –all equally relevant to both archaeology and photography.

Organised by
NiMAC [The Nicosia Municipal Art Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation]
IAPT [International Association of Photography and Theory]  

Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2018-2019

Artists: Klitsa Andoniou, Helen Black, Lia Lapithi, Panayiotis Michael, Theodoulos Gregoriou, Socratis Socratous, 242

The exhibition ‘ATLANDIS LOST’ investigates the various understandings and meanings of land and its relation to notions of home and belonging. Land as yet another fundamental carrier of an unspoken subtext, it embodies literal and intellectual battlefields where desires, histories, identities and memories are being negotiated.  The understanding of land as a symbolic perception of stability and continuation of history has been repetitively ruptured in the contemporary era of constant mobility: yet land is in the center of another debate; that of an imminent ecological destruction.

Engaged with contemporary issues surrounding the concept of land, and seeking to gain a deeper insight into the long-standing relation between land, the individual and society, the works featured in ‘ATLANDIS LOST’ attempt to decode the consequences and implications of land’s conceptual loss. Three distinctive perspectives seem to emerge in the exhibition: In the work of Klitsa Antoniou, Helen Black and Lia Lapithi, the experience of the local and the current sociopolitical state of affairs, ignite a provocative agenda, pointing to a series of questions regarding identity, time and memory, space and boundaries, and the ambivalence of history.  For 242 and Panayiotis Michael, the mapping of a new land perception is firmly intertwined with the personal and the contemporary matrix, whereas Theodoulos Gregoriou and Socratis Socratous embark on a dialectical as well as literal ‘excavation’, seeking to break down the physical and the symbolic parameters of land.

Organised and Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports
High Commission of the Republic of Cyprus

Official Participation of the Cyprus Republic in the EU Cultural Weeks in India (EUCW).
Mati Ghar (Exhibition Gallery of Indira Gandi National Centre)
New Dehli, India, 2008

Artists & Designers: Artemis Eleftheriadou, Savvas Xinaris, Marianna Kafaridou, Demetris Kokkinolambos, Nicolas Lambouris, Costas Mantzalos

The exhibition I LIKE IKE was an inquiry into the relationship between language and Cypriot cultural and national identity. Exploring language and its codes, artists and designers exposed issues of prejudice, discrimination, national trauma and cultural decay observed in the current Cypriot context. Cypriot, a dialect deriving from Greek, has been a source of political and cultural debate as it negotiates larger issues such as the relationship between Cyprus and the ‘motherland’ Greece. Established as one of the three formal languages of the newly-founded Republic of Cyprus in 1960 together with Turkish and English, especially after the 1974 Turkish invasion and consequent division of the island, for the locals, Greek language became a complex and a problematic currier of opposing ideologies. However more than four decades later, spoken Cypriot -heavily influenced by the English language prevailing new media and culture of commerce- appear to reveal, in commonly used expressions, more complexed meanings and messages. The exhibition I LIKE IKE attempts to critically examine the hidden subtext of everyday language and takes upon humor and irony to confront and expose larger and difficult issues.

Organised by
NiMAC [The Nicosia Municipal Art Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation]
E.KA.TE [Cyprus Chamber of Arts]  

Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2008

Klitsa Antoniou’s Since you left my Wet Embrace (2004), echoes a recurrent range of ideas permeating the artists’ work. The fluidity of time and memory, the unavoidable certainty of loss and the futile longing of sustaining the past are some issues that the work attempts to unfold. he concept of water embedded in the essence of the work encompasses the reiterating quality of memory, whereas, the dysfunctional, pitiless vessel emphasises the infinite and unavoidable sense of loss towards things or people gone. The understanding of the perpetual mental process, of allowing the present to formulate and re-address the past, lies at the core of Antoniou’s work. The human capacity for recollecting, memory, is often perceived as a sum of concrete events and situations."Since you left my Wet Embrace", a title borrowed from a love song by Bjork, is in itself nostalgic and sad, suggesting the discontinuity of a narrative. The work becomes a painful comment to the incomplete and disturbing nature of loss in everyday life.

Organised and Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports

Official Participation of the Cyprus Republic in the Open XI, Venice, Italy, 2008

The exhibition Home Sweet Home sprung out of a University course and the need of young artists and designers to investigate how Cyprus’ geographic position, turbulent history and tradition has come to influence the way identity is formed. As a newly formed Republic facing a colonial past, an unsettled political state of affairs and a recent entry in the European Union, youth face binary oppositions regarding their sense of belonging. Torn between east and west traditions and culture, a sense of escapism and attachment is observed as one looks both inwards and outwards. The islands’ small scale, divided political situation, sudden economic growth and decline and conservative family and social traditions are some of the themes explored by the artworks presented in an effort to explore these relationships and look upon the conflicting issues that arise both in the private and public spheres.

Supported by
Frederick University Cyprus

Stoa Aischilou Gallery, Cyprus, 2008

Jean Baudrillard, in his essay The System of Collecting, (in The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal (eds.), Reaktion, London, 1994, pp.7-24), explains how all objects that are possessed, submit to the same abstractive operation and participate in a mutual relationship in so far they each refer back to the subject. They thereby constitute themselves as a system on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm.

In the exhibition Publish Me! through a series of painstakingly selected images, 242 try to abstract and summarize the human ties that consciously or unconsciously shape their social universe. The images of objects or faces demonstrate only a fraction of their meaning. An assembly of photographs laid in a grid is shown, revealing almost embarrassingly details that influenced their lives. The ability to transform objects and people into meaningful spiritual and mental sources is a seductive act, which holds sway over the subject. However, this is no ordinary photo album. Within it there lies a series of references of undetermined events, un-manifested desires, broken friendships, relationships of power and need. 242, caught in the middle of such bonds, are now playing ‘cats and dogs’ provoking the absurdity of coincidence and impossibility. In a playfully perverse mode, they dictate control over their world, and verify the irony underlying our everyday lives.

Organised and Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports
Stadtische Gallery, Erlangen, Germany, 2005

Artists: Klitsa Antoniou, Melita Couta, Panayiotis Michael, 242

The exhibition 100 Artist for a Museum was supported by the city of Casoria in collaboration with the International Contemporary Art Centre. The works exhibited were donated by over 100 Internationally known artist from 40 different countries together with the monumental works created at the sculpture symposium, April 2004 and the graffiti works during the symposium in February 2005 in an effort to promote a transnational conscience.

Cyprus participates with the segment A Broad Thinking featuring four works, contributed by Klitsa Antoniou, Melita Couta, Panayiotis Michael and the artist group 242. As art often becomes the means for connecting the personal and the social, the private and the political, illusion and reality, or even life and art practice, the four proposals by Cyprus are teamed together to explore a wide range of such issues arising in the context of contemporary culture. It is more accurate to say that, their coming together was materialised taking into account their differences in terms of art practice, subject matter and process. Expectantly, the works will offer a brief, yet a representative understanding of the current Cypriot art scene.

Organised by
The Casoria International Museum/
The International Contemporary Art Centre

Supported by
Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sports
Cyprus Participation, Italy, 2005