At the confluence of the familiarity provided by the home and its capacity to give one freedom to experiment, there is a small, imaginary room. Its walls can be made of anything you like—cell membrane, mosquito nets, a eucalyptus fence—but its dimensions are always conditional on the space needed for your various fantasies to stretch their arms and legs, to contemplate what’s outside and invite it inside. “11 Parthenon, Ayios Andreas, 1105 Nicosia, Cyprus” is our way of launching this space, of asking it to disclose itself to whatever is waiting outside. We invite you to join this exhibition like this, to enter it knowing your presence is both intervening and surrendering.
Being asked to take off your shoes or coat, to hang your bag on the hook by the door, upon entering a home, is as much a representation of a sudden increase in awareness of the body, of one’s presence in a room, as much as it is an act of disarmament. Look at Arnold Böcklin’s Spring Awakening—beyond its physical conversation on colour and the body, it does a strange thing for perspective: positioned carefully, the placing of each figure suggests to the viewer that you are at the front door of this painting, at the front door of their forest, swinging momentarily between having been granted permission to enter and willing your body to step through it. The uncertainty of what lies behind the figures is a proposition for openness, for all the insects you might find, for all the variations in redness, in micro pockets of water, in moods, for all the things, real and not real, that are moving towards something.
In this way we invite you into this space. We locate a lightness in this invitation, a permission to be ghostly and lingering, as much as there is license to be bound by something you might find inside, to use a tool or make one, to be hosted or be the host, to decide what makes up the forest and what divides it.
—Penelope Ioannou
Participating artists:
Michael Anastassiades, Penelope Ioannou, Michael Kleine, Roman Lemberg, Marietta Mavrokordatou, Hana Miletić, Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis, Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio, Shinji Nakaba, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano, Vittorio Visciano, Valentina Desideri & Constantina Zavitsanos
Conceived by
Andre Zivanari and Haris Epaminonda
at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia
until February 9, 2025