This group exhibition features work by seven invited artists alongside prints from the collection of Hambis Municipal Printmaking Museum, gathered over a long period of artists’ workshops facilitated at Plataniskia and by exchanges between artists. The artists in this show incorporate printmaking in their practice, each in their own way, to touch upon issues of locality and memory, human and more-than-human entanglements, love and sensuality. Parallel events will be announced throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Participating Artists:
Evelyn Anastasiou, Panayiotis Andreou, Kyriaki Costa, Kyriacos Theocharous, Eleni Panayidou, Simone Philippou, Korallia Stergides
In dialogue with works from the museum’s collection by:
Kostas Averkiou, Eleni Hadjineophytou, Kyriakos Kallis, Glafkos Koumides, Stella Lantsia, Lefteris Olympios, Frixos Papantoniou, Stass Paraskos, Michalis Phantaros, Mary Plant, Despo Pringi, Rinos Stefani, Hambis Tsangaris, Marianna Tsangarou, Evgenia Vasiloudi, Stelios Votsis
Co-curated by Evagoras Vanezis & Nicola Mitropoulou
Graphic Design: Popi Pissouriou
Ammochostou 55 – 59, Nicosia 1016
Duration: 23 September 2023 - 15 March 2024
Curatorial Note:
The exhibition’s visual narrative takes as its starting point a small work by Hambis, a linocut from 1970, which carries the title Of Theater and the Sun. A black, solid sun at its rightmost corner is the center of a web of concentric circles, which suggest a diffusion of light that is all entangling, strong in its presence, and denoted by black lines. Within this tangle, ten figures without faces -the theater’s chorus?- are enmeshed in a dance that suggests a pleading to a sun god; a weird exercise in balancing; or a practice of urgency (feel free to make your own connection.)
What would happen if we thought of this ritual as a plight of bodies thirsty to give the sun a place to rest? Will we stay a bit more with the sensation of a sustained caress, of the flesh that burns ever so lightly in its touch with the world, sometimes even pleasantly so, and asks of the world to sustain this relationship?
Closer to a Sustained Caress is conceptualized as an essay exhibition, with emphasis given to the ways in which the artworks interact and connect to each other and the surrounding architecture. Materials, images, words and worlds co-exist, leaving the audience free to piece together their own experiential response.
The emphasis shifts between the specifics of each artist’s work and the (un)easy temporality suggested by a sustained caress. An opportunity arises to rethink printmaking in terms of its relation to time as a nuanced concept: how much one sustains the caress is integral to the works’ becoming, and becoming is always becoming-with, in a contact zone where the personal, the political, and the poetic intermingle.
