A transnational project under the name of oO
is The Republic of Cyprus’ contribution at the 55th Venice Biennale -
an unprecedented collaboration with the Lithuania National Pavilion to
discuss the very idea of national participation. The atypical, but
eye-catching, title lends to the unusual theme, and sets the stage for
the sequence of concepts created by Cypriot, Lithuanian and other
artists, united by their intent to influence the mental and physical
experience of the visitor.
Although multinational presentations are common to the Venice Biennale, oO
is the first example of a united front against the very idea of
national participation. Lithuanian curator and writer Raimundas
Malašauskas envisioned the project oO
as a ‘sequencer’ - a series of mental and physical pathways where
‘concepts are made, or discarded subsequently’ by the visitor. Artists
of different generations will meet at the 1970s modernist building of
the Venice Municipal Sports Hall at the Arsenale for a large-scale show
that effectuates diverse ideas about technology, subjectivity and the
body. The artists selected for the Cypriot branch of the exhibition are:
Lia Haraki, Maria Hassabi, Phanos Kyriacou, Constantinos Taliotis and
Natalie Yiaxi, along with the international participants Morten Norbye
Halvorsen, Jason Dodge, Gabriel Lester and Dexter Sinister.
Past winner of the Cyprus Dance Platform Choreography Award for her solos
Evergreen and
Eye to I,
Limassol-born Haraki (b. 1975) juggles contemporary dance and
performance in innovative ways. Haraki views the body as a carrier of
identity, yet subject to the transformative potential of performance. At
the center of the artist’s investigation in recent years is what she
terms ‘
Standup PerformDance’, which seeks to unite standup comedy with contemporary dance. Her latest touring project
Tune In will be stopping at the Venice Biennale via Dublin, Prague and Cologne.
Kyriacou
(b. 1977) is a visual artist concerned with the materiality of objects
and their place in the urban landscape. The artist’s ongoing project
Midget Factory
(2003 onwards) involves a series of annual pop up installations set in a
shop window in old Nicosia. Displayed near the abandoned lodgings of
the Green Line and the red light district, these disquieting displays
interfere with the daily routines of the unsuspecting passerby. With
each new encounter,
Midget Factory poses new questions and gives way to fresh interpretation. The artist splits his time between Nicosia and Berlin.
Book
art lies at the centre of Natalie Yiaxi’s visual fantasy (b. 1980):
‘The book is a bundle of time made up from a sequence of spaces. Spaces
in this case can be pages, images, sounds, moving image, consecutive
thoughts, a performance seen frame by frame. Sometimes the book is a
gesture; a music album; an object containing the space that contains the
book’. Last year the artist presented her first solo show, 35 Book Experiments, in Nicosia. Yiaxi has also taken part in group exhibitions in Athens, Dusseldorf and London.
Maria Hassabi (b. 1973) currently works as a director,
choreographer
and performance artist in New York, though her art projects, workshops
and lectures often take her to prestigious venues from Mexico City to
Tel Aviv. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2009 Grants to Artists Award. In 2012,
she also received The President’s Award for Performing Arts from the
LMCC. Her acclaimed work extends from performance to installation works
and film. In a recent project entitled
The Ladies, Hassabi
filmed six female performers, dressed in dark clothing and bright
lipstick, who paraded arbitrarily through different Manhattan
neighborhoods on random days during a two month period. The particular
slowness of their movement, and their unusual look inspired confusion
and wonder among pedestrians.
Writer and visual artist, Constantinos Taliotis (b. 1983) is the
youngest of the Cypriot group. His work balances between
video
and found object, the pictorial and the archival. Among his recent
projects is 50 Years of James Bond Against Architecture, presented at
PiLOT Gallery in Istanbul in 2013. The work was the culmination of two
years spent researching the aesthetics of gangster films and b-movies,
and is a prime example of Taliotis’ transdisciplinary practice.
The
art of Jason Dodge (b. 1969) is often minimalist or nonsensical in
appearance, but far more elaborate conceptually. His sculptures and
installations include little-altered everyday objects to which Dodge
gives a poetic substance and significance that influences the viewer’s
perceptions of them. In the words of the artist: ‘Generally, it is the
people, the subjects that are lacking in what I do. I’m talking to you
about them, but they’re not there. It’s as if I were using the feeling
of loss as material’. Dodge recently exhibited at the 2012 Paris
Triennale and the 30th Sao Paolo Biennial. His work is part of the
permanent collection of the esteemed Guggenheim Museum in New York.
With
a focus on electronic media and open source sound, Havlorsen (b.
1980) employs drawing, sound, sculpture, film, performance and
photography in his work. He is a contributor at
OCA - Office for
Contemporary Art Norway, a foundation that aims to strengthen the
position of contemporary visual arts and encourage synergies between
international artists. Some of his projects include:
The Museum Problem in Rome (2012),
More or Less, A Few Pocket Universes in Helsinki (2011) and
Repetition Island
in Paris (2010), for which he filmed activities that unfolded during
one ten hour day in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition space.
Gabriel
Lester’s (b. 1972) passion for the narrative has evolved from his early
creation of prose and electronic music to encompass more widely
cinematic artworks. Through his installations, which are at once visual
and narrative, his goal is to challenge viewers’ perception of their
surrounding environment. Recent solo exhibitions include:
Suspension of Disbelief in Rotterdam (2011) and
Big Bang
in London (2007). He has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions around the world, including last year’s dOCUMENTA in Kassel,
Germany. His film
Urban Surface was screened at the Venice Biennale in 2007.
Artist
duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey have been devising new ways to
print and edit, publish and design books and journals - both digital and
in print under the name Dexter Sinister. Working in contrast to today’s
large-scale publishers, Dexter Sinister propose an on-demand publishing
model and alternative distribution strategies that are both economical
and ecological. In 2011, they created, along with artist and writer
Angie Keefer, The Serving Library,
a journal with a wide palette of critical and artistic contributors,
while in 2012 they took part in the Museum of Modern Art’s
Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language exhibition in New York.
The Cyprus Team
Artists: Lia Haraki, Maria Hassabi, Phanos Kyriacou,
Constantinos Taliotis, Natalie Yiaxi, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Jason
Dodge, Gabriel Lester, Dexter Sinister.
Commissioner: Louli Michaelidou.
Deputy Commissioners: Angela Skordi, Marika Ioannou.
Curator: Raimundas Malašauskas.
Venue: Palasport 'Giobatta Gianquinto' Calle San Biagio 2132, Castello
By Danai Molocha
Images courtesy: 1: PiLOT Gallery. 2: Lia Haraki. 3: Phanos Kyriacou. 4: Maria Hassabi, SHOW, 2007/Photo by Darial Sneed.
5:Yvon Lambert Gallery. 6: Gabriel Lester. 7: Dexter Sinister.
