Ar[t]chaeology

Archaeology is a field of inquiry that directly deals with material culture and the study of objects/artefacts, primarily as a means of providing coherent ideas for the interpretation of the past. However, poststructuralist theories that sprung in the late 1970’s led to a still relevant widespread critical discussion about archaeology’s failings in fully understanding and embracing the social and political dimensions of objects, their multifaceted relationship to history and human societies, as well as the proliferation of competing narratives. The task of encouraging diverse viewpoints and comprehending the social role of objects seems to demand an interdisciplinary approach. 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: (1) unpacking and deconstructing official narratives, processes of memorialization, personal accounts, and witnessing, as a way of re-imagining history and the past [Victoria Ahrens; Peter Ainsworth, Charalambos Artemis & Alexandra Manglis, Nicolas Lambouris, Wiebke Leister and Adam O’Meara]; (2) tracing, collecting and appropriating fragments as a way of engaging with diverse temporalities, historical knowledge and discontinuity [Ze Barretta, Kyriaki Costa, Marina Kassianidou, Efi Savvides and Stephen Vaughan]; and (3) engaging with existing archives and constructing new ones as sites for excavation and critical analysis [Michal Baror, Armenoui Kasparian, Thomas Nicolaou, Sara Sallam, Lena Seraphin and Andrea Meinin Bück, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Andreas Papallas & Thomas Aquilina].

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. 

PROGRAMME:
Friday 19 October 2018
20:00 Opening and guided tour with the curators (in English)
21:00 Opening Party at NiMAC’s courtyard

Guided tours in Greek:
Wednesdays at 18:00
24 October 2018| 7, 14, 21 November 2018
5, 12 December 2018 | 9 January 2019
Reservation required
T: 22797400 (Mon-Fri 08:30-14:30)

Exhibition opening hours:
Tuesday-Saturday, 10:00-21:00

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES of ARTISTS

Victoria Ahrens is an artist, writer and researcher from Argentina, based in London. She holds an MA and PhD in Photographic Theory and Practice from Birkbeck College, University of London, and an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, and her work features in private and public collections in the UK, France and China. She has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Celeste Photography Prize and the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize. Her work looks at the contemporary translation of photographic aura in political landscapes of trauma.

Peter Ainsworth lives and works in London. He is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of Portsmouth and he is currently undertaking a PhD in the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths University, London with working title, Allure, Reception and Affect of the Contemporary Photographic Image. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art Houston. He has been awarded a Pavilion Commission, Flash Forward Award, and was the recipient of the inaugural Dazed and Confused Emerging Artist Award.

Charalambos Artemis is a photographer based in Nicosia, Cyprus. He has been practicing photography since 1999. He was awarded the Metroimaging Bursary (2001) and a Merit at the UK Association of Photographers’ Fujifilm Assistants Awards (2002). By 2007 his portrait work was exhibited in London’s National Portrait Gallery. His professional clients included the Guardian Weekend, Virgin Books, University College London, TimeOut London, Saatchi & Saatchi, and UNESCO. His most recent project, ISLANDLISTENING, a meditation on surveillance and Cypriot landscape, was exhibited at the AG Leventis Gallery in 2016.

Alexandra Manglis is a writer based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 19th century American literature and is the co-founder of the experimenting literary journal Wave Composition. Her fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in Strange Horizons, the Times Literary Supplement, The Millions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books and she is currently co-editing a book of collected essays to be published by Milkweed Editions in the USA in 2019. In 2017 she was awarded the Susan C. Petrey scholarship to attend Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop in Seattle, WA, USA.      

Nicolas Lambouris received a BA in Studio Arts and a BA in Media Studies, from Queens College, City University of New York, and an MFA in Photography from Kent Institute of Art & Design, University of Kent. He is a faculty member at the Department of Fine & Applied Arts at Frederick University, Cyprus and is the president of the International Association of Photography and Theory (IAPT). His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally and is part of private and state art collections. He mainly works with photography, installation, video and collage.

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher living in London. She studied at the University in Essen and gained a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. As well as being course leader for MA Photography at London College of Communication, she exhibits and publishes her work internationally, receiving several awards. As an artist she works with photography, collage and performance, and her written practice spans from academic papers to text-based works for the gallery. She is a co-organizer of the Photography and the Contemporary Imaginary Research Hub and a core member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at University of the Arts London.

Adam O’Meara is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media Humanities and Performance and the Programme Leader of the MA in Photography at the University of Lincoln, UK. He earned his BA in Film and Photography from Newport School of Arts and Design and his MA in Photography from De Montfort University. He has exhibited widely in the UK and the US and his work has featured in a number of publications including The Photographic Review, Immediate 3, and Year of the Artist (2001) published by British Arts Council.

Zé Barretta is a photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He attended the Escola Panamericana de Arte, with a specialization in photography and is currently a graduate student in geography at the University of Sao Paulo. He has extensive experience in daily photojournalism and portraiture. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions and has received many awards, highlighting the Porto Seguro 2010 Photo Prize, Visura Photo Grant 2016, AI-AP Latin America Fotografia 5 and Centro de Estudios Brasileños of Salamanca University, Spain.

Kyriaki Costa is a Cypriot artist based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She studied Byzantine and Applied Arts in Greece and the United Kingdom. She received her Masters degree in Art from Kingston University, London. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of private and public art collections, as well as of the State Collection in Cyprus. She received numerous distinctions, including a number of Biennale awards. Costa is also an activist in Cyprus and she deals with topographies, histories, and place-making, by using art as an anthropological practice and as a set of interventions on the social and the political.

Marina Kassianidou obtained an M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and a Ph.D. in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts. She is Assistant Professor in Art Practices, University of Colorado Boulder. She has exhibited her work in Europe and the US and has had solo exhibitions in Nicosia, London and Chicago. Her work is found in several private and public collections. She received numerous awards including grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation and fellowships at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, and Ragdale Foundation.

Efi Savvides is a visual artist and art educator based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Her work seeks to investigate conditions of exclusion set up by institutions of power, especially in relation to minority groups in Cyprus. Savvides has presented her work at the 21st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, the 4th International Cairo Biennale, and the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art as well as in group shows at institutions including House of Cyprus and Benaki Museum, both in Athens; European Economic and Social Committee, Brussels; Espace Commines, Paris; Goethe Institute, in Thessaloniki; and NiMAC, Thkio Ppalies, and Phytorio, in Nicosia.

Stephen Vaughan is Senior Lecturer in Photography and member of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University. He earned his MA in Photography at the University of Brighton. His photographs are held in a number of public and private collections in the UK and internationally, including the National Photographic Collection at the National Media Museum. His work has also been shown in solo exhibitions in the UK and America. His photographic research projects have been awarded in the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards and Photolucida’s Critical Mass Awards. He was also nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet.

Michal Baror works in Israel. She received her BA in Fine Art from Bezalel, Jerusalem (2008) and her MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London (2013). Her Solo shows include -It Is No Dream in TEA, Tenerife (2018), Looters in the CCA, Tel Aviv (2017), Abandoned Property in the Yad Mordechai Kubbutz (2016), The Hawks and the Sparrows in the Petach-Tikva Museum of Art (2015).Recently Baror participated in a number of group exhibitions in London, New York and Vienna. She is the recipient of Young Artist Prize for 2015 and the ARTPORT residency for 2015-2016.

Armenoui Kasparian Saraidari is originally from Greece. She earned her PhD from Central Saint Martins, UAL (2018), and her MA in Photography from the same school. She was a former fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellowship). She has exhibited her work widely including the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India, the CRASSH Research Centre of Cambridge University, the Christie’s, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China. Kasparian Saraidari has also presented her research work in numerous international conferences on photography. Her practice focuses on photographic archives, materiality, memory, post-memory and trauma.

Thomas Nicolaou is a British, Oxford based visual artist, graphic designer and tutor. He is an Associate Lecturer at the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University and holds an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster (2016). He has exhibited both in the UK and internationally. In 2008 his work was displayed at Tate Modern for Street or Studio: A Photobook and in 2011 he had a photograph shortlisted for Everyday Journeys by the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2013, he was runner up for Images on the Move a photography competition organised by The Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), Oxford.

Sara Sallam is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist based in the Netherlands. She has a BA in Media Design from the German University in Cairo, an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication, and is currently pursuing an MA in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University. She was a grantee in Magnum Foundation’s Arab Documentary Photography Program, and Mophradat’s Grants for Artists. Her photobook The Invisible was shortlisted in Kassel Photobook Award, PhotoIndependent Art Fair, and was exhibited in Offprint and Format Festival. She was nominated for Joop Swart Masterclass, and was a finalist for Lange-Taylor Prize.

Lena Séraphin is a visual artist based in Helsinki. She completed her doctoral dissertation for the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in spring 2017 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Her work consists of collaborative writings and visual works that give emphasis to display as a dramaturgic event. Séraphin relates to the mediums of text, photography, installation and moving image.

Andrea Meinin Bück is a photographer acting on the international field. Meinin Bück worked for the Vera Incessu Patuit Dea Foundation during 1996–2000, while photographing disappearing European cultural heritage. She faced several culturohistorically important sites under the threat of demolition. Her intense interest in cultural history subsequently led to radicalisation and forced Meinin Bück, in her own words, to go “underground”.

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is a visual artist, researcher and educator based in Nicosia. She is an Associate Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology and the coordinator of its Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab. She holds a PhD in museum studies from the University of Leicester and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. She has exhibited and published widely and she is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship. Her artistic and research interests intertwine and include museum studies and visual sociology with an emphasis on photography.

Andreas Papallas and Thomas Aquilina first collaborated during their MPhil in Architecture at the Uni-versity of Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Design Research Studio. Andreas Papallas is a researcher and an architectural designer interested in evaluating, analysing and visualising complex urban conditions. His previous work set out to explore the role of design in ameliorating inter-ethnic tensions and encouraging meaningful interactions. His recent work on Nicosia has been presented and exhibited in Cambridge, San Francisco, Cartagena, Waterloo and Madrid.

Thomas Aquilina is an architectural designer, urban researcher and itinerant academic. His on-going research explores the everyday life of downtown cities through a synthesis of image and text. He is currently a designer for Adjaye Associates and previously a researcher for LSE Cities. His recent photography and film-work has been exhibited in London, Cambridge, Delft, Groningen, Johannesburg and Kampala.