Layers of Visibility

Between 2013 and 2017, artists associated with the University of Plymouth, UK, responded to Cyprus through residencies at NiMAC. The works included in the exhibition and publication indicate a range of different responses to the island and to the complex layers of Cypriot culture, a place where historically the Hellenic and the Islamic were variously entangled and, along with legacies of British colonialism, remain marked now.

Place is constituted through geography, history, memories and narratives that reflect cultural currencies, familial and personal lived experience. Cyprus is a land of complex tensions. The economy primarily centres on tourism, small-scale industrial enterprise, services and agricultural production. Through photography, video and painting, the artists in the exhibition discover and explore challenging stories and trajectories of local realities: new architectural developments in contested urban settings; the situation of refugee dogs in shelters; military presence in a divided island, family memory and symbolic legacies; and the dead zone as a complex metaphor for links as well as divisions. For outsiders, there is much more to be discovered than that which first meets the eye.

The curators, and some artists, will be available on the afternoon of Friday 19th or the morning of Saturday 20th October for questions or broadcast interviews.

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

Carole Baker is a practice based researcher exploring posthumanist and phenomenological debates around the non-human animal through a Critical Realist photographic practice. Her current work Sensing the Familiar juxtaposes the social realities of Cyprus dog rescue with philosophical reflections on the nature of alterity, being, power and knowledge.

Christopher Cook is a painter who employs broadly surrealist processes and a specific monochrome medium to interrogate a range of themes, including genetic modification, sacred and profane architecture, and migration/protectionism. His work questions the relationship between painting and photographic reproduction, and between surrealist approaches and Eastern philosophies.

Stuart Moore is a film-maker and sound artist based in Plymouth. His work screens internationally and he has won awards from London Short Film Festival and two South West Media Innovation Awards. He is currently a 3D3 AHRC-funded doctoral researcher at Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE, whose PhD inquiry focuses on personal archives, film and memory.

Liz Nicol’s projects are about sites of conflict, from memorials of the Great War to the environs of the Venetian Lagoon. Investigating place through the processes of photography with high and low tech cameras and camera-less image making, depictions of place are brought together in her preferred exhibition format.

Kayla Parker is an artist film-maker who creates innovative works for cinema, gallery, public and online spaces using film-based and digital technologies. Her research interests centre around subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives, with a particular interest in the interrelationship between still and moving image, and new materialism.

Simon Standing explores our relationship to sacred and secular architectural environments through photographic research. Current projects focus on urban development on Cyprus undertaken within the recent artist residency. Further research explores his relationship with Gothic cathedrals that have been a very particular element of his personal and photographic identity over the last thirty years.

CURATORS

Liz Wells writes and lectures on photographic histories and practices, and curates exhibitions on land and environment. She co-edits Photographies journal and is series editor for Photography, Place, Environment, Bloomsbury Academic Press (forthcoming). She is an elected member of the Board of Directors, Society for Photographic Education, and in 2017 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University of Gothenburg.

Yiannis Toumazis , writer, curator, Director of NiMAC and the Pierides Foundation, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cyprus Theatre Organisation, is also an assistant professor at Frederick University, Nicosia. In 2011 he acted as curator for the Cypriot Pavilion, Venice Biennale.