ART PRESENTATION:Maria Loizidou-Transcapes/The Halted Traveler
How do contemporary Cypriot artists orientate themselves in a landscape marked by conflict? What kind of issues do they seek to address when they choose to do so, and how does their work contribute to our understanding of landscape? These are some of the questions initiated by Exercises on Orientation, a curatorial project investigating the significance of landscape in the work of contemporary Cypriot artists. Initially presented at Nicosia Municipal Art Centre (NiMAC) “Exercises in Orientation” involved the development of two projects: Transcapes/The Halted Traveler by Maria Loizidou and Overtones by sound artist Antonis Antoniou. For the exhibition at the Peltz Gallery, the project includes Mustafa Hulusi’s Recollections of Underdevelopment and Panayiotis Michael’s Landscape. Transcapes/The Halted Traveler is a proposition which attempts to comment on such wanderings around the multifaceted concept of the landscape. In the exhibition it unfolds as a memory-recall workshop aiming to involve the participants in a constructive network for outlining personal landscapes. In the context of this proposition, these landscapes are ‘crossbred’ to produce a narrative made up of multiple, conflicting and contradictory memories.The initial tools of this workshop are the eight handmade notebooks-reconstructions1 of borrowed images, thoughts and correspondence, borrowed texts and works whose fragile makeup provides the favourable conditions for the development of personal narratives. The reader of this notebook – who may be the archaeologist, the poet, the painter, the writer, the curator, the architect – emphasises different areas of memory and produces his or her own landscape which is recorded on video2 and added to the tools of the workshop to help create more notebooks and more records that will enhance the conditions for recalling memories. Our involvement in the workshop for generating this favourable moment for signifying a familiar place enables our senses to function and produce scenes that were never recorded and whose emergence helps us to register ourselves as part of the landscape.
Info: Curating “Exercises in Orientation”: Elena Parpa, Curating: “Transcapes/The Halted Traveler”: Elena Parpa and Maria Loizidou, Peltz Gallery, Exhibition space in Birkbeck’s School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, Duration: 12/1-11/2/15, Mon-Fri: 13:00-20:00, Sat: 13 :00-17:00 www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/peltz-gallery
