Twenty-Third Exhibition
Though one may interpret Klitsa Antoniou’s work as an elegiac journey through loss and trauma, in the exhibition Tall Tales Lovely Landmarks, Antoniou engages on a philosophical and aesthetic level in subverting rationalist distinctions between real and constructed space.
By examining fragments of modernist design like an archaeologist, or an anthropologist, Antoniou draws from the formal and aesthetic qualities of modernist architecture in order to transgress their vocabulary into distressing objects and installations. Her spatial interventions and installations question the constructed nature of delimiting devices; dividing lines, political boundaries and in particular the Cyprus Green Line, which problematise the use of the architectural forms they engage with. Instead, her work signals towards a modernist aesthetic and vocabulary that unravels the scheme of a political and historical utopia.
Challenging the idea of Utopia as the source of reflection, Antoniou draws on the Golden Lane Estate and the Green Line that divide the island of Cyprus as the point of reference to create this new body of work, which powerfully express her preoccupation against what we came to expect from this historic border or dividing line. And it is exactly this desire of reflection that allows the artist to create a new possibility of thought, where identities can be overdone and the binaries and dualisms that dominate the Cypriot culture can be re-thought and contested.
‘Klitsa Antoniou juxtaposes photography, everyday objects with drawing in order to reveal the complexities of memory, loss, trauma and space in relation to geo-political, art historical, aesthetic, and identity issues. Her constructed spaces, inspired by the ruins of the dividing line and the abject of the space, the dead zone as it is otherwise known, become spaces where through an interrogation of modernist architectural aesthetics she can reveal the interruptions of history in the spatiality of the city in order to create another possibility of history.’
Dr. Gabriel Koureas, Art Historian
Tall Tales Lovely Landmark is one of the Super Estate Projects, which celebrate the 50th anniversary of Golden Lane Estate.
17 Jun – 4 Jul 2010
