Look under the hood
Μaria Loizidou
27 September – 31 October 2019
Maria Loizidou’s new proposal Look Under the Hood, in collaboration with the Lefteris Economou Foundation, will take place at the Garage Art Gallery, Famagusta Street i Nicosia, from September 27th to October 31st. The character of a retrospective approach, steers the artist towards attempting to activate some 22 venues with which she has collaborated over the course of her 35 years of work, in order to understand our dialectical relationship with art and the city, through the diversity of the reasons behind it, and by questioning the means of documentation and memory.
We see the projects that are hosted, together for the first time, and we can view them as references and notes, travelling through journeys and walking paths that help us connect with each other with new interpretations: textual, virtual, emotional.
If the observation is at the heart of this theme, Loizidou’s proposal attempts to contribute to emerging questions such as: Where am I now? What is this place
Starting from the main showroom Garage, which is loaded with the history of the Tahtakale area within the city walls, the proposal borrows its title from the English expression Look under the Hood, which refers to the attention we need to show to the detail of things (such as oil and water for the operation of the car). The fact that it was also used by feminist΄s movements of the 70’s, commenting on the responsibility of a society against the proper evaluation of the parameters composing it, causes the artist to extend to the opposite venue of a car garage in operation, with the well-known naked photos of Pirelli. In a dialogue with them and in general with all the details contained in the garage and with the contribution of the engineer owner, a shared ambiance is produced as a tool for understanding synergies, otherwise heterogeneous to one another.
As trail hunters we are called upon to walk where others have walked and with the feeling that we are not the last to march against the threat to human fragility.
During the exhibition the artist gathers old and new collaborators from the local and international scene, to make the Look Under the Hood proposal a platform for workshops, discussions and challenges to the production of thought and new proposals.
Brief CV
Maria Loizidou is a visual artist, educated in Lyon, France and settled in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has taken part in exhibitions (Documenta 14, 2017, Venice Biennale of Art, Cyprus National participation, Arsenal 1986 and Architecture, Cyprus and Greek National group participation, 2016, 2006, 2004). She created public projects (Kerameikos, Athens, Fatima, Portugal, Futuroscope, Poitier) and gave lectures in various institutions. Relevant collaborations with museums (MAMC, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint Etienne, Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, Benaki Museum, Athens,EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Sungkok Museum, Seoul, Bozar: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) keep renewing her work’ s perspective enriching it with social and political concerns giving emphasis to “the power of fragility”. Her collaboration with AA & U For Architecture, Art and Urbanism has given her the possibility to address such issues on an interdisciplinary level.
