P.S. x10
Texts: Ioulita Toumazi
Curatorial team: Maria Leonidou, Ioulita Toumazi, AnnaMaria Charalambous
Exhibition design: Superside Studio – Eleonora Antoniadou
Graphics: Popi Pissouriou
Photographs: Nikolas Karatzas, Stephanie Keszi
— One day it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my extreme
individuality as a person but we’ll be one and the same.
Clarice Lispector, An apprenticeship or the book of pleasures, 1969 (translated in 2021)
Where does the person end and their world begin? How can we imagine those not present through what they left behind: their letters, notes, the objects they loved, their sketches and blueprints? What’s the relationship between archive and memory –both the collective and individual memory–?
Is it possible t0 find the artist –the person– through their art, their words and their
creative process? Can archives act as vessels that rescue something from oblivion? And if so, what do they save? Do they carry history, stories or a space through which to construct stories?
The exhibition poses the above questions and invites the public to excavate time and immerse themselves in a curated selection of the personal worlds of 10 pioneer Cypriot artists, born in the first three decades of the 20th century, that were significant for the art history, and therefore the history, of our island.
What our research made clear is that we shouldn’t think of the Cypriot artists just as individuals, but as parts of networks: They exchanged letters, talked about politics, taught art, co-founded artists collectives and they self-organised. They all had connetions with artists and theorists from abroad, and they traveled to show their work. Some of them were close friends, they often supported each other, they would sometimes criticise the local art scene, but most importantly, they all cared; They cared to build
an alternative way of thinking and creating, for freedom of expression, for
experimentation, for finding their voice. And finding one’s voice may seem like an
instinctive, organic process, but at that time it was a difficult one, especially if we
consider that those artists were born under British colonialism, decades before the
independence of the island, in a country with no art schools or cultural institutions.
The art scene today is the lineage of those artists, who started creating art out of dust.
And we are still trying to unearth what they left for us to find.
P.S. Through our research for this exhibition we noticed:
– It was much harder to discover information about the female artists, as we know that archives, like history, can be exclusionary, prejudiced and patriarchal.
– Most of what has been saved and presented in this show, has been saved out of love. The love of friends, relatives or collectors who protected the artists’ archives from decay. And this is difficult, it requires time and space and it shouldn’t just be an individual responsibility: a person against forgetfulness. Specialised, public structures should exist for protecting and making accessible the archives and works of artists.
The exhibition P.S.x10, organised by the Lefteris Economou Cultural Foundation, is the conclusion of a series of five exhibitions held over the past six years at GARAGE.
The Cultural Foundation and the curatorial team of the exhibition would like to express their sincere thanks to the families of the artists and to all those who provided material for the exhibition.
The exhibition is organised by the Lefteris Foundation Cultural Institution and it is
supported by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Department of Modern & Contemporary Culture.
