The sky you kept for us
Curatorial team: Ioulita Toumazi, AnnaMaria Charalambous, Maria Leonidou
Exhibition design: Eleonora Antoniadou
Curatorial text: Ioulita Toumazi
Publication’s texts: Salamis Aysegul Sentug-Tugyan, Marina Ashioti, Lefteris Economou
Graphics: Popi Pissouriou
Photographs: Demetris Loutsios
The exhibition “The sky you kept for us: Lefteris Economou”, organised by the Lefteris Economou Cultural Foundation, brings together paintings and drawings by Economou from Famagusta district, most of which were created in the 50s-80s. Through this body of work, we raise questions about people’s relationship to land and memory and the complications such an “acquired” memory has, considering that many people haven’t lived in Famagusta themselves, but still feel a connection to that place. Attempting to go beyond and challenge nationalistic conceptions of ‘home’ and ‘land’, we ask: How can we love a place we haven’t really experienced? Do we love places because people we love do? Do artworks contribute to the cultivation of a relationship with a place we haven’t lived in? How does the real and the imaginary blend in the conception of such a space?
In this exhibition, we propose that the fictional and the real do not negate one another, but that they coexist. Economou’s works become a portal through which we search for traces of the material reality of the time, such as the conditions of labour, the rural and the urban lives of people, the landscapes of Famagusta -the land, the sea, the sky-. At the same time, we also realise that his art becomes a mediator: a surface on which we project, but also create, our own understandings of a place and a time and its people.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an installation by Maidie van den Bos, artist in residence at Urban Gorillas.
P.S. About the Title
Anne Carson, in her reading performance “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” asks asks various sky-related questions, like:
Is the sky something or merely what’s left over because everything else has edges?
Can the sky break and if it broke could it be built again?
Is there one sky or many?
If many, do they know about each other?
As it’s often the case, things in the world don’t manifest themselves from the beginning. Until, something happens, and they are revealed: someone tells you something, you read something, you have a dream about something. And suddenly, a synapse happens in the brain and it makes you wonder whether ‘something’ can always be there and you just don’t know it.
The skies of Economou were always there for us, but as Carson tells us in her reading performance, we’ll ask the questions about the sky but they cannot be answered. They can only bring on synapses. Something like memory.
The exhibition is supported by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Department of Modern & Contemporary Culture
