Through the Looking Glass

Through the front window of its exhibition space (Ellados 52 & 1A Athinon street, Limassol 3041), Pylon Art & Culture presents films from three visual artists who, through their research and work, document and highlight sociopolitical issues. As part of their practice, the participating artists are engaged in an ongoing interaction with historical and current events which affect our daily lives.

The phrase “Through the Looking Glass,” derives from the title of a book by Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there” (1871) which is a sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. It has become a metaphor for when something we see, even though it is recognizable, may appear unfamiliar as if it were turned inside out.

Through its projects Pylon Art & Culture aims to broaden and deepen the conversation on contemporary art by making it accessible and relevant to more people.

Duration: 02/02-19/03 from 18:00-22:00

Screenings schedule:
Weeper Capuchin, Stelios Kallinikou
02/02, 05/02, 11/02, 17/02, 23/02, 26/02, 04/03, 10/03, 16/03, 19/03
Days In Between (Kaiserpanorama), Μarianna Christofides
03/02, 09/2, 12/02, 18/02, 24/02, 02/03, 05/03, 11/03, 17/03
ZEI, Constantinos Taliotis 
04/02, 10/02,16/02, 19/02, 25/02, 03/03, 09/03, 12/03, 18/03

Weeper Capuchin, (2022), Stelios Kallinikou.
Video, infinite loop
In “Why look at animals?” John Berger, sets forth that "captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another across a narrow abyss of incomprehension.” The work (Weeper Capuchin, 2022) negotiates this space between us and the animal, striving to offer a bridge that hovers over the void. The expressive eyes of the Capuchin monkey, as if carrying a prehistoric melancholy, exchange glances with the viewer via a thick glass wall that is invisible in the photographs, much like the photographic lens. Often birds find tragic death on such reflective glass walls because they are not visible to them

Days In Between (Kaiserpanorama), 2015/19, Marianna Christofides
16mm to digital, 4' 34''
concept, cinematography, editing: Marianna Christofides
music: George G. Vasileiades
film still © Marianna Christofides / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2023
In Natural History Museums the stuffed animals become theatrical subjects that cannot return the spectator’s gaze. So are the stereoscopic images in every Kaiserpanorama (a proto-cinematic aparatus suggesting an illusion of reality). And yet here they look back at us, in the eye—the polar bear, the two-headed calf, the peacock, the deer and even the ‘blinking’ stereoscopic lenses of the Kaiserpanorama in their round, brazen frame. And in doing so they expose deep histories of violence and subjugation.

ZEI, 2008/2022, Constantinos Taliotis
11 hour and 44 minutes
film still © Marianna Christofides / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2023
This is the story of the controversial transportation of a colossal national monument of the ethnarch of the island from an imposing position in the city centre dominating the urban landscape to an invisible and hermetic site, the Throni peak in Kykkos Monastery. It is about the displacement of an enormous monument initially inaugurated in 1987 from a site to be perpetually looked at, to a remote location where it is, instead, positioned to look from. The video ZEI documents the journey of the slow disappearance of this emblematic statue as it is being moved from the courtyard of the Archbishop’s Palace to the mountains. With particular emphasis on the operational magnitude of relocating a 10-meter-long bronze sculpture, this handheld camera road movie traverses through different landscapes - the city of Nicosia, the suburbs, the Solea valley and the forest of Kykkos - accompanied by an uncanny soundscape. As the flatbed truck with the lying statue covered in tarpaulin, resembling a funeral procession, disappears into darkness, it creates a traveling reverie evoking questions about the evanescence and futility of monuments and the constructedness and ephemerality of national narratives and identity.

Bios:

Stelios Kallinikou presents us with sequences of imagery, flowing into interlaced dialogues, whilst crossing different themes such us, politics, colonialism, the environment, technology, spirituality, and the power of images. Through photography, video and occasionally sound, worlds are constructed at an introspective pace, and then act as speculative scenarios through which the intersections between territorial and ideological notions relating to land and the body-such as space/place and time/history - are explored. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions and group shows at SPEL, State Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2023); Kunsthalle Baden Baden (2022); 6th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2021); Goethe-Institut Zypern (2021); Grey Noise, Dubai (2021); Saigon, Athens, Greece (2021); Phenomenon, Αnafi, Greece (2019); Nimac, Nicosia, Cyprus (2018); Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018); Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2017); Point Centre of Contemporary art in Nicosia, Cyprus (2017); Equilibrists, organised by the New Museum, New York and the DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece (2016). Kallinikou was a resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2018-2019). He is the co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Project Space, based in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Marianna Christofides (b.1980, Cyprus) is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living and working in Berlin. Her artistic research deals with covert narratives of rupture that mesh in the fabric of bruised places. What drives her practice is the urgency to remain attentive to disregarded undercurrents of sociopolitical, environmental, and biographical thrusts. In 2011, she co-represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions, screenings, writings and film lecture performances include [2023] Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (upcoming) [2022] Pallas Theatre, Nicosia; In the Sea of the Setting Sun, State Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nicosia; After Yugoslavia, Senses of Cinema, Melbourne; Celluloid Now, Chicago Film Society; 25FPS Film Festival, Zagreb; Provenance Research, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (solo artistic intervention); exercises in becoming uncertain, mumok Kino, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna [2021] Marianna Christofides. Days In Between, monograph co-edited with Brenda Hollweg, publ. Hatje Cantz; Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian [2020] Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp Memorial; History Now, VIS, Nordic Journal for Artistic Research [2019] National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (solo); Berlin Art Prize (solo); Videonale. 17, Kunstmuseum Bonn; Anatomy of Political Melancholy, Athens Conservatoire.

Constantinos Taliotis (b. 1983, Nicosia, Cyprus) is an artist and an academic. Taliotis’s art spans sculpture, photography, video art and immersive installation. Inspired by histories of architecture, film and post-humanist narratives and driven by his interest in site specificity, perception and time, his practice invites audiences into familiar worlds made unfamiliar. Taliotis engages the public sphere through architectural interventions that treat the exhibition space as a medium through staged narratives about the here and now, while creating an embodied experience for the viewer.  His solo exhibitions include, amongst others, Appendix, Porcino, Chert Lüdde, Berlin, 2019; The Pavilion, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, 2019; FORMS, L’Œil de Poisson, Quebec City, 2018; Paradise Productions, Pilot Gallery, Istanbul, 2017; Casting Modernist Architecture, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2012. Group exhibitions include In the Sea of the Setting Sun, State Gallery of Contemporary Art – Spel, Nicosia, 2022; Hypersurfacing, NIMAC, Nicosia, 2019; Here not here, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2019; 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, MOMus, 2017; So close yet so far away, The Petach Tikva Museum, Tel Aviv, 2017; Forum Expanded, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2016; Aftermath, Akbank Sanat, Istanbul, 2012.  In 2013 he co-represented the Republic of Cyprus at the 55th Venice Biennial.

[01] Weeper Capuchin- Stelios Kallinikou-2022-Film still
[02] Days In Between (Kaiserpanorama)- Marianna Christofides-2015/19-Film still
[03] ZEI - Constantinos Taliotis- 2008/2022-film still