Upcoming touring exhibition: Layers of Visibility

Curators: Liz Wells and Yiannis Toumazis

NiMAC, Nicosia, opening October 2018, available for tour, UK, spring 2019 onwards

Artist residencies facilitated and funded jointly by the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC) and the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts, School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth, UK

Layers of Visibility

Exhibition statement

Cyprus appears in many guises. It is an island. A European island, albeit divided, which is closer to the Middle East than to the heart of Europe.

Nicosia is currently the only European capital city divided by a wall, the buffer zone, monitored by United Nations troops since 1964. Whilst simultaneously Oriental and Hellenic, legacies of British colonization are also evident. Place is constituted through geography, history, memories and narratives that reflect cultural currencies, familial and personal lived experience. For those who live there, Cyprus is a land of complex tensions. For many, Cyprus is better known as a holiday destination, whether sun, sand and Aphrodite’s rock in the south, or hill-walking in the north, a region under development with new hotels, casinos and clubs signifying further expanses of pleasure realms. The economy is primarily centred on tourism and on agricultural production and export. Yet sandy inland areas, marked by small-scale industrial enterprise, suggest different stories and trajectories. For outsiders there is very much more to be discovered than that which first meets the eye.

Between 2013 and 2017, seven artists associated with the University of Plymouth, UK, responded to Cyprus through residencies at Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre. The resulting work indicates a range of different responses to the island and to the complex layers of Cypriot culture, a place where historically the Hellenic and the Islamic were variously entangled and, along with legacies of British colonialism, remain marked now.

Artists

Carole Baker
Christopher Cook
Liz Nicol
Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore
Simon Standing

Land/Water and the Visual Arts

As a research group it operates as a forum for interrogation of nature and culture, aesthetics and representation.

Land/Water consists of artists, writers and curators who embrace a diversity of creative and critical practices. As a research group it operates as a forum for the interrogation of nature and culture, aesthetics and representation. Questioning imagery and practices relating to land, landscape and place is central to our ethos. As artists, writers, curators we work individually exploring space and place as a point of departure for experimenting in new modes of communication through picturing. We generate work that addresses a range of issues. These include environmental change, sustainability, journey, site and regional specificity.