Christodoulos Panayiotou’s artistic activity covers a wide range of performance-based practices. At times setting up happenings and at others documenting real events in order to assign new meaning to them, the artist often operates as a director and producer. He encourages his audiences to dance, gives instructions to actors and organizes battle aircraft to form hearts in the sky, often achieving strong relations between the works and the viewers. Through his conceptual work, Panayiotou examines the social and psychological interactions of his actions.

His new video installation entitled guysgocrazy, which he presents in the exhibition, consists of two projections that show the before and after of a happening, the preparation and the aftermath of a spectacular sex orgy produced by a porno film company. In this work, the artist explores the celebratory and its deconstruction, the spectacle and its ‘de-spectacularization’, the squandering of energy and the vacuity of the finale. Panayiotou is interested in the associations and the connections developed throughout his works and re-examines concepts that he has dealt with in the past. His recent works deal with the concept of absence from different approaches. Guysgocrazy can also be seen from this perspective. Here, the main action and the human bodies that comprise it are missing. The viewer is directly placed before and after the event, which he perceives only by mentally reconstructing it.

The artist’s first work that deals with the theme of absence is Prologue: Quoting Absence (2006). For this work, Panayiotou invited four academics from Oxford University to carry out a discussion on the concept of absence. He then set this up as a sound installation in the empty white space of the museum. Like guysgocrazy, here, too, we ultimately have an ostensible absence as the discussion fills the empty space and makes its presence intensely felt. In the work shown in the exhibition, presence is expressed through the traces of the outcome of the action, which is absent. In guysgocrazy –as in all of Panayiotou’s œuvre– one sees dynamic juxtapositions of contrasts. Absence meets presence; the beginning meets the end; the attractive meets the harsh; and the spectacular meets the decadent. The artist seeks the concealed aspect of the action, what is hidden behind what we see. In an attempt to re-examine the legitimate, he overturns obvious conditions and creates systems, which invite the viewer to decode them.