2008, 153 color slides, 3 synchronized slide projectors, realized with the collaboration of the archive of the newspaper Phileleftheros, Nicosia, Cyprus.
Never Land is an allusive scenario on the subject of failure. Composed after research in the archives of one of the oldest newspapers in the Island of Cyprus, “Phileleftheros”, the work proposes a poetic view on the decade of the 90s, the socially and politically charged period during which Cyprus was in the process of becoming a member state of the European Union.
Extracts from the Guide Book of the Taipei Biennale - Never Land, Wonder Land
For his slide installation Wonder Land, the artist Christodoulos Panayiotou spent a considerable amount of time exploring the city archives of Limassol, Cyprus. Panayiotou’s selected photographs were taken at different renditions of the annual carnival, where the city’s citizens don various Disney costumes with a care and obsession that belies the hilarious of the affair.
Cyprus, long a divided country, with an all-too-common history of post-colonial ethnic-based skirmishes, military coups and invasions, has experienced its share of bitter stories of the Twentieth Century. Panayiotou’s slide installation is neither blint nor circuitous in taking on such large issues that loom inevitably in the background of his work. Silent, except for the sound of changing slides that distinguishes each photograph in the incessant run of images, the installation enunciates the deep inconsistency of the carnival even itself. The Carnival condition, which implies a collective celebration of joy and liberation, is here locked in a fantastic but also melancholic displacement of cultural codes and traditions. As time goes on, the supposed liberation from the shackles of a singular, collective identity, may also creat an emptiness that allows itself to return to what it avoids.
The systematic flow of images in Wonder Land gives way to a more atmospheric and unmonumental series of photographs in Never Land. As a whole constellation, the slide installation imparts a sense of gloom, a hollowness, and a lack of closure in the photographs’ inconclusive nature that makes it difficult to recapture what they record by hand of imagination.
