“Act I: The Departure,” as this show was titlede, brought together four recent works by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou under the aegis of the Lausanne art festival Les Urbaines. Inspired by anthropology, Panayiotou often casts himself in the role of a scientist doing field studies, in order to shed light on the manifestations and myths of “cultural performances” such as rituals and festivals. In the silent color video “Untitled”, 2008, a palimpsest of shots of various firework displays from an undifferentiated spectacle. Fireworks – a popular allegory for the “theatrum mundi” ever since the Baroque – imply a variety of cultural and historical metaphors and frequently appear in Panayitou’s oeuvre as a motif. Much like Freud’s model of memory as a “mystic writing pad”, on which traces of previous inscriptions are preserved as illegal impressions, this work captures the visibility of explosions that have long since faded away, revealing a profound melancholy.

Seen together wit the work “Guysgocrazy”, 2007, a looped double-channel projection, the fireworks of “Untitled” also refer to the sexual and orgiastic as a from of pop-culture symbolism (one that was used in Hollywood films as a recognized code for sexual climax, in a manner unobjectionable to censors). Appropriately, Guysgocrazy is a Czech production company for porno films that specializes in staging huge orgies. Panayiotou filmed the empty se before and after one of those shoots, showing a stage with disco pools and an inflatable pool – and then its postshoot, with countless banana peels and paper cups strewn about. A soundtrack of men exulting under the shower and a small-format framed photograph of the actors posing mounted beside the projection replace what is absent here – the straightforward manifestations of corporeality in the film.

For the eighty-part slide projection “Wonder Land”, 2008, Panayiotou sifted through archival images of the carnival in Limassol, the second-largest city in Cyprus, discovering that for years no subversive and traditional masquerades based on costumes taken from Disney films have played a dominant role, completely obscuring the carnival’s original character. Taking his cues from Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw in the carnival a temporary transcendence of taboos and utopian self-assersionin the face of repressive structure, Panayiotou here presents a collection of images that bear witness to the island’s problematic psyche, shaped bu ancient conflicts over both territory and identity, even as a part of it’s population anesthetisized itself by means of escapism and role-playing. Their unheard ribald laughter prompted by the decontextualized fictions of absurd benign cartoon characters like Pinocchio and 101 Dalmatians, is (unconsciously) indicative of a more widespread sense of helplessness.

Untitled (Act III: The Glorious Return), 2008, in tandem with the exhibition’s title, “Act I: The Departure”, served to wryly indicate a dramaturgical narration via only prologue and epilogue, much as in “Guysgocrazy”. The installation, part of a trilogy that is only ever presented one piece at time, consists of a historical theater set acquired from an archive and shown lying, folded, on the floor. It’s motif of a tromp l’oeil theater curtain framing the bow of a ship coming into port is here only visible in an accompanying photograph that shows the stage set installed in a theater. Like Panayiotou’s other work, the installation uses its iconology of interstitial space to compel the viewer to engage in dialectic reflection.

Valérie Knoll (translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss)

Christodoulos Panayiotou’s works are all performance-based and collectively they span every level of what one could describe as a spectrum of the performative in art– from creating a space for activity such as dancing, to the directing of actors and events, to the recording and tracing of both the artist’s and society’s ‘performances’. His practice is therefore difficult to sum up. To explore his works via a method of chronology or cross-referencing feels redundant, in favour of looking at it as a series of branches that stem out from a performative centre. Panayiotou adopts a similar process in his analysis of his own work, most specifically, at this moment in time, in relation to one of his more literal performance works Slow Dance Marathon (2005 - ). Slow Dance Marathon was first realised in Thessoloniki in 2005 on a stage set up in a wooded enclave, at an outdoor mini-concert venue, in which a chain of people danced to well-known love songs. Each person would dance for one full hour, with alternate partners changing every 30 minutes and so on, and so forth, until a whole day and night had passed. The second rendition with the same title was organised for Tel Aviv. Here an additional 24 hours were added, making the marathon a two-day affair. As anticipated, the third in the series planned for Istanbul, will take place over three days. Unlike similar artist-initiated events, Panayiotou is more interested in the sociological interactions created by the situation than the psychological reasons why people agree to participate. He admits that his intention is open to interpretation, but for him it is about creating a relational space, and the way people act within that space produces an opportunity to decode and analyse a spectrum of ‘amorous dialectics’.

The act of ‘slow dancing’ resurfaces in a number of Panayiotou’s other works. He finds this form of dance radical in comparison to other social dances, in the sense that it boasts emotional familiarity and the generation of a radically intimate space while being totally accessible through its lack of codified moves. In Forever is gonna start tonight (2004), which like all of Panayiotou’s works is part performance and part real life, the audience in the role of participants are invited to enter into a series of actions and dialogues with the three performers, one choice being to enter into a slow dance. As one-to-one relationships are formed the work unfolds like a soap opera, but one that is part script, part improvisation and part reality – the performers maintained their own identities and personalities while on stage. Within this work, the degree of literal performance rises and falls throughout its duration, as do the levels of intimacy between the audience and the performers. In a way this work simply restages aspects of life itself, which Panayiotou describes as a form of theatre, in order to interrogate certain forms of representation.

Another branch of his practice includes works like Sunday (2005) and Alkadashlar (2006) part of the work Truly (2005) for which Panayiotou won the Deste Prize in 2005, and most recently Prologue: Quoting Absence (2006). For these Panayiotou takes on a more directorial role, as the emotional impact of the works is less to do with the experiences of the protagonists, and has more to do with the appreciation of its audience who are confronted with it in the end result. For Sunday, 80 street cleaners were contracted to collect over two tonnes of confetti from the streets of Limassol following the city’s grand carnival parade. The confetti was then taken to the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre and piled to one side of the space, a sculptural remnant of a collective experience. To create the video Alkadashlar Panayiotou’s orchestration stretched even further to commission fighter planes from the British base in Cyprus to draw the shape of a heart in the sky. The work was shown in Istanbul on a Lumacom screen atop the towering Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square to coincide with the visit of the Greek Foreign Minister following the mid-air collision between jousting Greek and Turkish fighter planes over the Aegean Sea. The symbolic timing of this screening, its location and monumental proportions emphasise clearly the way Panayiotou plays with the various roles of artist-director, performer and audience within his constructions. This is also clearly evident in Prologue: Quoting Absence, a work commissioned by Modern Art Oxford that is a conversation on the theme of absence between four Oxford University scholars from the academic schools of Philosophy, Theology, Astrophysics and Arts. Played in an empty gallery as a form of ‘reversed landscape’, the desired intellectual conversation that comes about as the result of experiencing a work of art, is in this case, already there. As with Slow Dance Marathon, Panayiotou plans to develop this work in two further parts with a video and a performance epilogue, perhaps making this the new pivot for his practice.

November Paynter

The historical incredulity that derives as a result from unresolved territorial disputes surfaces as a kind of testament (or temptingly as a dispensation) for those who in their attempt to come to terms with the principles that condition such incredulity decide to distinguish the infinity of things from its structural presuppositions. The question of Cyprus, so eminently timely these days, prescribes not only what is definable about its nature but also what is knowable in the sense that under the guise of a problematic dissimulates the possibility of delineating what is called ‘historical’. In an attempt to resolve a piece of political puzzle that seems in the first sight to be admittedly easy one enters to a whole range of manifestations that each one separately weave each other into the ideology of the historical form that bore them.

Part of the C19th political knot called the ‘Eastern Question’ the political problem that the current situation in Cyprus poses evokes a multilayered stratification of phenomena that in a microcosmic level reflect the historical struggles of civilization itself. This patch of Mediterranean bliss has attracted through the centuries a mass of historical contradictions. History for Cyprus has been always coming in the form of the Mediterranean Sea that surrounds it amassing in the island’s shores the tide of events that patiently shaped the culture and society of its people. Its people on the other hand was the power to establish the extraordinary order of events that sealed the island’s destiny; events not so much grandiose in historical scale and importance but significant in the formation of a kind of psyche of what we are used to call civilization.

Conquests and invasions, wars and social upheavals, subjugation and colonization, nationalism and ethnic division stamp the route of three thousand years. It is not my intention to give a detailed account of the history of Cyprus. It is not feasible to do so here, anyway. My aim is to touch upon possible variations that reflect representations of an island whose identity has been for such a long time reduced to gestures of stubbornness and incredulity to move forward, to free oneself from the ties of historical formulations and self-deception, in a sense – to paraphrase Matthew Arnold’s words - to establish an era which will find its motive-power in the intelligence of men as well in their practical sense. But this kind of intelligence and practice that can be the motive power for a new era in the island has been numbed by the enforcement of pain as a historical residue of a reality that is neither a right nor a dream but rather a fixation. Today one might be tempted to use Althousser’s words and say that the whole population of Cyprus has no more history in their lives than they have in their dreams.

The Cypriots seem to live in an asymmetrical time. Divided into two their consciousness bears an unresolved alterity, which from a certain perspective denounces what is historical about it, while it sustains two different forms of silence. On the one hand (from the point of view of the Greek – Cypriots) surfaces a consciousness of pain that has developed through the years into a source of cognitive desperation one, which from a certain point has been transformed into bitter eloquence. In this context history resounds as a mere echo of the tiring and predictable rationality of the present whereas the reality of the historical falls all the more into pure silence. If the customs and the morals of the Greek-Cypriot community seem to testify that reality is a particular perception of the legitimate that caters for its historical perception, then what is missing in these acts and the anachronistic self-delusion that they represent is the real voice to do so. In that sense it turns out that the voice of this part of Cyprus is the simulation of a voice that through the process of time has developed into an inevitable morality, which suffers in its own silence. Both falsified and forgotten the suppressed nature of such a morality appears as knowledge in despair of dealing with its own strangeness while it pretends that it speaks the language of atonement. The new reality as it has emerged from the island’s brutal division in 1974, which has become the face of the true impact of the logos of pain has exorcised its truth in the realm of fetish producing out of it a surplus of reality in order to defend and legitimate itself. The legitimate language has occupied the unreal voice and in the midst of this confusion appears the phantom of bitterness. On the other scale of this asymmetrical and destabilized construct, on the other side of the green line that defines it exists in silence the Turkish-Cypriot community, which awaits as much as the visible and legitimate counterpart a solution to the problem. The prevailing silence in this case is the pain of not being allowed, not being able to exist, not even being able to articulate the language of such a pain. This is the other extreme of the island’s inevitable morality. That which does not exist does not have a language. Or rather it has; in this case the mediated, supplementary and primarily dictated language of somebody else, of an intruder who appropriates the Turkish-Cypriot community’s right to speak. It is a language that expresses calamity through its identification with the external consciousness that the intruding body falsely claims to be Turkish-Cypriot, thus an empty language, a non-language. Through time this kind of identification has developed into a preposterous wound that festers and cannot be healed. The Turkish-Cypriot community being under the influence of knockout medication does not feel the wound’s pain; it only observes it like a hideous spectacle. Anesthesia has become through the years a peculiar identity that hinders the unmaking of the Turkish- Cypriot community’s tragedy. The fatality of such a present has become a judgment of its own without being able to pronounce any judgment at all. This strange present has been already part of the island’s history, whose abstract and simultaneously mimetic character, its very lack of mobility includes an element of great importance, a new shiver (a historical one) that strokes the blindness of future time, of what time will be through history. A pain that doesn’t speak and a silence that longs for a voice: both converge to the same point that is to the fact that the problem of Cyprus is a problem of sounds.

Panayiotou’s art is a point of departure not only of the specific aspects of the politcs that surround it but also of the true opening to the consciousness of what these politics fail to understand. It becomes an embrace of the unnamed but existent, of the silent but still in need to speak. He collects the abandoned modes of perception and history that he finds scattered in the body of his native island and turns them into the potent force of an aesthetic language that mobilizes consciousness both as an artistic and subjective praxis as well as the living language of a long forgotten and deliberately lost community. Panayiotou is not, furthermore, disillusioned as to what a mnemonic relationship between the subject of this consciousness and the artist’s own imagery can infer. His own intervention comes not so much as a break in the serenity of a prefixed situation. Instead it implicates an anticipation of an identity that is related to the collective past time. In his own perceptive schema spectatorship becomes the dialectic project of remembering not in terms of perceptual ambiguity but through the enactment of a process during which the aesthetic intervention has been transformed into memory.

At the same time through memory Panayiotou communicates to his audience a certain belief that by avoiding the realistic representation of a political situation, by defying the temptation of being appropriated by the politics of image construction he claims his own faith to an art that substantiates the distance between what is past and what is present while it examines the unresolved melancholy of this distance. In his video work with the title ‘Arkadaşlar’ that was shown at the huge lumacom screen atop the towering Marmara Hotel in Taxim Square in Istanbul, Panayiotou deviates from a subjective urge to represent the real by means of fetishising its object. In this video, where two jet-fighters from the British base in Cyprus were commissioned to draw with the smoke of their trails a heart on the sky, the iconography becomes the dilemma of the historical mind as mnemonic process that withholds its ability to use the symbols and the symbolic language that constitutes consciousness by giving emphasis to the act of converging the communal myths of the past with the specificity of the real in the present. The piece’s narrativity, which includes references to the island’s colonial past as well as it highlights the role that this colonial past has played in the shaping of Cyprus’ current political situation, expands the subjective and purely textual aesthetic of its meaning to include the initiation of a new tonality, a new linguistic competence that operates in the level of consciousness and establishes what in politics is not self-reflective and obvious.

Panayiotou is the first Greek-Cypriot to have been invited as a resident artist by Platform-Guaranti Center of Contemporary Art Turkish institution. By transferring his own artistic practice and believes about the common and shared consciousness of the two divided communities to the very heart of the consciousness of a city (Istanbul) that is also in a remarkable way both lost and fixed in time, Panayiotou defies the (historically) imposed belief for a memorial of what is claimed to have been lost. Moreover he opts for the excavation of a memory that eradicates the collective void of a false division by means of the images and the myths that constitute the identity of Cyprus. His implicit reference to Aphrodite (the heart made by the jet fighters’ traces), the goddess of Love who according to Greek mythology surfaced from the shores of Cyprus, is a direct but somehow silent confrontation of a consciousness that structures its own system of traces and signs with a reality that disassembles the potential that these traces and signs stand for.

At the same time in its delicate but obviously ironical manner the iconography of ‘Arkadaşlar’ promises precisely that, which while it comes from memory in the form of knowledge (but decisively not as the tradition that certain understanding of history imposes), will inevitably be transformed into the gesture that the common past of the two communities is for the future. In that sense and by means of an emphasis put on the fact that the work shows British jet fighters as post-colonial remnants this heart of love and anamnesis, this precarious effect of a mythological time and of contemporary consciousness defines the archive not of what is to be preserved but of what is to be born. In the end ‘Arkadaşlar’ diffuses the motion of a gesture and the tonality of an irony into a meaning that seems to be eternally interwoven with Cyprus. The reflection of such an identity becomes for Panayiotou the distinctive way to unsettle those trivial orthodoxies whose lingering power of formulation disfigures the force of expression that persistently desires to change them. By stressing on their ambivalence and by extending their economy to the point that they reveal a more poetic perspective, he prevents the conditions of the aesthetic reality from confering its values as a reward on history.

On the other hand this very practice on behalf of Panayiotou introduces the spectator to a significant drama within which one finds those tools that constitute the elements of one’s critical ability. With his work the spectator is engaged with a process during which one is not only responsible for the way one perceives the work itself but one is also responsible for the way that his or her critique signifies his or her position in relation to the production of culture (of its gestures, iconography, sounds etc). Nevertheless in the case of ‘Arkadaşlar’ the element of cheerfulness is not a mental twist that defies the ability to endure what is felt as injustice. On the contrary it portrays the historical despair to the extent that this in its ephemeral manner can be changed and to the extent that it seals the accumulation of pain that commands no language. Like a cenotaph on which consciousness and history converge, ‘Arkadaşlar’ composes time out of silence.

For three days and on the occasion of the official visit of the Greek Foreign Minister to Istanbul in June 2006 Panayiotou with his video work ‘Arkadaşlar’, which had been previously shown as part of his video installation ‘Truly’, elucidated the city’s nights by offering not another symbolic gesture of the empty language that contemporary political art often does but the potential of a new language for those who desire reconciliation. He infiltrated the price that the fragmented representation has to pay to history by holding out against it. He also identified in history’s archival language and in the geography of disputed politics the possibility of a trace, of a mnemonic reserve for those in the future who will attempt to reconcile should the ones of today fail to do so. ‘Arkadaşlar’s’ aesthetic gratification confesses an aesthetic materiality free from historical necessities. Its schematization planes away in a reckless but romantic way the circular regularity of political processes. Thus discovering a mathematical formula the work decodes a harmonious sentiment, whose vowels make its echo vulnerable but significant. An incredulous task indeed!

Antonis Bogadakis

Some months ago, Freymond-Guth & Co Fine Arts moved into a former car repair shop. Aside from the narrow window across the large doors, the two exhibition spaces offer a retreat from the bustle of the surrounding neighbourhood. For the solo exhibition and one-work show by Christodoulos Panayiotou, part of the gallery gained a slide-projected view out into an unexpectedly Neapolitan night. Only the projector’s rhythmical clicking briefly interrupts the glare of the photographs of firework displays gathered from the archives of two Naples daily newspapers for the slideshow If Tomorrow Never Comes (2007). It should be noted that the occasions for these photographs may not always have been happy ones, since fireworks are used in Naples both for popular festivals and by the Camorra to transmit sensitive messages.

Although the photographs date back to the early 20th century, historical orientation during the slideshow is near impossible. As both newspapers print their pictures in black and white, even today, the firework displays are reduced to a range of greys and appear almost interchangeable – even if the various motifs span an entire century. This difficulty of historical orientation allows the work to awaken paradoxical hopes. What was once captured on film as news and then apparently vanished forever is brought to light again – if only for a few seconds – in the projector’s endless loop. Removed from the context of day-to-day reporting, isolated from any text, the pictures now stand out from the background. A simple trick, but one which in Panayiotou’s work creates a distinctive sense of time, which seems to expand again and again during the viewing process.

In many cases, the press photographer’s camera is pointed out over the sea, which amplifies every effect of the light during the firework display like a huge mirror. The bundles of light spread out like rays above the water and briefly illuminate the Gulf of Naples with its boats and promenades. Sometimes, historical buildings, lampposts or a shoreline make their way into the foreground. Brightly lit by a powerful flash, trees and bushes are starkly outlined against the night horizon. As a result of the peculiarities of photographic imaging, various light sources merge with the haze of burning gas from the fireworks. And the long exposure carefully archives the arcs described by the rockets. Only in photography can visual traces from a given time-lapse be visualized together in a single image.

The spectacular light events almost transform the mechanical re-presentation of a slideshow into a performative act that permanently reverses the camera’s recording process: instead of capturing light waves, a firework display becomes visible on the gallery wall with a click from the projector. For a moment there is darkness, and then the next bright rocket trace lights up the here and now – thanks to an event that was recorded during a brief time-span several decades ago and then archived. Whether using photographs, sound recordings or video installations, Panayiotou’s works perform an exchange between the act of recording and the act of showing that is capable of developing a time structure all of its own.

Burkhard Meltzer (Translated by Nicholas Grindell)