CURATOR'S DIARY
26 January 2006, OxfordRob and I travelled to Cyprus on 19 January and returned on 24 January. It is a four hour flight each way, with a two hour time difference. Arriving in Nicosia on the Thursday evening, we were collected by artist Achilleas Kentonis who, with his wife, Maria Charalambous, showed us around their Artos Foundation, an independently-run arts organisation in the former British colonial quarter of Nicosia. The Foundation buildings were constructed around an old bakery on a site which encompasses a 2000 year old crypt which Achilleas and Maria excavated and which can be visited by the public. It was a reminder that Cyprus is an archeologist's dream with some extraordinary percentage of ancient sites per square metre. The Foundation, on the contrary, is equipped with state of the art recording and digital editing suite which is used artists locally and those staying with them on residency programmes.
The next few days were spent attending the conference sessions organised by Manifesta which is holding its next biennial event in the divided city of Nicosia in the autumn of 2006. Rather than work with the model of the exhibition, presented across different sites in the city, the Manifesta curators are creating a post-graduate Art Academy. The conference, known as the 'Coffee Break' was held in venues in southern (Greek Cypriot) and northern (Turkish Cypriot) Nicosia and was attended by artists, curators, writers, educationalists, sociologists and art activists from Cyprus, Europe, Turkey, Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East. The discussions, organised around the subject of the art academy and what it might be in Nicosia and in the future, provided us with invaluable contextual information in terms of Nicosia and Cyprus, its historic and contemporary divisions - geographically, politically and socially - and where artists and art sit within it. Many young Cypriot artists, a number of whom we planned to meet in the following days, attended the Coffee Break and we were able to meet with some of the key cultural organisers in the region, among them, curator Yiannis Toumazis, who is Director of the Municipal Art Museum in Nicosia, and Co-ordinator of Manifesta 6. Trained in Rotterdam as an engineer specialising in airport design and then graphic design, Toumazis has been Director of the Art Museum since its opening twelve years ago, and has curated important shows with contemporary Cypriot artists, Accidental Meetings being the most recent.
Over the two days following on from the 'Coffee Break', we met with and did studio visits with most of the sixteen artists we had arranged to meet, including the artist collective, The Artrageous Group. We were struck by the variety of work, ranging from sculpture and painting to film, performance and interventions in the city, and the internationalism of their art education. There are no schools of Fine Art in Cyprus - southern Cyprus has a population of around 700,000. We were unable to get any figures on northern Cyprus. All of the artists we met had studied abroad in Greece - Athens and Thessalonika being the most common cities - in France, the Netherlands, the UK, Russia. One artist had spent a year at art school in Beijing. The majority of artists were living in Nicosia and Limassol. One artist, Nicos Charalambidis travelled from Athens to meet with us. We only met one artist from Northern Cyprus, Sarep Kanay, who is descendant from the country's population of African-Cypriots.
While the work we saw did not therefore conform to anything one might dare to identify as 'Cypriot' (although a certain shared concern with the hand crafted, with sewing in particular, and with notions of habitat and with travelling or escaping, was notable), there was a shared concern with content which, more or less explicitly, expressed something of the condition of Cyprus as a divided country with a tragically brutal history (the bloody annexation of the north of the country by Turkish troops in 1974) which is looking to move forward into the future. This sense of a divided existence is reflected in the maps we received in our welcome pack for the conference do not show the northern part of Nicosia despite it being contained by a vast circular wall built by the Venetians when they occupied the country in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Our experience of walking through the UN buffer zone which separates north from south in Nicosia brought home to us this reality. Open for the past few years, the checkpoints on either side of this buffer zone offer an eerie experience of watch towers, rolled barbed wire and notions of 'no man's land'. The contrast between north and south Nicosia is also immense. Greek Cyprus seemed a largely flourishing country with a sense of large amounts of disposal income expressed in the many new houses being built, fashion stores, new car outlets and large furniture emporiums, among them, Marks and Spencer Home. Southern Nicosia has a charming 'old city' which is undergoing refurbishment and restoration. Northern Nicosia is full of large stone buildings - churches, houses etc. in various stages of ruin. The language is different and the currency is different. Standing on the balcony on the Saray Hotel in north Nicosia, we looked out at an impressive mountain range on which a monumentally scaled Turkish flag with a quote from Attaturk has been inscribed into the mountain side and visible from overhead.
Our last day was spent in the coastal city of Limassol where we met with three artists in their apartments cum studios. An hour's taxi ride from Nicosia to the south east, it was good to see more of the country and its physical landscape, and to get a slightly different perspective on Nicosia.
The flight back to England offered yet another and not altogether unexpected view of Cyprus as the getaway island for British retirees looking for some good weather in the winter months. Having taken off from Larnaka airport on the east of the island, we almost immediately began a descent into Paphos airport on the west of the island where the plane quickly filled with elderly passengers returning to Britain.
Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator
Artists met include: Klitsa Antoniou (Artrageous Group), Katerina Attalidou, Nicos Charalambidis, Melita Couta (Artrageous Group), Georgia Della, Serap Kanay, Achilleas Kentonis (Artos Foundation), Phanos Kyriakou, Lia Lapithi, Panayiotis Michael (Artrageous Group), Demtris Neokleous, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Maria Papacharalambous (Artos Foundation), Polys Peslikas, Lefteris Tapas.