Layers of Visibility

Between 2013 and 2017, artists associated with the University of Plymouth, UK, responded to Cyprus through residencies at NiMAC. The works included in the exhibition and publication indicate 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.

Place is constituted through geography, history, memories and narratives that reflect cultural currencies, familial and personal lived experience. Cyprus is a land of complex tensions. The economy primarily centres on tourism, small-scale industrial enterprise, services and agricultural production. Through photography, video and painting, the artists in the exhibition discover and explore challenging stories and trajectories of local realities: new architectural developments in contested urban settings; the situation of refugee dogs in shelters; military presence in a divided island, family memory and symbolic legacies; and the dead zone as a complex metaphor for links as well as divisions. For outsiders, there is much more to be discovered than that which first meets the eye.