Transitions I-IV

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.

My work within Layers of Visibility:

Transitions I-IV

Transitions I (The Stones of Nicosia)
Facade development is something of a contested practice in urban redevelopment. In the context of Nicosia 'The restoration of facades of privately owned buildings is conceived as a trigger that will motivate the owners to continue the restoration with their own means, supported by the substantial governmental incentives and subsidies for listed buildings.' However, the EU report then goes on '...there is concern that the scenographic choice - to rehabilitate only facades as if the area were a theatre set - will lead to the rapid deterioration of the repair works, especially in the case of empty dilapidated buildings, but also in the case of low-income owners and residents who do not have the means to complete the restoration.'

These surfaces seemed to take on various properties, not only of the aspects referred to above, but also ambiguous referential elements of conflict, separation and division.

Transitions II
Transitions II moves out into the modern city, where further evidence of transitioning residential neighbourhoods can be seen, for instance in the often empty single storey dwellings overlooked by later apartment blocks, a dynamic of the lack of planning regulations in 20c urban development in the city.

Transitions III
Before arriving in Cyprus I was made aware of a number of urban developments in various sites across the island particularly, but not exclusively, in the north. For example there was the infamous ghost town of Varosha in Famagusta, the casinos, nightclubs, hotels and mosque-building in the north and the social housing projects for displaced communities constructed south of Nicosia.

Transitions III draws together a series of images made around Kyrenia, Famagusta and the outskirts of Nicosia. They are more distanced views and further indicate what became the overarching focus of my attentions, that is, my interest in representing ideas of home, neighbourhood and nationhood that are such vital elements in the landscapes of Cyprus. In this series we see the dynamics of a variety of urban relationships: of nightclubs (which are in fact brothels) overlooking residential neighbourhoods; of the historic apartments and hotels of Varosha overlooking the contemporary children's play area; of halted housing developments in the slopes of the Pentadaktylos mountains; of a view through lush trees towards the consumerist industrial parks south of Nicosia from the edge of a social housing development; of the small and large-scale mosques being built in the north.

Transitions IV
Transitions IV relates directly to the effects of light in relation to architecture. Light is, of course, integral to photo-graphic processes, and therefore is central to photographic observation and expression. My attention had been arrested by a truly dominant edifice, namely the Hala Sultan Mosque, that transforms into a light show each night, and is yet another evocation of the evolving landscape of this contested island. I visited this mosque on more than one occasion but when the residency was drawing to a close I revisited the site for one final photographic intervention. This became a set of images that has been resolved as a screen-based work of single, time-sequenced photographs, that records the aesthetic affect and related symbolic effects of the way in which the mosque is transformed through the fading light.