Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II
Exhibition View: “Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II”, Thkio Pallies, Nicosia, Cyprus, October 2020
The exhibition includes the presentation of the photobook Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II published by IAPT Press, a series of photographic collages and a screening of the 1965 film Island of Aphrodite; CyBC’s first colour documentary film.
George Lanitis’, Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite [Νάσος τας Αφροδίτας], published in 1965, in Nicosia, was one of the first ambitious artistic efforts in producing a photographic book on Cyprus. In a hefty volume divided in three-sections appropriately titled ‘The Place’, ‘The People’ and ‘Tradition’, Lanitis attempts to encapsulate the visual essence of 1960s Cyprus; a visual testament to an ethno-national and romantic vision of the island.
Fifty-five years on, Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite manifests both as an artistic and historical artefact, a segment of a ‘curated’ archive of Cypriot imagery, a tactile and conceptual point of departure for this project. When in 2017 the Lanitis family granted access to the Cyprus University of Technology to digitize his surviving photographic archive, the artists Stylianou-Lambert and Lambouris were faced with a vast number of photographs that were simultaneously familiar, peculiar, personal at times, yet distinctively Cypriot. After spending months viewing and studying Lanitis’ archive, while also considering the pages of the original book for possible visual connections and interventions, the artists settled on their own selections, exclusions and visual juxtapositions for a new photobook.
Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II, published in 2020, is Stylianou-Lambert’s and Lambouris’ attempt to renegotiate their own visual past and a tribute to the creative process of photographic selection, exclusion and erasure. In what becomes an extended photographic act, the 1965 book is meticulously reproduced, only this time, ‘new’ photographs –photographs from Lanitis’ archive– are introduced and partially overlaid on top of the original pages; all the while, remaining aware of the fact that the mere act of overlaying material necessitates a much more violent act, that of erasure. As sociologist Andreas Panayiotou mentions in the introduction of Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II: ‘The imposition of one picture on the other may shock the eye, and feel like a violation. The eye cannot see the older image in its totality. It can imagine it. But the artistic intervention is not only a negation. It is also a continuation. This is a book in which artists of the 21st century create a new paradox by adding archival photos, as if in a collage, to older, classical by now, “sacred” images.’
In appropriating the 1965 Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite, Stylianou-Lambert and Lambouris approached the original book as a complete artifact, a work in its own right, carefully considering issues of reproduction, materiality and book design. Working closely with Artemis Eleftheriadou, IAPT Press’ editor and art director, the 2020 Cyprus Island of Aphrodite II, reproduces the original in its entirety making sure that the viewer can distinguish the two layers, old and new. The resulting book is an alternative view of a past Cyprus; one that reveals omitted images and focuses on the politics of the everyday.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS/AUTHORS
Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is a researcher, visual artist and educator. She is currently associate professor at the department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology and the coordinator of its “Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab”. Her research and artistic interests include museum studies and visual sociology with an emphasis on photography. Theopisti has published widely on museums and photography, is the co-author of The Political Museum (Routledge, 2016) and the editor of Museums and Visitor Photography (MuseumsEtc, 2016), Museums and Photography: Displaying Death (co-editor, Routledge, 2017), Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place, Identity (co-editor, I.B.Tauris, 2014), and Re-envisioning Cyprus (co-editor, University of Nicosia Press, 2010). She received her PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester (UK) and her MA in Visual Arts/ Museum Education from the University of Texas at Austin (USA). Theopisti is also the recipient of several scholarships and awards including a Smithsonian Fellowship in Museum Practice (USA), a Fulbright Fellowship (USA) and an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award (UK).
Nicolas Lambouris is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Arts & Communication at Frederick University and director of Unit [Arts, Media & Visual Studies Center]. He holds an MA in Photography from Kent Institute of Art & Design, University of Kent (UK), a BA (cum laude) in Studio Art and a BA (cum laude) in Media Studies from Queens College, City University of New York (USA). Lambouris is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Photography & Theory [IAPT], and a founding member of the Cyprus Semiotic Association (CSA). He has participated in a number of conferences dedicated to the interdisciplinary and critical exploration of photography and visual culture, and has text contributions in the scholarly journal Photographies. His work, primarily photographic and time-based media, has been exhibited locally and internationally; it is part of private and state art collections, and has been published by Yard Press and IAPT Press. His research interests focus on issues of production, assimilation and dissemination of the photographic image as a visual and cultural apparatus.