view to river from north
Maccarone NY, 11.1 - 15.2.2014
Maccarone is pleased to announce its first exhibition of Phanos Kyriacou, “view to river from north,” opening January 11, 2014.
On view will be new works, unearthing Kyriacou’s practice for its first presentation to a New York audience. Over the past decade, Kyriacou has explored varying media interventions within space and poetic manipulations of sculptural form, in turn creating an unexpected dialogue with and about his environment.
The crux of Kyriacou’s practice manifests in his hometown of Nicosia, Cyprus, in modes such as the Midget Factory, a project space he founded there, or through spontaneous installations throughout the urban and rural landscape, each functioning autonomously yet on the whole creating a pulsing record of an ongoing conversation with his surroundings. Kyriacou’s position is one considered from the fringes of craftsmanship, astute research and civic engagement. His arrangements incorporate things found as well as commissioned objects often infused with the interventions of local craftsmen. With an awareness of the intricacies of materials implanted in locations and structures, the attentiveness enduring in his output configures these re- arrangements of the spatial and the temporal.
Most recently for the 2013 Venice Biennale (Kyriacou participated in the joint Cypriot and Lithuanian Pavilion curated by Raimundas Malašauskas situated within a working 1970’s modernist sports complex), the artist’s sculptural ensemble, Eleven hosts, twenty-one guests, nine ghosts, consisted of free- standing elements arranged on the bleachers of an in-use basketball court. This homage to humble reclaimed objects such as the back of a chair, a dried yucca tree, or ceramics, served to disrupt the surroundings while simultaneously creating a rhythmic experience of asymmetry. Teeming with phantasmagoric aura and operating as relics imbued with markers of his process, these objects gain significance through their interactions with one another in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Kyriacou’s identification with the aspect of transition in his working process could be attributed to living in a city split into two territories, which is reflected in the re-materialization of the works themselves, not as a means to acquire status but rather to remain fluctuating and floating through the field of perception.
Kyriacou plays with our perception of space, further problematizing the notion of location. “By expanding our grasp of a spaces’ particulars over and above the demolishing silences of history and architectural orthodoxies, from the ridgelines of an uninhibited art and an undisciplined architecture Phanos Kyriacou rigorously transcribes, re-arranges, the anexact privateerings that continuously open up the infinite conditions of possibility of the emergent.†– Demetris Taliotis, cultural theorist. For his inaugural exhibition at Maccarone, Kyriacou will alter the exhibition space with a site-specific intervention, concurrently presenting a series of sculptures and a multichannel video installation. Several of the sculptural works feature various sized objects upon plywood structures, alluding to a stage for continued exploration of informal aesthetics in this new city, at a new moment in time, in an open- ended drift through a reshaping of experience.