A new exhibition at the Cyprus Museum invites us to delve deeper into our own relationship with place and rethink the museum experience, by entering into a dialogue with its artefacts and shedding light on the archaeological process.
Visual artist Katerina Attalidou has achieved this through a series of 86 watercolours that have been placed throughout the Cyprus Museum, as part of the new exhibition ‘In The Same Place,’ which will be open to visitors until September 10.
The exhibition title denotes, amongst other things, the coexistence of the watercolours with selected exhibits, as well as the artist’s physical presence ‘in the same place’ in which the archaeological objects were discovered.
Attalidou’s project is the result of lived experiences and long journeys of discovery, and could be experienced as a “gentle gesture,” the exhibition’s co-curator Efthymia Alphas writes. “Attalidou’s watercolours, each with a unique journey behind it, invite us to appreciate the aura of place: the archaeological, ecological, historical, personal, and romantic place,” she notes.
The artist pays homage to the Cyprus Museum; a place to which she feels an emotional attachment, “where countless place-specific experiences are reflected and all sorts of identities and stories can be told.”
As Alphas writes “All excavation is destructive, a non-reversible process. Archaeologists remove layer after layer of centuries-old accumulated material, which was once part of places. Places are in the process of continuous transformation, either a gradual, slow one or a result of unexpected and abrupt events. Regardless of their nature, these episodes all leave their traces on the biography of the landscape.”
Attalidou’s ‘places’ invite us to take in a different museum experience. Her works bridge the gap formed when an archaeological object has been removed from its find-spot and is displayed in a museum exhibition space. At the same time, they urge us to move around our landscapes and observe the places around us, reminding us of Cyprus’ wholeness and indivisibility.
Exhibition opening hours: Tuesday – Friday: 8.00 – 18.00 / Saturday: 9.00 – 17.00 / Sunday: 10.00 – 13.00 / Monday: closed / Every first Wednesday of the month: 8.00 – 20.00
FREE ENTRY
16.8.17 Vouni. The colours change so quickly that it is impossible for me to capture them. Opposite is Turkey, to
the west Pentadaktylos and behind me the Troodos mountains.
7.8.17 August full moon in Ammochostos (Famagusta).
12.8.21 Marion/Arsinoe.
2.4.22 Afentrika, Ourania.
23.4.19 Holy Tuesday, Gialousa, on the hilltop, the house where I lived my first year has collapsed.